The Metropolitan Museum of Art - The Collection: Recent Acquisitions

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Director's Note

In the past few years a concerted effort has been made to augment the Metropolitan's funds for the acquisition of works of art. This Bulletin devoted to our recent acquisitions is testimony to the importance of that effort. There have been individual gifts, a number of them substantial, and the credit lines attached to major purchases record those donors' generosity and proclaim our gratitude. The Acquisitions Fund Benefit is now an annual tradition, and its proceeds allowed us last year to obtain an important seventeenth-century German sculpture by Leonhard Kern. In addition, the funds provided by several members of the Chairman's Council made possible the purchase of a splendid figure study by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

As in previous years, this issue of the Bulletin underscores the encyclopedic nature of the collections by nearly matching that diversity with newly acquired works spanning several millennia and continents. Once again, I would like to devote pride of place in this note to Ambassador and Mrs. Walter Annenberg, whose continued munificence provides us this year with a number of important Impressionist and Post-Impressionist canvases, including two handsome Fantin-Latours (Asters and Fruit on a Table and Roses and Lilies). Our collection of nineteenth-century European paintings also benefited from the addition of its first work by the British/French landscape painter Richard Parkes Bonington (View near Rouen), as well as of a unique and most touching painted document, Gauguin's portfolio of 1894 from his second Pont-Aven period. Mr. and Mrs. Leon Black are associated with the latter purchase, and it is my pleasure to observe here that their names are being linked to acquisitions with increasing frequency.

Among those groups of works of art that have measurably enhanced the quality and scope of other areas of the Museum's collections is the assemblage of "Dongson"-culture Bronze Age objects bequeathed by Samuel Eilenberg, which makes our holdings of this material virtually unrivaled in the Western world; and the Fales Collection of American jewelry, which propels us to first rank in that field as well.

Finally, I wish to end by welcoming to the Museum a single work, one of the most important to be acquired in recent times by the Metropolitan in the field of African art: the large and imposing sculpture of a couple from the Menabe region of Madagascar. We could not have added this iconic image of man and woman to the collection without the assistance of valued friends of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. To these individuals, and to all the others who have contributed to the acquisitions program of the Museum in the past year—listed for the first time at the back of this Bulletin—I express my deepest gratitude. Their generosity is our lifeblood.

Philippe de Montebello
Director

(This note is adapted from Recent Acquisitions: A Selection: 2000–2001, a special issue of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin.)

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