The Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial

Last updated February 07, 2020

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial was a series of events and initiatives celebrating the 100th anniversary of the charter of the Museum occurring between 1969 and 1971.

Background

The Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrated its centennial with exhibitions, symposia, concerts, lectures, the reopening of refurbished galleries, special tours, social events, and other programming for eighteen months from October 1969 through the spring of 1971. The highlight was an open house and Centennial Ball on April 13, 1970. The anniversary was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 100th Anniversary Committee, chaired by Trustee Roswell Gilpatric and including Museum President Arthur A. Houghton, Trustees Brooke Astor, C. Douglas Dillon, and Arthur K. Watson, advertising executive David Ogilvy, CBS President Frank Stanton, socialite and representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights Marietta Tree, and collector and future Museum Trustee Jayne Wrightsman. Events were held both at the Museum and beyond, reaching cities throughout the United States and overseas.^[1]

"The Great Age of Fresco: Giotto to Pontormo," which was on view for only two months in the fall of 1968, was the first exhibition at the Museum to have corporate sponsorship. Olivetti’s underwriting of the exhibition was seen as a model for the pursuit of corporate sponsors for the Centennial exhibitions being planned at that time.^[2]

Exhibitions

Centennial special events at the Museum centered around five exhibitions celebrating the breadth of the Museum’s collecting over the previous one hundred years: “New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970” (sponsored by Xerox ^[3]), "The Year 1200," "19th-Century America" (opened by First Lady Pat Nixon), “Before Cortés: Sculpture of Middle America,” and “Masterpieces of Seven Centuries.” "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970" was the Museum's first exhibition of contemporary American art, curated by Henry Geldzahler to mark the inauguration of the newly established department of Contemporary Arts. It elicited reactions ranging from shock to relief at the new direction of collecting that it signaled.^[1] For each exhibition, a contemporary American composer was commissioned to create an orchestral fanfare. These included Shivaree by Leonard Bernstein (for "Before Cortes: Sculpture of Middle America"), Ceremonial Fanfare For Brass Ensemble by Aaron Copland (for "Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries"), Ceremonial Fanfare by Walter Piston (for "The Year 1200"), Anniversary Fanfare by William Schuman (for "19th Century America"), and Metropolitan Museum Fanfare: Portrait Of An American Artist by Virgil Thomson (for "New York Painting And Sculpture: 1940–1970").^[2]^[4]

As part of the Museum's expanded outreach programs, the Centennial was marked with loan exhibitions to museums in the United States and overseas, including Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. "Treasures from the Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art" traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. "Prints by Nine New York Painters" was seen in Jerusalem and seven other cities, while "Masterpieces of Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art" traveled to The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which celebrated its own centennial in 1970. Many objects shown in "Before Cortés: Sculpture of Middle America" originated from Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropologia y Historia as part of a 25-year reciprocal loan and cultural program with the Metropolitan Museum.^[2]

Events

April 13, 1970 marked the 100th anniversary of the granting of the Metropolitan Museum's charter by the State of New York. On April 10 the Museum hosted a reception for staff members, before which Director Thomas Hoving presented the Museum's “Comprehensive Plan for the Second Century,” which would guide building and program efforts in the coming decades. On April 13, the Museum held an open house for New York residents from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., including a receiving line of political dignitaries, special programs, refreshments, and entertainment in the Museum and on its Fifth Avenue plaza. The Centennial Ball that evening was hosted by Museum trustee Brooke Astor and featured reduced ticket prices for staff members and their families. Four ballrooms were set up in the Museum, each decorated by a noted New York interior decorator around the theme of a specific historical event or artistic period.^[1]

Publications and centennial initiatives

In celebration of the Centennial the Museum published eighteen new books, twelve directly related to the anniversary and six to other aspects of its collections. Among them were Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, written by New Yorker staff writer Calvin Tomkins and published in 1970, which serves as an official history of the institution, and a centennial issue of the Metropolitan Museum Journal published to coincide with the celebrations’ conclusion in 1971. Other initiatives included educational programs, book publishing, television programs, film projects, and receptions to coincide with meetings of professional organizations including the American Association of Museums.

“Cinémathèque at the Metropolitan Museum,” which was jointly sponsored by the Museum and City Center of Music and Drama, showed seventy films dating from the medium's first seventy-five years on thirty-five consecutive evenings from July 29 to September 3, 1970. The films were selected by Cinémathèque Française founder and director Henri Langlois, from its archive of more than 50,000 films. Chosen for their significance and contributions to the history of filmmaking, they included work from official film industries as well as current and early avant garde directors. The program was the most diverse film exhibition held in the United States to date, and was the Museum's first major undertaking in film. Television projects associated with the centennial included "Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries” narrated by noted art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, a one-hour NBC program prepared by Aline Saarinen, and a network television report each evening during the week of October 6, 1969 on one of the five centerpiece centennial exhibitions.^[2]

Specially tailored Museum visits were organized for members of other museums and cultural organizations across the United States to see the Centennial exhibits and participate in related programming. An intensive advertising, promotion, and public relations campaign publicized the events to a wide range of visitors and distant supporters through newspapers, magazines, and other print publications, as well as television and local store window displays. A free year-long course in art history, composed of thirty lectures, was developed and offered to the public by the Education Department.^[5] Artist Frank Stella was commissioned to create a Centennial logo, and medals incorporating the design were struck to mark the occasion. Remodeled and refurbished galleries in the Museum opened during this period, including the Ancient Near Eastern Art and Egyptian Art departments and the Costume Institute in the fall of 1970, and a reinstallation of the Musical Instruments collections. The extent of air-conditioned gallery space was doubled, to include almost two-thirds of the Museum's exhibition spaces. Considerable emphasis was also put on fundraising for the expenses associated with the Centennial celebrations.^[2]

Related Research Articles

The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the United States. With 6,953,927 visitors to its three locations in 2018, it was the third most visited art museum in the world. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park in Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art galleries. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe. On March 18, 2016, the museum opened the Met Breuer museum along Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side; it extends the museum's modern and contemporary art program.

Frank Philip Stella is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York City.

The New-York Historical Society is an American history museum and library located in New York City at the corner of 77th Street and Central Park West on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The society was founded in 1804 as New York's first museum. It presents exhibitions, public programs, and research that explore the rich history of New York and the nation.

The Speed Art Museum, originally known as the J.B. Speed Memorial Museum, now colloquially referred to as the Speed by locals, is the oldest, largest, and foremost museum of art in Kentucky. It is located in Louisville, Kentucky on Third Street next to the University of Louisville Belknap campus and receives around 180,000 visits annually.

Leonard Alan Lauder is an American billionaire businessman and art collector.

Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh are four museums that are operated by the Carnegie Institute headquartered in the Carnegie Institute complex in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Carnegie Institute complex that includes the original museum, recital hall, and library was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 30, 1979.

The Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon, United States, was founded in 1892, making it the oldest art museum on the West Coast and seventh oldest in the US. Upon completion of the most recent renovations, the Portland Art Museum became one of the 25 largest art museums in the US, at a total of 240,000 square feet, with more than 112,000 square feet of gallery space. The permanent collection has more than 42,000 works of art, and at least one major traveling exhibition is usually on show. The Portland Art Museum features a center for Native American art, a center for Northwest art, a center for modern and contemporary art, permanent exhibitions of Asian art, and an outdoor public sculpture garden. The Northwest Film Center is also a component of Portland Art Museum.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, or VMFA, is an art museum in Richmond, Virginia, in the United States, which opened in 1936.

Birmingham Museum of Art Municipal Art Museum in Alabama, U.S.

Founded in 1951, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama, today has one of the finest collections in the Southeastern United States, with more than 24,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and decorative arts representing a numerous diverse cultures, including Asian, European, American, African, Pre-Columbian, and Native American. Among other highlights, the Museum’s collection of Asian art is considered the finest and most comprehensive in the Southeast, and its Vietnamese ceramics one of the finest in the U.S. The Museum also is home to a remarkable Kress Collection of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts from the late 13th century to c.1750, and the 18th-century European decorative arts include superior examples of English ceramics and French furniture.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), located in the Houston Museum District, Houston, is one of the largest museums in the United States. The permanent collection of the museum spans more than 6,000 years of history with approximately 64,000 works from six continents.

Henry Geldzahler was a Belgian-born American curator of contemporary art in the late 20th century, as well as a historian and critic of modern art. He is best known for his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as New York City Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, and for his social role in the art world with a close relationship with contemporary artists.

Ronnie Landfield American abstract painter

Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction,, and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.

The New Orleans Museum of Art is the oldest fine arts museum in the city of New Orleans. It is situated within City Park, a short distance from the intersection of Carrollton Avenue and Esplanade Avenue, and near the terminus of the "Canal Street - City Park" streetcar line. It was established in 1911 as the Delgado Museum of Art.

James Edward Grant was a painter and sculptor active from the late 1950s into the early 1970s. Best known for his sculptural work in plastics, this work by no means defined him, but was rather a natural endpoint of an exploration into increased dimensionality—starting from abstract canvases, moving through collages and bas-reliefs until the work finally came off the wall in sculptural form.

Anne d'Harnoncourt was an American curator, museum director, and art historian specializing in modern art. She was the director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), a post she held from 1982 until her sudden death in 2008. She was also an expert scholar on the works of French artist Marcel Duchamp.

Henry Pearlman (1895–1974) was a Brooklyn-born, self-made businessman who discovered in midlife a passion for impressionist and post-impressionist art. Over three postwar decades, he assembled a "deeply personal" collection centered on thirty-three works by Paul Cézanne and more than forty by Vincent van Gogh, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaïm Soutine, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and a dozen other European modernists. His eye for quality was "rarely matched in a private collection."

Janice H. Levin (1913–2001) was an American businesswoman and philanthropist and art collector from New York City. She was a patron of the ballet and collected mostly French impressionist paintings. She was a supporter of higher education as well as charities in Israel. She donated many of her paintings to museums.

Portrait of Mrs. Bodolphe is a painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals, painted in 1643 as half of a pair of pendant marriage portraits and is still together with its pendant in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Alfrederick Smith Hatch was an American investment banker who founded Fisk & Hatch along with Harvey Fisk. Hatch was the President of the New York Stock Exchange from 1883 to 1884.

The Beeches is a mid 19th-century painting by American artist Asher Brown Durand. Done in oil on canvas, the work depicts a forested path in the Northeastern United States. Beeches has been described as one of Durand's earlier works of Naturalist art.

References

1 2 3 Linda Sipress, The History of the Centennial of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, (1972).
1 2 3 4 5 Finding aid for the George Trescher records related to The Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial, 1949, 1960-1971 (bulk 1967-1970). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 1 August 2014.
↑ Metropolitan Museum opens first major centennial exhibition "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970". Digital Collections, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries. Retrieved 1 August 2014.
↑ Various – Centennial Fanfares: The Metropolitan Museum Of Art 1870-1970. Discogs.
↑ Metropolitan Museum gives free year-long art history course in celebration of Centennial. Digital Collections, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Retrieved 1 August 2014.