MetPublications

In just three years, between 1893 and 1896, Frederick William MacMonnies’s Bacchante and Infant Faun evolved from a clay sketch in the artist’s Paris studio to the most controversial sculpture in the United States. Perceptions of the sculpture, which depicts an over life-size dancing woman who gleefully holds an infant in one arm and grapes aloft in the other, still range from provocative to innocuous. This Bulletin provides a close examination of Bacchante and Infant Faun, a work most frequently associated with the scandal that led to its acquisition: the public uproar over the impropriety of the figure’s nudity and her apparent inebriation spurred its original owner, architect Charles McKim, to withdraw it as a gift to the Boston Public Library and give it to The Met instead. While earlier studies focused almost exclusively on the controversy, this Bulletin takes a fresh look at one of the icons of the American Wing, from its origins in the artist's Beaux-Arts training to its place in the rich tradition of the bacchante as a subject of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art.

To late nineteenth-century Americans Augustus Saint-Gaudens was well known as a sculptor of public monuments rendered in a naturalistic, vital, and thoroughly modern aesthetic. A son of French-Irish immigrants, Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) embodied the American success story, rising from humble Lower East Side circumstances to become the finest American sculptor of his day, attracting international acclaim and patronage. Born in Dublin, Ireland, he was the quintessential cosmopolite artist—during his four-decade career he moved effortlessly between studios in New York, Paris, Rome, and his beloved Cornish, New Hampshire. He counted among his friends a cultural who's who: writers Henry James and William Dean Howells, artists John Singer Sargent and Maxfield Parrish, and architects Stanford White and Charles McKim, and his clients included Cornelius Vanderbilt II and President Theodore Roosevelt. But Saint-Gaudens always remained self-effacing, quipping that it was his exotic name (as he said, pronounced Gaudens, as in "gaudy") as much as his sculptures that brought him distinction. Whether or not his name is as broadly familiar today, his art remains celebrated and relevant, from the gilded equestrian monument to William Tecumseh Sherman in New York to the storied twenty-dollar "double eagle" gold piece he designed for President Roosevelt. The Metropolitan's collection of works by Saint-Gaudens numbers 45—in marble, bronze, plaster, terracotta, and even shell. His association with the Museum is reflected not only in these tangible objects but also through his career-long connections with its staff and trustees and their tireless efforts to assemble a comprehensive memorial exhibition of 154 works in the Great Hall in 1908. In subsequent years, a representative group of Saint-Gaudens's sculptures entered the collection through astute purchases and generous gifts and bequests. Now, just over one hundred years after the artist's death, the Metropolitan's holdings of his works continue to grow steadily, affirming the adage "adding strength to strength." Saint-Gaudens's engaging story and his substantial legacy at the Metropolitan are detailed in this issue of the Bulletin, written by Thayer Tolles, Associate Curator in the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture.

This publication, the first of two volumes, presents a definitive new catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum's distinguished and comprehensive holdings of American sculpture. Since 1872, when the first piece of American sculpture entered the new Metropolitan Museum of Art, the number of examples dating from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century has grown to approximately four hundred. The collection is particularly strong in neoclassical and Beaux Arts sculpture and is acclaimed for its preeminent group of life-size statues in marble and bronze. The Museum's holdings accurately document the history of American sculpture and its development as a profession, from the artists who lived in Italy and carved in marble and those who studied in Paris and cast in bronze, to those who worked only in the United States and were pioneers in the techniques of their art. The collection includes premier examples of neoclassical ideal nudes, expressive genre statuettes, naturalistic representations of Native American subjects, studies for and reductions after monumental sculpture, dramatic depictions of animals, and many portraits in the preferred styles and materials of each period. High points in the careers of such renowned sculptors as Hiram Powers, Erastus Dow Palmer, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Frederick William MacMonnies are represented. Volume 1 begins with an introduction on the history of the Museum's collection, particularly in the context of the outstanding personalities who have been involved in its formation. A summary biography of each of the 61 sculptors and entries for each of the 198 objects incorporate the most up-to-date scholarship as well as documentation from the wealth of archival material at the Museum. The sculpture has been specially photographed by Jerry L. Thompson for illustration in the catalogue. Volume 2, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1865 and 1885, scheduled for publication in 2000, will present nearly 200 works by 70 sculptors, including such acclaimed artists as Gaston Lachaise, Elie Nadelman, and Paul Manship.

This publication, Volume 2 of American Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, presents nearly 200 works by 70 sculptors, including Paul Wayland Bartlett, Frances Grimes, Adolph Alexander Weinman, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, James Earle Fraser, Max Weber, Elie Nadelman, Jo Davidson, Jose de Creeft, Malvina Hoffman, Hugo Robus, and John Henry Bradley Storrs. A biography of each of the sculptors represented summarizes the artist's life, and catalogue entries discuss each of the objects treated in this volume in terms of its subject and creation, its place in the artist's oeuvre, other extant versions of the work, and its complete exhibition history after it entered the Metropolitans collection. The biographies and catalogue entries incorporate the very latest scholarship as well as the wealth of archival material at the Museum to present a brief but thorough and up-to-date documentation of each artist and work. Jerry L. Thompson photographed all the sculpture for illustration in the catalogue. Volume 1, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born before 1865, was published in 1999. Together the two volumes record the Metropolitan Museum's distinguished and comprehensive collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American sculpture, which is particularly strong in neoclassical and Beaux Arts works and is acclaimed for its preeminent group of lifesize statues in marble and bronze, a selection of which is on view in the Charles Engelhard Court. The Museum's holdings accurately document the history of American sculpture and its development as a profession, from the artists who lived in Italy and carved in marble and those who studied in Paris and cast in bronze, to those who worked only in the United States and were pioneers in the techniques of their art. There are premier examples of neoclassical ideal nudes, expressive genre statuettes, naturalistic representations of Native American subjects, studies for and reductions after monumental sculpture, dramatic depictions of animals, and many portraits in the preferred styles and materials of each period. And high points in the careers of such renowned sculptors as Hiram Powers, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Gaston Lachaise, and Paul Manship are represented.

A master photographer, Alfred Stieglitz was also a visionary promoter and an avid collector of American and European art from the first half of the twentieth century. Operating a succession of influential Manhattan galleries from 1905 to 1946, he exhibited many of the most important artists of the era, including Constantin Brancusi, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Vasily Kandinsky, John Marin, Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, Francis Picabia, and Pablo Picasso. The collection he assembled of their works—by purchase, gift, and happy accident—was of exceptional breadth and depth and has been the cornerstone of the Metropolitan Museum's holdings of modern art since 1949. This volume is the first catalogue of the Metropolitan's unparalleled Alfred Stieglitz Collection: more than four hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints made between the 1880s and the 1940s. After an illuminating introduction that traces the collections formation and surprising dénouement, thirty-one short essays serve as focused biographies of the dealer and each of the artists he cultivated and collected, demonstrating the intense and often intimate relationships that affected artistic direction, financial well-being (or its opposite), and social and professional prestige. These discussions are enriched by new scholarship, technical analysis, and archival research, and many works in the collection are published here for the first time. Seen together in splendid color reproductions, they present a portrait of a supreme connoisseur—a man who acted as "midwife" in the creation of twentieth-century art.

In 1825 the Erie Canal, connecting the Atlantic with the American heartland via the Great Lakes, was completed, and in 1861 the Civil War, disrupting American unity, began. This volume examines the exhilarating period between these two far-reaching events. The Erie Canal turned the port of New York into the gateway to the United States, ushering in a time of enormous growth and change for the city of New York. Still very much a work in progress, New York became both an international economic and cultural center: it was transformed into what contemporary observers variously termed the Empire City, the Great Emporium, and the Empress City of the West. The cultural component of this transformation was as significant as its economic aspect. Highly skilled artists and craftsmen working in New York, both native born and immigrant, grew in number, and institutions devoted to the arts emerged and flourished. With Broadway at its heart, the Great Emporium developed into the nation's major manufacturing and retailing center, the depot for luxury goods made in and around the city and imported from Europe. The complex story of the proliferation of the arts in New York and the evolution of an increasingly discerning audience for those arts during the antebellum period is the focus of this book, which accompanies a major exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In essays that will interest scholars as well as a more general audience, specialists from the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, and the University of California at Berkeley bring new research and insights to bear on a broad range of subjects. Their texts offer both historical and cultural contexts and explore the city's development as a nexus for the marketing and display of art, as well as private collecting; landscape painting viewed against the background of tourism; new departures in sculpture, architecture, and printmaking; the birth of photography; New York as a fashion center; shopping for home decorations; changing styles in furniture; and the evolution of the ceramics, glass, and silver industries. This volume is lavishly illustrated in color and black and white, providing reproductions of the more than three hundred works in the exhibition as well as comparative material. A checklist of works in the exhibition, a bibliography, and an index are included.