The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC: Part 4, “The Art of Success”

Success for an art museum cannot be measured quantitatively. It has to do with how deeply the museum is able to make an impact on its visitors. In the Met's 19th century European collection, many of the paintings, mostly French, are incomparable. The Courbet, Woman with a Parrot, it's a shocking painting. Courbet's handling of paint. His depiction of flesh is sufficiently realistic as to cause very strong reactions on the part of viewers today. Another Woman with a Parrot dwells nearby. This one by Courbet's rival, Edouard Manet. Almost certainly a satirical commentary on Courbet's nude. Of course, 19th century Paris was also the center of the Impressionist universe. The stories are as simple as walking through a hayfield with poppies on a beautiful sunny day. All you have to do is be human to recognize the pleasure in such an image. At the Met, there are water lilies by Monet, sunflowers and cypresses by Van Gogh, apples and primroses by Cezanne, a parade of early works by Gauguin and Matisse, and Renoir's stunning group portrait, Madame Charpentier and her children. In other words, the most important collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist painting in America. Key works came from the peerless private collection of a true art connoisseur, Louisine Havemeyer, wife of the sugar baron, H.O. Havemeyer. Louisine Havemeyer became very much a student of art in addition to simply a collector of a mass of objects. As a teenager, she visited Paris in 1874, where she met and befriended the American artist, Mary Cassatt. She became a devoted collector of Cassatt's work. Not merely for the companionship, but because she saw how beautiful the paintings were, how great they would become. In Young Mother's Sewing by Mary Cassatt, you see some of her most popular imagery, the imagery that she's best known for, that is the subject of mothers and children. She used friends and family in her compositions, painting them quite, quite beautifully and showing herself to be every bit the worthy colleague of the great French Impressionists. Guided by Cassatt, Louisine Havemeyer became one of the earliest collectors of Impressionism. Above all, she favored Edgar Degas. She wanted to have early works and late works. She wanted to have finished paintings as well as informal studies. What she made was an exhaustive and comprehensive collection of his work, which makes me believe that she fully understood his achievement and wanted to document it. Two Dancers Practicing at the Bar is an example of Degas' wit at play. The fact that he included a watering can at the bottom left, mimicking with its spout the angle of the dancer's feet, shows his cleverness in making a visual analogy. An entire gallery at the Met is devoted to the Havemeyer collection of Degas' bronze sculptures featuring his twin fascinations, horses and ballerinas. Center stage in the Havemeyer collection is Degas' irresistible 14-year-old dancer, standing tall at three feet, three inches. All in all, Louisine Havemeyer collected the largest and most complete collection of Degas' work ever formed. And all of this, really, for the Metropolitan. I mean, the Metropolitan was always in her mind as the ultimate recipient of the collection. A museum is really a collection of collections. As a result, we have suites of objects that really tell a story in a more complex and complete manner than if we were to buy a single example. The Met is a vast storehouse of art, knowledge and inspiration. It's a place to return to over and over again, to savor in small doses, to lose yourself in thought or to immerse yourself in the wonders of human creativity. Once you become comfortable, you'll discover again the things that mean most to you. You could indeed come back again and again and again over the years and learn something new every single time. It is only a short walk from Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm to the abstract elegance of Egyptian hieroglyphs, from an Indian goddess Parvati to Titian's Venus and Adonis, from a bronze head by Picasso to a West African reliquary head. The Met is, in fact, several museums in one, and I think that's one of its great advantages because it means that you can make those wonderful comparisons, appositions, contrasts. It's all there, and one is traveling the globe.