Mellon Curatorial Fellow Rachel Parikh examines some of the weaponry on view in the exhibition The Royal Hunt: Courtly Pursuits in Indian Art.

Emily Sutter, editor and producer for Digital Learning in the Digital Department, responds to Hudson's letter to The Met about Paul Klee.

A magnificent selection of drawings by one of the greatest artists of the seventeenth century, for the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), drawing was a fundamental activity. Ranging from delightful renderings of children and elegant portraits of noblemen and women to vigorous animal studies and beautiful landscapes, Rubens's drawings are renowned for their superb quality and variety. This exquisite book presents—in beautiful full-color reproductions—more than one hundred of the finest and most representative of Rubens's drawings, from private and public collections around the world. Essays by Anne-Marie Logan and Michiel C. Plomp provide overviews of Rubens's career as a draftsman and of the dispersal of his drawings among collectors after his death. The authors discuss the various functions of Rubens's drawings as preparatory studies for paintings, sculpture, architecture, prints, and book illustrations. The volume also includes a sampling of the artists early anatomical studies and copies after antique sculpture as well as several sheets by other artists that Rubens retouched, restored, or reworked. This publication accompanies an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (January 14 to April 3, 2005)—the most comprehensive exhibition of Rubens's drawings ever held in the United States.

Among the Metropolitan's most beloved spaces are the galleries dedicated to arms and armor. The Museum's collection of fourteen thousand pieces, unrivaled in quality, depth, and diversity, encompasses objects from around the globe and across more than two millennia. Crossbows occupy a singular place in the history of weapons and their technology: they remained in use for more than two thousand years, and, until eclipsed by firepower, reigned as one of the dominant weapons throughout the world. Indeed, changes originally designed to increase the propulsive power of the simple bow evolved into the mechanisms that would define the operation of firearms.

Paul Strand (1890–1976) was one of the most important and influential photographers of this century. The dramatic achievements of his early career, which have not until now been studied apart from his entire oeuvre, are the focus of this book, which accompanies an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Spurred by the example of Cézanne, Picasso, and Nietzsche, Strand pushed the medium into artistic terrain considered too difficult, cerebral, or brutal to describe with a camera. His undeniable success brought photography to its maturity. For concentrated power, formal coherence, and human sensitivity, the extraordinary pictures he made in and around New York City in 1916 have never been bettered. After studying photography with the social reformer Lewis Hine, Strand began to absorb the ideas of the European avant-garde, gradually abandoning the painterly effects of pictorialism in favor of a candid and psychologically potent realism on the one hand and a masterfully wrought abstraction on the other. Fellow photographer and art entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz recognized Strand's astonishing pictures as bold strides into a new world and heralded them as the first images in an incisive modern vision—a direct and flexible idiom expressive of 20th-century experience. Strand's large, beautiful platinum prints are reproduced here in superb tritone plates. The text by Maria Morris Hambourg traces the early development of Strand's ideas, the complex cultural context of his experiments, and the emergence of such masterpieces as Wall Street, White Fence, and Blind.

Website Editor Michael Cirigliano II examines some of the parallels between composer Paul Hindemith and artist Max Beckmann—two prolific artists who both fled Nazi Germany in 1937.

In this interview, Rachel High speaks with Paul Booth about the design of Monumental Journey, the first monograph in English on Girault de Prangey's groundbreaking photographs.

The story of a remarkable young woman and how her painting by Paul Klee escaped confiscation by the Nazis and came to The Met.