BGuthrie Photos: NY -- NYC -- The Met Cloisters -- Exhibit: Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination

NY -- NYC -- The Met Cloisters -- Exhibit: Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination:

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Description of Pictures: Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination
May 10–October 8, 2018

The Costume Institute's spring 2018 exhibition—at The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters—features a dialogue between fashion and medieval art from The Met collection to examine fashion's ongoing engagement with the devotional practices and traditions of Catholicism.

Serving as the cornerstone of the exhibition, papal robes and accessories from the Sistine Chapel sacristy, many of which have never been seen outside The Vatican, are on view in the Anna Wintour Costume Center. Fashions from the early twentieth century to the present are shown in the Byzantine and medieval galleries, part of the Robert Lehman Wing, and at The Met Cloisters.

Exhibition design by Diller Scofidio + Renfro

"A gift from the Sartorial Gods . . . an idea so right, so inevitably majestic, that it's amazing it never happened here before." —Wall Street Journal

"It's gorgeous, moving, and surprisingly witty. . . . It confirms the historical, even mystical power of fashion, its worthiness of serious attention . . ." —The Cut

"Art lovers already know the Metropolitan Museum is heaven on Earth. But its new exhibit . . . should convert everyone else." —New York Post

The exhibition is made possible by Christine and Stephen A. Schwarzman and Versace
Additional support is provided by Condé Nast

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Wikipedia Description: The Cloisters
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Cloisters is a museum in Fort Tryon Park in Washington Heights, Upper Manhattan, New York City, specializing in European medieval architecture, sculpture and decorative arts, with a focus on the Romanesque and Gothic periods. Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it contains a large collection of medieval artworks shown in architectural settings sourced from French monasteries and abbeys. Its buildings are centered around four cloisters—the Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont and Trie—which, following their acquisition by American sculptor and art dealer George Grey Barnard, were dismantled in Europe between 1934 and 1939 and relocated to New York. They became part of the Metropolitan Museum's collection when acquired by financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Oher major sources of objects came from the collections of J. P. Morgan and Joseph Brummer. Today it is governed by the Metropolitan, under the chairmanship of Daniel Brodsky.

The museum's building was designed by architect Charles Collens, on a site built into a steep hill and comprises upper and lower levels. It contains medieval gardens and series of indoor chapels and thematic display spaces, including the Romanesque, Fuentidueña, Unicorn, Spanish and Gothic rooms. It holds approximately five thousand works of art and architecture, all European and mostly dating from the 12th to 15th centuries—that is, from the Byzantine to the early Renaissance periods. The varied objects include stone and wood sculptures, tapestries, illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings, of which the best known include the c. 1422 Early Netherlandish Mérode Altarpiece and the c. 1495–1505 Flemish Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries.

The Cloisters' early collection was built-up by Barnard and acquired by Rockefeller in 1925 who then purchased, and in 1931 donated the site and housing museum in Washington Heights to the Metropolitan as a their permanent home. The design, layout and ambiance of the building is intended to evoke a sense of medieval European monastic life. On its opening in 1938, the museum was described as a collection "shown informally in a picturesque setting, which stimulates imagination and creates a receptive mood for enjoyment".

Formation and history

The basis for the museum came from the collection of George Grey Barnard, an American sculptor and collector who almost single-handedly established a medieval art museum near his home in Fort Washington. Although he was a successful sculptor who had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, his income was not enough to support his family. Barnard was a risk taker and led most of his life on the edge of poverty. He moved to Paris in 1883 where he studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He lived in the village of Moret-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, between 1905 to 1913, and began to trade 13th- and 14th-century European objects to supplement his earnings. In the process he built a large personal collection of what he described as "antiques", at first by buying and selling stand-alone objects with French dealers, then by the acquisition of in situ architectural artifacts from local farmers.
Barnard and Clare Sheridan at his cloister in New York City, 1921

Barnard was primarily interested in the abbeys and churches founded by monastic orders from the 12th century. Following centuries of pillage and destruction during wars and revolutions, stones from many of these buildings were reused by local populations. A pioneer in seeing the value in such artifacts, his acquisitions were often met with hostility from local and governmental groups. Yet Barnard was an astute negotiator who had the advantage of a professional sculptor's eye for superior stone carving, and by 1907 he had amassed a high-quality collection at relatively low cost. Reputably he paid $25,000 for the Trie buildings, $25,000 for the Bonnefort and $100,000 for the Cuxa cloisters. His success led him to adopt a somewhat romantic view of himself. He recalled bicycling across the French countryside and unearthing fallen and long-forgotten Gothic masterworks along the way. He claimed to have found the tomb effigy of Jean d'Alluye face down, in use as a bridge over a small stream. By 1914 he had amassed enough artifacts to open a gallery in Manhattan.

Barnard often neglected his personal finances, and was so disorganized that he often misplaced the origin or provenance of his purchases. He sold his collection to John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1925 during one of his recurring monetary crises. They had been introduced by the architect William W. Bosworth. Purchased for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the acquisition included structures that would become the foundation and core of the museum. Rockefeller and Barnard were polar opposites in both temperament and outlook and did not get along; Rockefeller was reserved, Barnard exuberant. The English painter and art critic Roger Fry was then the Metropolitan's chief European acquisition agent and acted as an intermediary. Rockefeller eventually acquired Barnard's collection for around $700,000, retaining Barnard as an advisor.

Rockefeller offered to build the Cloisters for the Metropolitan in February 1930. Under consultation with Bosworth, he decided to build the museum at the 66.5-acre (26.9 ha) site at Fort Tryon Park, chosen for its elevation and views, as well as its accessible but isolated location. The land and existing buildings were purchased that year from the C. K. G. Billings estate and other properties in the Fort Washington area. In 1927 he hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of one of the designers of Central Park, and the Olmsted Brothers firm to create a park, which he donated to New York City in 1935. The Cloisters building and adjacent 4-acre (1.6 ha) gardens were designed by Charles Collens. They incorporate elements from abbeys in Catalonia and France. Parts from Sant Miquel de Cuixà, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Bonnefont-en-Comminges, Trie-sur-Baïse and Froville were disassembled stone-by-stone and shipped to New York City, where they were reconstructed and integrated into a cohesive whole. Construction took place over a five-year period from 1934. Rockefeller bought several hundred acres of the New Jersey Palisades, which he donated to the State in an effort to preserve the view from the museum.

Early donations and acquisitions

Rockefeller financed the purchase of many of the early collection of works, often buying independently and then gifting to the museum. His financing of the museum has led to it being described as "perhaps the supreme example of curatorial genius working in exquisite harmony with vast wealth." The second major donor was the industrialist J. P. Morgan, founder of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, and who in the last 20m years of his life acquiring artworks, according to art historian Jean Strous "on an imperial scale", spending some $900 million (inflation adjusted) in total. After his death, his son J. P. Morgan Jr. donated a large number of works from the collection to the Metropolitan.

An other early major source of objects came from the art dealer Joseph Brummer (1883-1947). James Rorimer, a curator at the Cloisters, had been a friend of Brummer over many years and long realized the importance of his collection, and purchased large quantities of objects in the months after Brummer's sudden death in 1947. According to Christine E. Brennan of the Metropolitan, Rorimer realized that the collection offered works that could rivaled the Morgan Collection in the Met's Main Building, and that "the decision to form a treasury at The Cloisters was reached...time because it had been the only opportunity since the late 1920s to enrich the collection with so many liturgical and secular objects of such high quality." These pieces, including works in gold, silver and ivory, are today held in the Treasury room of the Cloisters.
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