John Singleton Copley was the leading portraitist of the American colonial era. This volume, which accompanies a major exhibition of Copley's work organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, focuses on the paintings, miniatures and pastels which Copley produced before he moved to London in 1774. In four principal essays, a team of experts places Copley's work in historical and social context, and brings new critical methods to bear upon traditional aspects of the study of portraits and portraiture. Among the conclusions are that Copley's portraits helped to shape pre-Revolutionary culture, and that their content was market-driven in a relentlessly consumerist, anglophile society. Four shorter texts treat Copley's use of costumes in his portraits, his achievement as a miniaturist, his pastels, and the frames he used for his work. Catalogue entries on the color-plates detail the sitters' lives, decode the emblematic language that reflected status in colonial society, and reveal the way Copley contrived to enhance his subjects' status. The exhibition with which the book is timed to coincide opens in June 1995 in Boston and in September 1995 in New York, and travels subsequently to Houston and Milwaukee.

Idealized pairings have been an enduring concern of sculptors across the African continent. This universal theme of duality is now examined in a handsome book that presents African sculptural masterpieces created in wood, bronze, terracotta, and beadwork from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. Drawn from twenty-four sub-Saharan African cultures, including those of the Dogon, Lobi, Baule, Senufo, Yoruba, Chamba, Jukun, Songye, and Sakalava, the sculptures tell much about each culture's beliefs and social ideals. These artistic creations are astonishingly rich and diverse forms of expression. An essay written by Alisa LaGamma discusses thirty works, all of which are illustrated in colour. This book is the catalogue for an exhibition on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ronald E. Street and Dieter Arnold outline their methods for creating a physical model of the pyramid complex of Senwosret III that is on view through January 24, 2016, in the exhibition Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom. 

As a result of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's renewed excavations in Lisht, the Egyptian Department published The Pyramid of Senwosret I by Dieter Arnold in 1988, followed in 1990 by The Control Notes and Team Marks by Felix Arnold. The first volume examined the main pyramid and its related mortuary installations, while this third volume, The Pyramid Complex of Senwosret I by Dieter Arnold, discusses the monuments and objects found within the outer enclosure wall of the royal pyramid, mainly the nine subsidiary pyramids and other tombs belonging to members of the royal family and their households. Although the pyramids and their surrounding installations are much destroyed and the burials pillaged, it has been possible to reconstruct, to some degree, the architecture from these ruins. Such a reconstruction is particularly important, as no other pyramid enclosures of the Middle Kingdom, and very few of the Old Kingdom, have ever been so thoroughly excavated and published. The results of this enterprise provide an important contribution to our understanding of the structure and development of the royal funerary complexes of the Middle Kingdom. As with the other volumes on the Museum's excavations, this publications provides complete information and archaeological context for a number of important objects from Lisht that were given to the Museum as a result of the division of finds, and are now displayed in the Egyptian Galleries of the Metropolitan Museum. Also significant is the discovery of timbers from one or more ancient ships, described in the appendix. When these vessels were no longer thought to be seaworthy, they were disassembled and their timbers embedded in roads used during the construction of the pyramid complex. Future publications on Lisht South will discuss the reliefs associated with the funerary complex of Senwosret I, private tombs that surrounded the pyramid complex, and texts associated with these tombs.

This Closer Look focuses on a single work from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a sculpture of a seated couple created by the Dogon people of Mali in West Africa. The goal is to inspire young people and adults to look more closely at works of art—to discover that details can be fascinating and often essential to understanding the meaning of a work of art. This packet may be used as an introduction to looking at and interpreting the Dogon couple, or as a springboard for exploring how it reflects the culture in which it was made. Teachers and students can use these materials in the classroom, but we know that study and preparation are best rewarded by a visit to the Museum.

Although Lucie Rie and Hans Coper are regarded as the preeminent British potters of the latter half of the twentieth century, neither was born in Britain. Both were refugees from Nazism: Rie at the age of thirty-six emigrated from Vienna in 1938 in search of a new life in London, and Coper fled his native Germany in 1939 as a youth of nineteen. Lucie Rie's pots were made of stoneware or porcelain. She did not follow the usual potter's procedure of bisque-firing the object, applying glaze, and re-firing it. Instead she painted her glazes directly onto the "green," unfired body, firing the piece only once. She experimented with a wide spectrum of colors and her glazes, often softly modulated, ranged from satiny smooth to deeply pitted "volcanic" textures. Applied decoration, when it appeared, was abstract and discreet, used to enhance the piece rather than to call attention to itself. Decoration was generally restricted to sgaffito (lines scratched into the glaze with a needle) or inlay, where the lines were cut into the body itself and filled with a contrasting glaze. Rie stamped the bottom of her pieces with a distinctive "LR" and sometimes decorated them with color or sgraffito. Throughout Hans Coper's career, his work at the potter's wheel was what mattered most to him. From the start, his pots were less conventional than Rie's. He executed them all in stoneware, and he restricted himself to a much more limited range of glazes, eschewing her frequent use of color and relying only on white, buff, brown, and black. He burnished the surface of some of his pots and experimented with textures, scouring the clay or layering glazes and abrading them with scouring pads. Ultimately, it is Hans Coper's unique forms that most immediately characterize his work. Although for the most part small in scale, his pots have a remarkable presence. Some recall ancient Cycladic figures; others are built up of such geometric forms as cylinders, discs, and cones. Strong, monumental whatever their size, their impact is that of sculpture. Yet they are all vessels, and Hans Coper was insistent on that fact—that he was first and last a potter.

Exhibition co-curator Tim Barringer shows how the artist brought the expansive vistas of massive panoramas to scale.

In East Asian cultures, the arts of poetry, calligraphy, and painting are traditionally referred to as the “Three Perfections.” This exhibition presents over 160 rare and precious works—all created in Japan over the course of nearly a millennium—th…

Victoria Button, senior paper conservator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, discusses a selection of European miniature portraits in The Met collection that she worked with during a one-month exchange program between the two institutions this spring.

Publishing and Marketing Assistant Rachel High speaks with author Kathryn Calley Galitz about her new book, a landmark survey of The Met's painting collection.