#ReadThis @MetMuseum @yalepress Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence by Colta Ives - Don't Miss This Before It Closes at The Met July 29th!
An absolutely essential aspect of city living is having the right greenery to retreat to. And not all parks are the same, and not all museums are the same. The Met is our favorite therefore Yale must be our favorite Ivy publisher! Yale does all the books for The Met that we have seen, and this exhibit you cannot miss. It is a bastion of tranquility that you will want to remember, and the best way to remember any exhibit at The Met is to get the book for your collection.
Of course the brilliant works of art in this volume will provide needed relaxation even if you are gifting this to someone far away not able to get to the exhibit. Written by a curator of The Met, Public Parks, Private Gardens is the perfect celebration of cultivated greenery that is key to well-being and happiness. It is nicely balanced from of course the public spaces to the private as the title indicates, and concentrates on France and how we can all be better from learning from them, like they did when creating Central Park.
Don't miss the Garden of Versailles on page 27, a must-see on your Met visit. We love the level of detail that is in-depth and delved into; page 55 shows ironwork and benches, proper park components. "A Sunday on La Grand Jatte" by Seurat on page 65 epitomizes this exhibit and we love it in particular, and pointillism. Peachy actually studied this at Boston College and tried to do it herself but it turns out she is better at writing about it. (And Seurat might not have been as good at social media? But we hope he is reading up there.)
The planning, architecture and aesthetic precedence set forth in this book will fill your day with brilliance as you turn each page. It's Friday, New York (and rest of the world), get to The Met and see this before it closes and if you can't, you can at least get this fantastic book.
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The spectacular transformation of Paris during the 19th century into a city of tree-lined boulevards and public parks both redesigned the capital and inspired the era’s great Impressionist artists. Including masterworks by artists such as Bonnard, Cassatt, Cézanne, Corot, Daumier, Van Gogh, Manet, Matisse, Monet, and Seurat, Public Parks, Private Gardens examines how the transformed landscape affected life and art in the city. As the availability and variety of plants and flowers grew tremendously, so did public interest in them. A revival in floral still life easel painting brought the garden’s beauty indoors. Many artists were themselves avid gardeners, and they painted parks and gardens as the distinctive scenery of contemporary life. Writing from the perspective of both a distinguished art historian and a trained landscape designer, Colta Ives provides new insights not only into these essential works, but also into an extraordinarily fertile period in France’s history.
Colta Ives is curator emerita in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Accompanying the exhibition at The Met Fifth Avenue, on view March 12 – July 29, 2018
