{"id":536473,"date":"2026-07-06T22:38:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T22:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/536473\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T22:38:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T22:38:10","slug":"the-met-museums-staff-have-some-thoughts-about-the-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/536473\/","title":{"rendered":"The Met Museum’s Staff Have Some Thoughts About the Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt is that miraculous connection between artist and subject, the self and the world beyond, that is the fever dream of all great art,\u201d Dale Tucker, the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s senior editor, writes in Points of View: 100 Connections to Art<\/a>. Composed of short essays written by The Met\u2019s staff, the compendium zeroes in on 100 objects in the museum\u2019s permanent collection, offering new perspectives on artworks through five themes: \u201cRelationships,\u201d \u201cSelf,\u201d \u201cPolitics,\u201d \u201cSpirituality,\u201d and \u201cEnvironment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Edited by The Met\u2019s CEO and director, Max Hollein, and published last month, Points of View is the museum\u2019s first publication to encourage dialogue across its various professional departments. Each essay positions one of the 29 contributors \u2014 whether a curator, producer, librarian, educator, or conservator \u2014 as a guide into the anecdotes, discourses, and histories surrounding particular works. <\/p>\n

\"\"Riza-yi ‘Abbasi’s \u201cThe Lovers\u201d (1630 CE) in Points of View: 100 Connections to Art (image courtesy The Met)<\/p>\n

In the book\u2019s preface, Hollein gestures towards The Met\u2019s larger endeavor to \u201cunderstand other cultures and other eras\u201d through a collaborative model. The 488-page book aptly begins with \u201cRelationships,\u201d where essayists explore interpersonal human connections in artworks such as Greek funerary vessels, modernist sculptures, and Renaissance portraiture. Laura Corey, an associate research curator and project manager for the director\u2019s office, writes about Joan Mitchell\u2019s abstract painting \u201cLa Vie en Rose<\/a>\u201d (1979) in connection with Fleetwood Mac\u2019s 1977 song \u201cSilver Springs.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe chose the theme of \u2018connections\u2019 to share both personal and unexpected perspectives on art, and to think about the many roles objects play in our world, past and present,\u201d Mitchell told Hyperallergic. \u201cI never expected to have the opportunity to write about Fleetwood Mac in a Met publication.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0In the subsequent four chapters, relationships take on different hues \u2014 between people, cultures, governments, the divine, and the natural world. In \u201cSelf,\u201d Digital Managing Director and Producer Christopher Alessandrini examines Leonora Carrington\u2019s \u201cSelf-Portrait<\/a>\u201d (c. 1937\u201338) through mentions of the British-Mexican artist\u2019s eclectic hobbies and career, writing, \u201cShe is regal yet plain, ancient and virginal, stark and auratic like the Oracle of Delphi.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

Left: Fra Filippo Lippi, \u201cPortrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement\u201d (c. 1440) (image public domain via The Met<\/a>); right: Wendy Red Star, \u201cD\u00e9axitchish \/ Pretty Eagle from 1880 Crow Peace Delegation\u201d (2014) (\u00a9 the artist; image courtesy The Met)<\/p>\n

Objects in \u201cPolitics,\u201d including an Incan tunic and a Sri Lankan casket, show complex expressions of power, diplomacy, and censorship. In the \u201cSpirituality\u201d chapter, writers, including American Decorative Arts Curator and Manager Medill Higgins Harvey, navigate artistic representations of the divine in details like the \u201cstriated interlaced scrolls carved into the smooth red surface\u201d of a 14th-century Chinese incense box. And the book\u2019s final chapter, \u201cEnvironment,\u201d returns readers to Earth through writers\u2019 historical and modern meditations on the natural world, as relayed by their chosen objects of study.<\/p>\n

To create a broader perspective on the 100 artworks, the book\u2019s contributors often write about objects outside their area of expertise. Thus, a curator of European paintings reflects on an ancient Mesopotamian sculpture; a researcher of Islamic art ponders a bust from a German-Austrian sculptor; and a managing editor is reminded of his own experiences in a municipal office when looking at George Tooker\u2019s \u201cGovernment Bureau<\/a>\u201d (1956).<\/p>\n

Even within each essay, the writers often navigate multiple fields of study, leveraging interdisciplinary research to generate new perspectives on works both long studied and long overdue for scholarly attention. When writing about Marsden Hartley\u2019s \u201cPortrait of a German Officer<\/a>\u201d (1914), for instance, Corey moves away from the decades-long focus on the painting\u2019s abstraction and political undercurrents, and instead revisits the artwork \u201cas a coded message of queer love.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Boris Mikhailov, \u201c[May Day Parade]\u201d (1975, printed 1986) (\u00a9 the artist; image courtesy The Met)<\/p>\n

The featured objects, which range from the iconic \u201cTemple of Dendur<\/a>\u201d (10 BCE) to Isamu Noguchi\u2019s \u201cRadio Nurse<\/a>\u201d (1937), also do not adhere to any one medium, style, culture, or era.\u00a0 Nevertheless, each contributor tailors their essays to an artwork\u2019s context, whether that be Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov\u2019s print \u201c[May Day Parade]<\/a>\u201d (1975), Persian artist Riza-yi ‘Abbasi\u2019s painting \u201cThe Lovers<\/a>\u201d (1630 CE), or Aps\u00e1alooke artist Wendy Red Star\u2019s ultra-contemporary digital reproductions.<\/p>\n

When writing about Tavares Strachan\u2019s funerary urn, \u201cENOCH<\/a>\u201d (2015\u201317), Andrea Myers Achi, curator of Byzantine art at The Met, connects the recent artwork memorializing the life and tragic death of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African American astronaut to be selected into a US space program, to Ancient Egyptian sculpture. She calls it \u201ca charged commentary on absence, memory, and reclamation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since starting at The Met as an intern in 2014, Achi found new perspectives on artworks through interdepartmental discussions and exchanges. In her essay, she aims to replicate that experience for readers.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo many of the ideas in my essays came from spending time in the galleries and from talking with colleagues who work on everything from ancient art to contemporary art,\u201d Achi told Hyperallergic.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt is that miraculous connection between artist and subject, the self and the world beyond, that is the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":536474,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-536473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}