Audio guide tours, a floor plan, a guidebook, and guided gallery tours are among the visitor amenities available to French speakers at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the largest and finest art museums in the world. Its vast holdings include more than two million works of art spanning 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present and from every part of the globe. Founded in 1870, it is located in New York City's Central Park, along Fifth Avenue (from 80th to 84th streets). The Metropolitan's two million square feet house what is, in fact, a museum of museums; several of its collections are among the best in the world and would be major independent museums almost anywhere else.
On Arrival
Visitors arriving at the Metropolitan Museum may pick up, at no charge, a floor plan of the galleries in French. These floor plans are available at the Information Desk in the Museum's Great Hall, which is located inside the main entrance at Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street. French speakers are also stationed at the Information Desk to provide additional assistance to visitors.
General information about the Museum is also offered in French on the Museum's website at http://www.metmuseum.org/visitor/vi_index_french.htm.
Available for purchase in the Museum's bookstore – located on the first floor, in the Great Hall – is The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide. This compact paperback illustrates and describes nearly 900 works of art from the Museum's encyclopedic collection. The objects for the guide were selected to provide a balanced overview of the Metropolitan's collections and a generous selection of its many masterpieces. It is printed in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and German.
Audio Guide Tours
Several Audio Guide tours provide visitors with valuable insights into the Museum's collections and history. "The Director's Selections" program – highlighting 58 masterpieces chosen by Director Philippe de Montebello from across the Museum's encyclopedic collection – is available in French to visitors. It is narrated in French by Mr. de Montebello himself.
In addition to French, the "Director's Selections" Audio Guide is offered in English, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin.
A spectacular "museum-within-the-museum," the New Greek and Roman Galleries display an extraordinary collection of Hellenistic, Etruscan, and Roman art. The French audio guide tour provides in-depth gallery introductions and information about 150 magnificent works of art. Ancient Greek and Roman stories are retold throughout the tour, illuminating the influence of mythology, philosophy, and history on the art from those cultures.
Visitors interested in architecture can explore the history of the Museum on the "Architecture of the Met" Audio Guide tour. Presented by Morrison Heckscher, who is the Lawrence A. Fleischman Chairman of The American Wing, the tour includes 15 stops and features interviews with Kevin Roche of Roche Dinkeloo and Associates, and Peter White, grandson of architect Stanford White. The tour is offered in French, Spanish, English, and Japanese.
Picturesquely located in Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, The Cloisters is the Met's branch museum dedicated to the art and architecture of the Middle Ages. The Cloisters Audio Guide tour – comprised of 75 stops featuring interviews with curators and music from the Middle Ages – enhances the experience of viewing the magnificent medieval art. The tour is offered in French, Spanish, English, and German. Admission to The Metropolitan Museum includes admission to The Cloisters.
Each of the audio tours is available on a palm-sized, easy-to-operate MP3 player. The random-access programming allows visitors to design their own tours in terms of length and sequence. Players can be rented for up to an entire day for $7 ($6 for members, $5 for children under the age of 12) in the Great Hall of the Museum or in the Main Hall of The Cloisters.
The Audio Guides are produced in collaboration with Antenna Audio, the leading provider of audio programming for museums and historic sites around the world.
The Audio Guide programs at the Metropolitan Museum are sponsored by Bloomberg.
Guided Tours
A wide selection of guided tours is offered in French to visitors throughout the week. Visitors can explore some of the highlights of the collection with a French-speaking guide on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays at 11:00 a.m. For visitors interested in exploring the American art collection in more detail, the Museum offers gallery tours in French on Wednesdays at 1:30 p.m. These public tours last approximately one hour and are free with Museum admission. Visitors should confirm the tour schedules on the Museum's online calendar at www.metmuseum.org/calendar.
The Museum also offers customized tours in French to groups by appointment. More information about these private group tours is available from the Visitor Services Department at 212-650-3711 or online at www.metmuseum.org/visitors/groups.
French Art at the Met
French artists are the focus of two exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum in 2008. French master Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) painted some of the most influential landscapes in Western art. In them, nature is viewed "through the glass of time" and endowed with a poetic quality that has been admired by painters as different as Constable, Turner, and Cézanne. Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions is the first exhibition to examine the landscapes of this great painter. It brings together approximately 40 paintings, ranging from his early, lyrical, Venetian-inspired pastorals to his grandly structured and austere works in which the artist meditated upon Nature, its transformations, and its renewals. An equal number of drawings are on view, the most luminous of which were done en plein air.
The first full retrospective of the French artist in 30 years, Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) presents some 130 works by this pioneering figure in the history of modernism, from his seminal manifesto-paintings of the 1850s to the views of his native Ornans and portraits of his friends and family. The exhibition also includes a selection of 19th-century photographs that relate to Courbet's work, especially his landscapes and nudes. The works are drawn from public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad.
Works by French artists – including paintings, drawings, and the decorative arts – are interspersed throughout all of the European collections galleries. The Wrightsman Galleries for French Decorative Arts recently reopened after a period of extensive renovation. And in December 2007, the New Galleries for 19th- and Early 20th-Century European Paintings and Sculpture opened to the public with renovated rooms and more than 8,000 square feet of additional gallery space – the Henry J. Heinz II Galleries – to showcase works from 1800 through the early 20th century. These galleries feature all of the Museum's most loved 19th-century paintings, including works by Bonheur, Bonnard, Cézanne, Corot, Daubigny, Degas, Delacroix, Gauguin, Gericault, Lerolle, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Moreau, Morisot, Seurat, Signac, Vuillard, and many more. Also on view is the full-room assembly of "The Wisteria Dining Room," a French art nouveau interior designed by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer shortly before World War I, the only complete example of its kind in the United States.
For a complete and up-to-date listing of the Metropolitan Museum's exhibitions and programs, visit www.metmuseum.org.
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March 21, 2008
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