In these times, any institution celebrating its 150th anniversary is a reason to rejoice. And for visitors to the Big Apple, as well as its native sons and daughters, the best of art is its own Metropolitan Museum of Art.
If museum officials are smiling quite a bit more these days, it’s not only because it will reopen on August 29—but it will reopen knowing that it also has received a remarkable gift: $5 million, donated by the ubiquitous Adrienne Arsht.
Ms. Arsht’s philanthropy is wide-ranging, and visitors will be able to see the results when the Met demonstrates some of the performance artists it is backing with her contribution. But the great bulk will be unseen: it will go to interns, those young people who devote their time but often receive no money. Now, about 70 people will be named as Adrienne Arsht Interns.
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They will be working at this place founded in 1870, but the art goes back 5,000 years, incorporating, oh, tens of thousands of objects. It is located at one of the easiest addresses to remember—1,000 Fifth Avenue. That’s on the corner of 82d Street.
A first-time visitor to the museum—the largest in the United States, fourth largest in the world—will take in objects that will last a lifetime in memory.
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Perhaps the most noted exhibit at the reopening will be a broad look at the Met through the years, called “Making The Met, 1870-2020.” It will include not only noted works of art, but ancient treasures so fragile they usually are kept from view in the museum’s storied vaults.
In particular, look at the Met’s involvement with a lady known as Queen Hatshepsut, who lived about 3,500 years ago. The Met describes her as perhaps the ancient world’s first important female ruler.
So we will see her face, and how it was found in pieces (a jealous successor destroyed her statues), that the Met’s expert antiquarians put back.
Of course, to most people an art museum houses the Old Masters—those classic paintings whose names we were forced to memorize in junior high school.
Well, the Met is taking a fresh take on them, in fact calling its exhibition “A New Look at Old Masters.”
You will read discussions about these fabled European paintings and sculptures.
One gallery will feature, for example, still-life paintings from the 16th and 17th Centuries, while a short walk away other galleries display oil sketches from the same period.
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You will learn about Tiepolo’s techniques, and compare his paintings to those of Rubens and van Dyck.
Then it’s on to expressionism, as well as the role of female artists.
Perhaps the most theatrical of the Met’s famed exhibits is guarded by a strange creature—a lion with a man’s head, and five legs. This is the lamassu, and he has been protecting the Assyrian Sculpture Court.
Then there is another wide-open space (under a skylight) that is filled with marble statues, some merely bodies with their heads never found. This is the Greek and Roman Court, and you get the sense that these ancients are about to start philosophizing, or going into battle.
Although the museum could have opened earlier, it wanted to get things exactly right for its 150th anniversary. And it’s all being done for you.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
