From the Vaults

“When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.” On April 7, 1955, Robert Frost delivered a poetry reading at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Born in the Bronx on Labor Day in 1914 to recent Italian immigrants, the self-taught American painter Ralph Fasanella is known today for his bustling tableaux of working-class city life.

“The only pleasure you can get from creating something is the pleasure you have in doing it, not the final product even,” the photographer Berenice Abbott once said of her work.

Using time-lapse footage of New York City, the filmmaker Hilary Harris imagines the metropolis as a living organism.

On February 7, 1963, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa made her public debut at The Met.

A self-proclaimed “collector of souls,” the American painter Alice Neel is known today for her powerful, psychologically rich portraiture.

Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the oldest surviving full-length animated film.

Flowers are more than merely decorative. People throughout time have used them as storytelling devices.

The artist and musician Richard Lippold is perhaps best known in New York City for his spectacular Orpheus and Apollo (1962), a five-ton chandelier made of shimmering metal ribbons that once hung in the lobby of the New York Philharmonic.

The painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun once wrote of the 18th century, “Women reigned then; the Revolution dethroned them.”

Superstition and fear ran rampant in 17th-century New England, causing many people to conjure up visions of spectres—which they believed could only be exorcised with certain rites.

Since the 1970s, the artist Charles Simonds has created enigmatic dwellings for an imaginary civilization of “Little People.”

When this film was made a century ago, Cairo was much smaller, and to Western visitors the way of life along the Nile River appeared to resemble that of Pharaonic Egypt.

In this short feature, produced to accompany a 1993 LACMA exhibition of Jacob Lawrence’s series on Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, hear from the artist and those who knew him well.

This atmospheric short film presents the many wonders of France’s Cathedral of Saint Peter of Beauvais, from its intricate stained glass to its soaring, vaulted interior.

Shot on location in Mexico and Honduras, this film tells the sweeping story of the civilizations that flourished in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean for centuries before European colonization.

In this dazzling short animation by the Brothers Quay, learn about the illusionistic technique known as anamorphosis, in which a hidden image only becomes visible when viewed from a different angle or in a curved mirror.

In this thought-provoking film, musicians such as Ellie Mannette and Pete Seeger talk shop and explain what they love about the steel drum, from its origins in Trinidad and Tobago to its status as one of the world’s most popular musical instruments.

Let Al Jarnow’s entrancing short film take you to the beach.

This short film presents rare footage of 12th-century Romanesque apse at its original site in the Castilian countryside, where dismantling the structure required meticulously numbering and crating each of its nearly 3,300 stone pieces.

Shot on location in Istanbul, Edirne, and the Turkish countryside, and narrated by Ian McKellan, this documentary explores Süleyman (or Süleiman) the Magnificent, the longest-reigning emperor of the Ottoman empire.

The American Impressionist painter Childe Hassam is known today for his depictions of New England landscapes and portraits of life in turn-of-the-century New York.

Perhaps the most famous wrought-iron monument is the Eiffel Tower in Paris. But you can also find wrought iron all around you on the streets of New York City, decorating balconies, staircases, windows, and doorways.

Near the end of his life, Vincent van Gogh moved from Paris to the city of Arles in southeastern France, where he experienced the most productive period of his artistic career.

Filmed in East Harlem just after the end of World War II, In the Street is a dynamic, tender, and often humorous portrait of life in New York City.

This enigmatic short film presents 50 Egyptian funerary portraits from the region of Fayum.

The American sculptor George Grey Barnard—known as the “modern Michelangelo” for his ambitious, often larger-than-life marble sculptures—perfects several projects in this charming vignette, including two massive busts of Abraham Lincoln.

Follow a pilgrimage across Europe to the shrine of Saint James in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

An elderly woman brings her granddaughter to a pottery studio in search of a new pitcher—but the mischievous youngster has other plans.

A gem of analog animation, George Griffin’s Head offers a delightfully snarky and clever self-portrait of the artist as a not-so-young man, undone by his own cartoon surrogate.

This outrageous and slyly self-aware documentary revisits The Costume Institute’s 1982 exhibition La Belle Époque, from the decadence in fin-de-siècle Paris through the global pandemonium of World War I.

“We discovered that art history was not the best handle by which to reach a kid.”

“Curator” comes from the Latin word “cura,” meaning “to take care.”

This ghostly romance tells the story of two young lovers in medieval France.

The artist Louise Nevelson was known for her elaborate and monumental sculptures made of found materials such as discarded wood and scrap metal.

“It seems funny to say it, but long before there was an ‘art world,’ there was art in the world.”

In this charming silent film, a drawing student’s daydream at The Met brings the ancient Greek myth of Perseus to life.

This captivating documentary about the rituals, myths, and traditions of Indonesia incorporates Old Javanese poetry, sculpture, and music alongside performances by traditional artists and healers.

Warps, wefts, heddles, and leashes: Learn how tapestries were made, across time and across cultures, in this mesmerizing short film.

This lyrical portrait of the Cathedral of Chartres was produced for the 1970 exhibition The Year 1200, a centerpiece of The Met’s centennial celebration.

This impressionistic visual diary is a quirky love letter to the Museum featuring long-time employee and artist Ray Cusie.

This short documentary follows the custom installation of Isamu Noguchi’s beloved sculpture Water Stone and offers a special opportunity to witness a living artist interact with staff as their work is prepared for display.

Sumptuously shot in richly contrasting black and white, this lyrical series of vignettes provides a window into the hidden workings of the Museum.

From ancient Chinese sculpture to the modern Broadway stage, cats have long been a source of inspiration for artists.

Produced for the 1974 exhibition Masterpieces of Tapestry, this short form recounts the tale depicted in “The Unicorn Tapestries” and explains the symbolic meaning of these mythic creatures, including their purifying and restorative powers.

In the 1920s The Met began to explore filmmaking as part of its educational program, and in 1924 it released two films about Arms and Armor.