The present volume, Publications of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1964–2005, is a successor to a volume published by the Museum in 1965 entitled Publications of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1870–1964. These two bibliographic volumes endeavor to list all the known books, pamphlets, and serial publications bearing the Museum's imprint, and issued by the institution during the first 135 years of its existence (through June 2005). The first volume was compiled by Albert TenEyck Gardner, at the time an Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, and the present volume has been compiled from the Annual Reports issued by the Museum during the relevant years. Together the two volumes testify to the tremendous contributions made to knowledge by the curators and conservators of the Metropolitan and by the many other experts who have contributed to the Museum's exhibition catalogues. Various issues of the Bulletin emphasize the great sweep of the Museum's acquisitions during these years, and the exhibition catalogues—a number of them Alfred H. Barr Jr., Award or the George Wittenborn Award—testify to the continuity of the institution's dedicated program to enrich people's lives through knowledge of art.

This catalogue, published annually by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announces the Museum's publications for that year. It also features notable backlist titles and provide a complete list of books available in print at the time of publication.

This catalogue, published annually by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announces the Museum's publications for that year. It also features notable backlist titles and provides a complete list of books available in print at the time of publication.

This catalogue, published annually by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announces the Museum's publications for that year. It also features notable backlist titles and provide a complete list of books available in print at the time of publication.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive collections of works of art from antiquities to modern and contemporary material. Their preservation is a responsibility shared by the many individuals employed at the Museum who have direct contact with the collection on a daily basis. The Care and Handing of Art Objects—first published in the 1940s and continually updated—offers a guide to the best practices in handling and preserving works of art while on display, in storage, and in transit. It explains many of the fundamental principles of conservation that underlie these methods. One of the goals of the publication is to make the complexities of caring for a collection readily accessible by offering basic guidelines for the preservation of the diverse materials and art objects found in The Met. Each chapter of Part I addresses a different medium ranging from paintings on canvas, works on paper, and photographs to furniture, upholstery, and arms and armor. The sections provides an overview of the particular environmental, handling, and housing factors needed to prevent damage and ensure preservation of each material. Written by experts in the respective specialty, the text summarizes the field's most critical preservation issues, many of which are amplified by photographs. Part II succinctly describes factors that affect the collection as a whole. Among these concerns the book features current environmental standards for temperature, relative humidity, light exposure, storage, and art in transit. The text also addresses integrated pest management and emergency preparedness and response. Charts on storage and display conditions as well as factors contributing to deterioration provide an easy reference for readers. A glossary of conservation terms, principles, and housing materials helps to guide for those unfamiliar with the field. The Care and Handing of Art Objects draws on the knowledge of conservators, scientists, and curators from many different departments, along with that technicians and engineers whose expertise crosses boundaries of culture, chronology, medium, and condition. It is an invaluable resource for students, collectors, small museums, museum study programs, art dealers, and members of the public who want to enhance their understanding of how works of art are safeguarded and the role environment, handling, and materials play in making this possible.

In 1874 a group of artists whose work had been rejected the previous year by the official French Salon organized their own exhibition in the studio of the photographer Nadar. The group included Pissarro, Renoir, Cézanne, and Monet, whose painting, Impression: Sunrise, led a prominent and hostile critic to deride the whole group as "impressionists," a name that stuck. Scorned by the French art establishment and for main years by the public as well, these artists continued to paint works that are now universally loved and acknowledged as perhaps the first true expressions of the modern spirit. The Impressionists did indeed depart dramatically from traditional, academic painting techniques and from the romantic or rhetorical subject matter then in vogue. Instead of subjects taken from remote times and places, they chose to paint the artifacts and everyday activities of modern life. In their work, nature ceased to be depicted as ideal and eternal; rather, they showed the instantaneous impression of land, sky, or water in a particular climate and at a particular time of day. Painstaking modeling and traditional perspective were abandoned in favor of short, staccato brushstrokes of color intended to represent the way particles of light reach the retina. This radical break from centuries-old traditions eventually led to new and different modes of painting both within the Impressionists' circle and in the works of succeeding generations throughout Europe and the United States. Modern Europe presents a selection from the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art of the best examples of Impressionism and its heritage, from the classically influenced but radically new works of Manet and Degas to the high Impressionism of Monet and Pissarro; from the work of Cézanne, who attempted to return to painting the weight and solidity abandoned by his colleagues, to the emotive distortions of Van Gogh's portraits and landscapes; from the exoticism of Gauguin, Redon, and Rousseau to the Expressionist visions of Soutine, Munch, Grosz, and Beckmann. Cubism—in which conventional representation began to disappear—is seen in masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, and Villon, and the emerging abstraction of the early twentieth century in works by Kandinsky and Kupka. In addition to reproducing the work of these influential artists. Modern Europe shows the continuing dialogue between the fine and applied arts, presenting an unusually broad picture of the artists and craftsmen of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in some one hundred and forty works of art in every genre and medium.

The Art Heritage of Puerto Rico: Pre-Columbian to Present was the first major exhibition to survey the five-hundred-year history of Puerto Rican accomplishment in art. Beginning with the clay pottery of the Igneri Indians and the stone sculpture of the Taíno culture, the exhibition included the paintings of the important eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists, the religious folk carvings of the Santeros, and outstanding graphic works and paintings of the present day. As most of the loan objects had never before been permitted to leave the Island, this was a first occasion for many to become familiar with the art tradition of Puerto Rico. It was an educational opportunity for all visitors to discover a significant and individual cultural achievement which has flourished over many centuries. The preparation of the exhibition was a joint project of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and El Museo del Barrio. To the Metropolitan's experience in the study and exhibition of works of art was added El Museum del Barrio's special knowledge of the Puerto Rican community and of the Puerto Rican cultural achievement. Martha Vega and her able colleagues at El Museo del Barrio worked closely with the Metropolitan's staff on every aspect of the show, and especially as regards its educational purposes. The partnership of shared work and responsibility proved to be effective, practical, and successful. This cooperation between an established central resource museum and an emerging community-based institution can be a prototype for similar partnership in the future.

The United States was born of European parents, and its culture reflects this rich heritage. But Americans have always been aware of the unique vision that led them to explore a new continent and establish a nation there. Historically, the "American experience" was seen largely as a political one—embodied by the institutions and outlook that distinguished the United States from her European forebears. More recently, however, Americans have become aware of the uniqueness of their artistic heritage, which, though it originated abroad, developed and flourished in ways far different from the arts of Europe. For several decades after the founding of the republic, many American painters and sculptors went abroad for their training, and even those who stayed at home copied European models as best they could. Similarly, American craftsmen at first designed furniture and other decorative objects according to what was fashionable in London or Paris. However, as the nation's wealth and self-confidence grew, so did its trust in its own artistic inclinations, and in the twentieth century Americans began to sense that they could create a great art that was completely and uniquely their own. Largely as a result of its growing preeminence both politically and culturally, America has begun to look back into its own past, inquiring whether its artists and craftsmen, who long remained in Europe's shadow, had not in fact created a distinct and distinguished art. This reexamination has led to countless rediscoveries of artists whose names were only dimly remembered and of craftsmen whose fine products were neglected as mere curiosities. Now, in museums and colleges, in galleries and auction rooms, we sense the excitement of discovery as a two-hundred-year-old artistic tradition is reevaluated and restored. This excitement is nowhere more evident than in the galleries of The American Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Since its founding more than a century ago, the Museum has actively collected American art in every medium. In 1980 its vast collections of earlier American art were reinstalled in a wing of the Museum devoted to the arts of the United States, and in 1987 the new Southwest Wing will house the Museum's significant collection of twentieth-century painting and sculpture. The United States of America re-creates this excitement of discovery in more than one hundred reproductions of paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs, as well as of furnishings, porcelain, silver, glass, and costumes—all revealing the fine craftsmanship and imagination that characterize American artists from the Colonial Period to the present day. Details of paintings allow readers to examine closely the vast landscapes of the mid-nineteenth century and the complex, energetic abstractions of the mid-twentieth century. Prints and photographs demonstrate how the history and natural beauty of America were recorded and presented to a wide and eager public. Furniture, shown in large multiple views, reveals the consummate skill and ingenuity of American craftsmen, and fully furnished period rooms show readers exactly how Americans lived, from the starkly simple Shaker home to the lavishly decorated antebellum salon. An introduction by Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, curator of American art, examines the history of painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts in the United States, and points out both the qualities it shares with the art of Europe and the vision that makes it unique. Entries accompanying each reproduction look more closely at the individual works and place them in the long tradition of American art.

The Pacific Islands, Africa, and the Americas presents the art of three large areas of the world where vital cultural traditions have flourished for centuries—indeed for millennia—separate from the artistic traditions of the West. The art of these areas is thus highly individual, formed by dynamic, autochthonous societies and informed by their own valued heritage and traditions. Today, it is an art unfamiliar to many Western viewers even though the last hundred years have seen an explosion of interest in these regions. Researchers, artists, travelers, merchants, and many others have greatly expanded our awareness of the peoples and cultures of these vast and distant places. Included in this volume is a broad selection of the arts of these areas now housed in the Metropolitan Museum's Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. From the Pacific appear the extraordinary memorial poles made by the Asmat peoples of Irian Jaya in western New Guinea, and the commanding works of the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. Other objects range from a New Ireland funerary carving to a Maori feather box from New Zealand, and important male figures from the Gambier and Easter islands in Polynesia. The African sculptures illustrated in this volume come from the forest and savanna areas south of the Sahara Desert. A compelling thirteenth-century terracotta figure from the ancient city of Jenne is the earliest African work in the collection. Numerous royal sculptures in bronze and ivory—including a magnificent sixteenth-century ivory mask—document the five-hundred-year history of art in the southern Nigerian kingdom of Benin. Wood figures and masks illustrate the diversity of styles in African art—from the stark geometry of the Dogon seated couple and the subtle abstraction of the great Fang head, to the spiritual presence of the Kongo power figures and the lush detail and expressive sensitivity of the famous Luba "Buli Master" stool. Precolumbian America is represented by works spanning a period of about twenty-five hundred years. The earliest objects here are ceramic and jade sculpture of the Olmec peoples of Mexico. A unique Maya sculpture in wood of a seated figure—the only known three-dimensional Maya wood object to have survived the ravages of a tropical rain-forest environment&mdsah;and one of the gems of the collection is also here. A rich selection of Precolumbian gold objects from Central America, Colombia, and Peru document this strong area of the Museum's holdings. And Peru, whose dry coastal sands have preserved fragile, otherwise easily perishable works, is further represented by such pieces as the great hangings of brilliant blue-and-yellow parrot feathers.

With just over a week left, now is the time to see Reid Farrington's groundbreaking installation The Return, which brings Tullio Lombardo's Adam to life.