The MET Part 1: "What Makes a Masterpiece"

America is a land of great museums, and every museum has spellbinding stories to tell. The Met has, under one roof, absolutely every civilization, every culture. Museum is really a collection of collections. You don't see a painting by Rubens. You see a gallery full. The permanent collection here is extraordinary. Walk a world of art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Next, on Great Museums. Major funding for Great Museums is provided by the Eureka Foundation, dedicated to the educational power of television and new media. Exercise your curiosity. Explore America's great museums. One of the architectural glories of New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art stretches 1,000 feet along Fifth Avenue on Central Park. The founders of the Met, we're talking about 1870, wanted a museum in which many representative examples of the great art of the world could be presented. We've shown over the last 130, 140 years that some of the great treasures of mankind could be acquired and are, in fact, here. Inside is a dazzling three-dimensional encyclopedia of world art, overwhelming in the variety and outstanding quality of its collections. You can walk in the door and literally work through the entire history of human creation, from its earliest forms through now, through today. You have to figure out your place in that universe of art and which direction you'll go. Vast galleries and storage vaults of the two-million-square-foot museum overflow with more than two million objects. Some are grouped in visual narratives, others celebrated on pedestals. All invite our attention. Most people who are not very familiar with our collection are surprised to see so many famous, familiar paintings, key works in the history of art, and here they are hanging on our walls. There's something absolutely thrilling about seeing the work itself. The running text is, oh, my goodness, that's so pretty. I didn't realize that was so red. That's a response that's good. What I can say to all of you looking is, when you come before a work of art, if it doesn't immediately speak to you, pause, wait, allow the work of art to yield its message. Over 3,000 years ago, an Egyptian sculptor created this masterpiece in yellow jasper. It is so powerful, so engaging, even though it is a fragment, clearly broken, part of a larger sculpture. Look at those extraordinary lips, that wonderful line underneath it, the way the light hits the cheeks and the hollow of the cheek. It's just one of the great works of Egyptian art, one of the great sculptures of any civilization. Curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art must decide, for this day and age, what makes a masterpiece? Well, first there has to be skill, but then you can have all the skill in the world and not be able to communicate the spiritual qualities. Serenity, chaos, love, innocence, power, desire, remorse. It's that fundamental human quality in the end that distinguishes a great master, a great El Greco, working in Spain some 400 years ago, surely painted from the soul. The expressive nature of El Greco's paintings, the exaggerated proportions of his figures and the soulful expression, but the real magic, to me, is the poetry of the hands. The Dutch master Van Gogh poured his emotions onto the canvas. The result was not accidental. It was deliberate. Every single brush stroke has been applied with a very precise movement of the hand. The American painter Thomas Eakins was exacting in his realist portraits of humanity. That is a painting of great mathematical precision, of incredible perspective, light, color. If you look deep into the distance, you see Eakins himself in the distant boat. Works by some of the most celebrated painters in the history of art are in the Met's European collection. Here is Rubens' portrait of the artist with his second wife and their then youngest child. You can see his love for her, and she is the embodiment of ideal beauty. And all the things you see in the painting are all symbols of this love affair that brought forth this sort of second blooming in Rubens' life and was the inspiration of many of his finest works. You're dealing with one of the greatest artists who ever lived. The evidence is clear. The Western painting tradition focused on figure, color, and paint. In the East, the Chinese masters celebrated the energy of the line. Painting in China did not feel the need to use bright colors, and that has to do with the tradition of calligraphy and valuing the quality of line. One of the earliest paintings in the collection dates to the 8th century. It's a portrait of a horse by the renowned horse painter Han Gan. In the lore of horses in China, a great horse was like a dragon. And this fiery spirit is, I think, what the artist was really trying to capture. The same energy courses through all things. They call it qi, whether it's the mountains and trees, animals or human beings. So for an artist to tap into that by spontaneously using his brush to capture his own energy, somehow he imparts new life to the pictorial image. Surrounding the borders of the paintings are the written comments and red seals of past owners. So you have 1,200 years of history recorded as part of the object. It adds. It adds a sense of the linkage between the viewer who opens it today and all of these other people who've appreciated it in the past. At the heart of the Chinese collection is a scholar's garden. I think everybody loves this garden because you come in, you have a sense of tranquility. You've been transported to another world. That is, in essence, what much of Chinese painting tries to achieve. It's a mountain of the mind. It's a landscape of the imagination. And it's intended for the viewer to somehow lose himself or herself in this other world. One can walk the world within the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, comb the continents of Asia, America, Africa, come face to face with the art of Egypt, Europe, Greece and Rome. What one sees at the Met is all of those civilizations represented under this one roof.