Associate Curator Yaëlle Biro recounts some of her recent investigative work to learn more about the use and history of a late nineteenth-century Bongo anthropomorphic post in The Met collection.

Curator Keith Christiansen considers whether the pervasive darkness in two of Caravaggio's late works should be viewed as metaphorical or as an expression of the artist's tortured life.

Finely worked to a resilient consistency from local clays and gravel, the millennia-long endurance of [Nok sculpture] is a testament to the technical ability of their makers.

The Metropolitan Museum Journal is issued annually and publishes original research on works of art in the Museum’s collection. Highlights of volume 53 include an exquisite pair of 17th-century Chinese birthday gift portraits of an elderly couple, a hidden painting of a Rococo-inspired nude underneath Manet’s 1862 Mademoiselle V. . . . in the Costume of an Espada, and a new identification of the central figure in Daumier’s The Third-Class Carriage.

Teen Advisory Group Member Karl invites readers to apply Matisse's "non finito" technique to aspects of their own lives.

The poet Jennifer Franklin responds to Friedrich’s painting Monk by the Sea.

Visiting Committee Member Rebecca Lindsey recounts former curator Emanuel Winternitz's attempts to mount a performance of Igor Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat at The Met.

In this preface to the Obsession catalogue, exhibition curator Sabine Rewald writes about the "private pleasures" that drew Scofield Thayer to nudes by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Pablo Picasso.