Great Paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art [antikvár]

Foreword "If you would civilize a man, begin widi his grandmodier," once wrote Victor Hugo. It was to the great-grandparents of the mature adults of today that the Metropolitan Museum first opened its doors in 1872. This new institution, the policy committee had reported two years earlier, "should be based on the idea of a more or less complete collection of objects illustrative of the History of Art from the earliest beginning to the present time." That same year the State Legislature granted an act of incorporation and the Trustees set out to raise §250,000 a sum that would cover the current operating expenses for less than a month. The paintings illustrated in this book, published almost three full generations after the inception of the Museum, represent only a small fraction of our holdings. But they serve to indicate how superbly the original policy committee's idea has been fulfilled. At the time they were written, theirs were bold words, yet, thanks to the men and women who have given shape to the present Museum, these words have now become a true description of tlie fact. The Metropolitan Museum has indeed bccome a great encyclopedia of the arts. Its fifty-two picture galleries and its growing collections of decorative arts and archaeological materials bear testimony to many high points of older civilizations and to the continuing developments of our own. From time to time in thirteen recendy reconstructed special exhibition galleries selected paintings are shown provocatively combined with other types of art drawn from our own vast resources, or from collections often not otherwise accessiblc to the throngs that visit our Museum. The approximately two thousand European paintings, and the even larger number by American artists which are beyond the scope of this book, do not represent all aspects of the painter's art. However, what has been gathered here over the past eighty-odd years to enrich the Hves of millions of visitors and students is a handsome reward for those who have held faith in the continuing development of the Museum. As the late Francis Henry Taylor said, "It is a tribute to American philanthropy and civic pride; it is an answer to propaganda from overseas that private enterprise, the public purse, and the cultivation of the mind cannot work togedier for the betterment of mankind."