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Director's Note

One of the most important bequests of works of art in the history of the Metropolitan Museum, and doubtless the most important for the Department of Modern Art, was that of Natasha Gelman of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection. We feature in this Bulletin only a very small part of it, but the whole was published in 1989, when the Metropolitan held the first public exhibition of the Gelmans' magnificent holdings.

The bequest, numbering eighty-five paintings, drawings, and bronzes, presents the art of the past century, particularly of its first half, at a remarkably high level of quality, with major works in areas where the Metropolitan was heretofore deficient. For example, the Museum gains its first painting by Francis Bacon through this bequest, and groups such as the fourteen Picassos, nine Matisses, and nine Mirós add depth in critical areas. As further testimony to the importance of collector/curator relationships in the life of a museum, the Gelmans' benefaction was clearly born of their long and deeply rewarding friendship with William S. Lieberman, whose closeness to the couple is also manifest in the title he holds: Jacques and Natasha Gelman Chairman of the Department of Modern Art. The Gelman Collection will be installed in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing in galleries named for these most discriminating and generous donors.

Inter vivos offerings continued to enrich the Museum as well, notably those of Ambassador and Mrs. Walter Annenberg, which readers of this annual Bulletin chronicling the Museum's acquisitions will have noted come with most welcome and admirable regularity. Degas's Race Horses and Monet's Camille Monet in the Garden at Argenteuil are among the highlights of the Annenbergs' gifts to date. Another Monet—the enchanting Jean Monet on His Hobby Horse of 1872, an early Impressionist study of the artist's son—arrived as a gift of the Sara Lee Corporation. Also worth special mention as an important addition to our Impressionist holdings is The "Kearsarge" at Boulogne, a major seascape by Édouard Manet acquired through a combination of Peter H. B. Frelinghuysen's promised gift and funds from a number of other sources.

Moving backward several decades, I cite two fine works of the Romantic period that entered the collection by purchase. Our first painting by Caspar David Friedrich, obtained with Wrightsman funding, helps give a truer sense of the merits of schools of nineteenth-century painting other than the French. And a splendid watercolor by Théodore Gericault not only is one of his finest and most elaborate but also is connected to the Museum's monumental Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct, being a sketch for a pendant to that painting.

Finally, among the purchases that have had the greatest impact on the Metropolitan's collection overall is the spectacular and sculpturally powerful (but sadly unphotogenic) dragon finial, a Korean gilt bronze of the ninth or tenth century that is a star of our new Arts of Korea galleries. Likewise, the magisterial depiction of the Lamentation by Ludovico Carracci—a pivotal work of the early 1580s, when Ludovico and his cousins Annibale and Agostino buried Mannerism and laid the groundwork for Baroque art—is now a cornerstone of our collection of Italian Baroque paintings.

It is as difficult as ever to end my contribution to this publication without mentioning every object reproduced on the pages that follow, as well as the many more listed in our Annual Report. All contribute materially to the Museum's performance of its primary mission. I am profoundly grateful to the donors of works of art or of the funds for their acquisition, whose generosity ensures that our millions of visitors, and especially our dedicated members, who return time and again, will never lack for new and unexpected visual pleasures.

Philippe de Montebello
Director

(This note is adapted from Recent Acquisitions: A Selection: 1999–2000, a special issue of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin.)