Metropolitan Museum Launches MetCollects, an Online Series Featuring Recently Acquired Works of Art Launch date: Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced today the launch of MetCollects, a new web series on the Museum’s website that offers first looks at works of art acquired recently by the Museum. 

MetCollects will feature one work each month, selected from the hundreds that the Metropolitan Museum acquires through gifts and purchases annually. MetCollects pairs spectacular photography with curatorial commentary, often including video for further contextualization of the works. 

Mr. Campbell said: “I am incredibly proud of this new initiative MetCollects. Works of art are the very heart of what we do, the story that we tell, and a collection that does not grow simply does not evolve—intellectually, geographically, culturally. It can take just one object to give us a new perspective on another, or ask questions of us that we never before considered, or change the way a single visitor sees the world. That is our mission, and the reason why the Met remains the vibrant and relevant institution that it is today.”

MetCollects is made possible by Bloomberg.

It builds on a series of award-winning Metropolitan Museum initiatives online that are inspired by the Museum’s vast collection. The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, launched in 2000, continues to evolve and expand, and receives more than one million visits per month. Connections (2011) offers personal perspectives on works of art in the collection by 100 members of the Museum’s staff. 82nd & Fifth (2013) features 100 curators from across the Met who talk about 100 works of art from the collection that changed the way they see the world—one work, one curator, two minutes at a time.MetCollects is the fourth of these collection-inspired Metropolitan Museum online features.

Three episodes are now posted online to launch the MetCollects series, which will henceforth post one new episode on the second Tuesday of each month. These inaugural episodes are on:

* The Refusal of Time (2012), a 30-minute multimedia meditation on time and space by artist William Kentridge, who is interviewed about the work in the video posted online on MetCollects. The installation is jointly owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum.

* The 1808 portrait by Francois Gérard of one of the greatest political figures of modern times, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord, with an interview by Keith Christiansen, the Museum’s Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings.

* An extraordinary addition to the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of Judaica, the Mishneh Torah by the Master of the Barbo Missal. This Italian manuscript from around 1457 is now jointly owned by The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

MetCollects, which can be found at www.metmuseum.org/metcollects, also introduces a larger selection of acquisition highlights with links to the Collections feature, notable press coverage, and downloadable publications on the Met’s acquisitions from the last five decades.

Visitors are encouraged to sign up to receive email reminders each month, as new episodes are posted.

MetCollects is produced by the Metropolitan Museum’s Digital Media Department in collaboration with The Photograph Studio and the curatorial staff of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.