Metropolitan Museum Of Art Quotes

(Rome) is a Metropolitan Museum of Art the size of Manhattan, no roof, no display cases, and half a million combustion engines rumbling in the hallways.

What was I thinking?" Chiron cried. " I can't let you get away without this." He pulled a pen from his coat pocket. It was an ordinary disposable ballpoint, black ink, removable cap. Probably thirty cents. Gee," I said. "Thanks." Percy, that's a gift from your father. I've kept it for years, not knowing you were who I was waiting for. But the profecy is clear to me now. You are the one. I remembered the feild trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when I'd vaporized Mrs. Dodds. Chiron had thrown me a pen that turned into a sword. Could this be...? I took off the cap, and the pen grew longer and heavier in my hand. In half a second, I held a shimmering bronze sword with a double-edged blade, a leather=wrapped grip, and a flat hilt riveted with gold studs. It was the first weapon that actually felt balanced in my hands. The sword has a long and tragic history that we need not go into," Chiron told me. "It's name is Anaklusmos." Riptide," I translated, surprised the Ancient Greek came so easily. Use it only for emergencies" Chiron said, "and only against monsters No hero should harm mortals unless absolutely, of course, but this sword wouldn't harm them in any case.

Much of the greatest art, I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious.

A work of art tends to speak of things that are at once too large and too intimate to be summed up, and they speak of them by not speaking at all.

Much of the greatest art, I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious. This is real. That's all it says. Take the time to stop and imagine or feel fully the things you already know.

I'm sometimes not sure which is the more remarkable: life lives up to great paintings, or that great paintings live up to life.

Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that’s why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

In Isaac Newton’s lifetime, no more than a few thousand people had any idea what he looked like, though he was one of England’s most famous men, yet now millions of people have quite a clear idea—based on replicas of copies of rather poorly painted portraits. Even more pervasive and indelible are the smile of Mona Lisa, The Scream of Edvard Munch, and the silhouettes of various fictional extraterrestrials. These are memes, living a life of their own, independent of any physical reality. “This may not be what George Washington looked like then,” a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “but this is what he looks like now.” Exactly.

Survival is a funny business, too. A losing game. Literally. They love us, and we lose them all. The ones who made us, the ones who gave us, the ones who sat down and played with us, the ones who held us, or just laid eyes on us. The ones who bought, traded, and sold us. Cleaned us, redeemed us, brought back the sheen on us. Loved us. Learned everything there is to know about us.

So under the cover of no one hearing your thoughts, think brave thoughts, searching thoughts, painful thoughts, and maybe foolish thoughts, not to arrive at right answers but to better understand the human mind and heart as you put both to use.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art claims to be the largest in the western hemisphere. It's right, but I'm not too sure about the arts bit. Don't misunderstand me. It's got tons of genuine art. It's also got tons of stuff that is hard to classify. I can't come to grips with a massive cube with a grandiose title. I allow that it's art, but not my sort. I need the big stone block to tell me something about the bloke whose name's on the caption, and it doesn't. That off my chest, I admit that any place with 3.3 million works of art truly is a wonder.

I would roam through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for one woman artist to show me the way. Mary Cassatt? Berthe Morisot? Why was it that so many women artists who had renounced having children could then paint nothing but mothers and children? It was hopeless. If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for domesticity in all your art. You could never escape your femaleness. You had conflict written in your very blood.

I had long wanted to see “true” indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium). About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, “I want to see indigo now—now!” And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved—never achieved, perhaps, because the color of heaven is not to be seen on earth. But it had existed once, I thought—it was the color of the Paleozoic sea, the color the ocean used to be. I leaned toward it in a sort of ecstasy. And then it suddenly disappeared, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness that it had been snatched away. But I consoled myself: Yes, indigo exists, and it can be conjured up in the brain. For months afterward, I searched for indigo. I turned over little stones and rocks near my house, looking for it. I examined specimens of azurite in the natural history museum—but even they were infinitely far from the color I had seen. And then, in 1965, when I had moved to New York, I went to a concert in the Egyptology gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, a Monteverdi piece was performed, and I was utterly transported. I had taken no drugs, but I felt a glorious river of music, four hundred years long, flowing from Monteverdi’s mind into my own. In this ecstatic mood, I wandered out during the intermission and looked at the ancient Egyptian objects on display—lapis lazuli amulets, jewelry, and so forth—and I was enchanted to see glints of indigo. I thought: Thank God, it really exists! During the second half of the concert, I got a bit bored and restless, but I consoled myself, knowing that I could go out and take a “sip” of indigo afterward. It would be there, waiting for me. But when I went out to look at the gallery after the concert was finished, I could see only blue and purple and mauve and puce—no indigo. That was nearly fifty years ago, and I have never seen indigo again.

A lawless place and a lawless people, the Italians said. A true frontier of civilization. Dangerous. FIFTY-FIVE The Stanhope Hotel was on Fifth Avenue at Eighty-third Street, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was

Growing up in NYC,The broken sidewalks, graffiti filled subways, and humid Laundromats, did not offer solace. I found solace in the strings of my violin, in my ballet slippers at the studio, and while gazing at frescoes in the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was always in the Arts that my soul was replenished.

I have heard of you- a kind of revolutionary. Hard to be a revolutionary in the deadly museum business.

Opera halls, ballets, and large art museums receive more funding--and not all from the government--than do popular art and what might be considered popular music venues...But there are plenty of innovative musicians...who have had as much trouble surviving as symphony orchestras and ballet companies...Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?...The 2011 annual operating budget for the New York Metropolitan Opera is $325 million; a big chunk of that, $182 million, came from donations from wealthy patrons.

Bird asked what a paleontologist was and Mom said that if he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum’s steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like a paleontologist.

The best part about the class was that the teacher would first lecture on a particular piece of art, then she would show us slides and photographs of it, and after some analysis, she would take us on a short walk to the worldfamous Metropolitan Museum of Art where we would actually see the real thing.

I can understand the feeling of a man struggling to escape the practical slavery imposed by the multitude of obligations which crowd upon a man who tries to be a good citizen. Root writes to Jack Morgan in 1927 about the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from Michael Gross' Rogues Gallery

After the war, when I told Terry Kitchen something about my three hours of ideal lovemaking with Marilee, and how contentedly adrift in the cosmos they made me feel, he said this: “You were experiencing a non-epiphany.” “A what?” I said. “A concept of my own invention,” he said. This was back when he was still a talker instead of a painter, long before I bought him the spray rig. As far as that goes, I was nothing but a talker and a painters’ groupie. I was still going to become a businessman. “The trouble with God isn’t that He so seldom makes Himself known to us,” he went on. “The trouble with God is exactly the opposite: He’s holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically constantly.” He said he had just come from an afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where so many of the paintings were about God’s giving instructions, to Adam and Eve and the Virgin Mary, and various saints in agony and so on. “These moments are very rare, if you can believe the painters—but who was ever nitwit enough to believe a painter?” he said, and he ordered another double Scotch, I’m sure, for which I would pay. “Such moments are often called ‘epiphanies’ and I’m here to tell you they are as common as houseflies,” he said. “I see,” I said. I think Pollock was there listening to all this, although he and Kitchen and I were not yet known as the “Three Musketeers.” He was a real painter, so he hardly talked at all. After Terry Kitchen became a real painter, he, too, hardly talked at all. “ ‘Contentedly adrift in the cosmos,’ were you?” Kitchen said to me. “That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while. How long did the feeling last?” “Oh—maybe half an hour,” I said. And he leaned back in his chair and he said with deep satisfaction: “And there you are.” •

The money was only part of what I found interesting. I really do think, and not just because I happen to be writing a book about it, that the business of creating and foisting new technology upon others that goes on in Silicon Valley is near the core of the American experience. The United States obviously occupies a strange place in the world. It is the capital of innovation, of material prosperity, of a certain kind of energy, of certain kinds of freedom, and of transience. Silicon Valley is to the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world. It is one of those places, unlike the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but like Las Vegas, that are unimaginable anywhere but in the United States. It is distinctively us. Within

Before we took the trip, he had never been on an elevator, eaten a hamburger, or enjoyed a chocolate milkshake. He’d never seen a vacuum cleaner, dishwasher, trash compactor, ATM, vending machine, car with automatic locks, or Western-style movie theater. He had never been to a shopping mall, ridden in a car on the Interstate, or traveled at over 40 miles an hour. He’d never seen a rodeo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Rubin Museum of Art in New York filled with Himalayan art, or drunk a single-malt scotch. Now he counts all of these marvels of Western culture as some of his favorite things.

Our lives are devoted to our absence—to the idea that no trace of ourselves should be left in our work.

Melvin thought about the museum inhaling so much of the world—all that history, all that spiritual juice, all the passions and laments of each visitor—without ever really exhaling.

Some curators are great scholars, others great exhibition makers, still others, superb collectors. It is rare to have a curator like Peter, who excels at all three.

God Damn it, I'm in the Jesus pictures again.” The most memorable complaint that I overhear in my early weeks comes when I'm patrolling the oldest of the Old Master corridors.

I called the section chief and ultimately I'm assured that the painting is unscathed and was never in any real danger, but I don't know. It's hard to feel that all is well when you've just seen the swinging Picasso.

When I find I can discover no definite meaning in most of what I see, nothing I could put into words, I take pleasure in the flash and sparkle of the scene.

So many stories under the blue jacket," he says.

It's hard to feel that all is well when you've just seen the swinging Picasso.

My sense of the artist as an unafraid person, came largely from my dad.

The day's first visitors arrived. I take up my position in the suitable corner. And I find that in these galleries I don't even need to close my eyes to feel what I wish to feel.

And we look at it to feel the great silence and weight of suffering. Or we don't see the picture at all.

When I stopped a middle school kid from climbing into the lap of in the ancient Venus one day, he apologizes and looks around thoughtfully. “So all of this broken stuff,” he says surveying the battlefield of headless and noseless and limbless ancient statuary, “did it all break in here?”.

I’ll tell you a chapter in what will be mine: One day I’m going to go to New York City. I’ll walk up and down the crowded streets. I’ll eat a hot dog from a sidewalk cart. I’ll stand under the lights of Times Square. I’ll take pictures of tourists and roasted chestnuts and the subways going over the Manhattan Bridge. I’ll go to the library with the stone lions outside it and look for the shelf where one day my books will be. I’ll walk across the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset. I’ll sit in a café and write down what I see. And I’ll go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look at every painting. Not for me, Clarissa. For you. I’ll go each day until I’m done. However long it takes.

Doc took a step forward. “That’s cutting it awfully thin, twelve hours. It would be easy to miss these ripples.” Edith shook her head. “Don’t you understand? That’s why the Patrol stretches all the way back to the beginning of mankind. We have twelve hours in the present, but all of history, after the initiating event of a ripple, to notice it. So any agent past the initiating of a ripple up until the present can report it.” She pointed toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “And that’s why we’re here. We have art in there from across the world. A series of ripples make it to a shift, it will show up in the art from some time and some place.” “Ingenious,” Eagle said. “The backup reporting system.” Edith nodded. “Yes. The Patrol disappearing, that wipes out any agent reporting in other than through the art.

In April 1653 Johannes Reijniersz Vermeer married a Catholic girl, Catharina Bolenes. The blessing took place in a nearby and quiet village Schipluiden. For the groom it was a good match. His mother-in-law, Maria Thins, was significantly wealthier than he, and it was probably she who insisted Vermeer convert to Catholicism before the marriage on 5 April. Some scholars doubt that Vermeer became Catholic, but one of his paintings, The Allegory of Catholic Faith, made between 1670 and 1672, reflects the belief in the Eucharist. Walter Liedtke in Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art suggests it was made for a Catholic patron, or for a schuilkerk, a hidden church. At some point the couple moved in with Catharina’s mother, who lived in a rather spacious house at Oude Langendijk, almost next to a hidden Jesuit church.

Head of a Young Woman This portrait was completed by 1667 and is now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Because of its almost identical size and its proximity in tone and composition, it is often considered to be either a variant or counterpart to the famous Girl with a Pearl Earring. The subjects of both paintings wear pearl earrings, have scarves draped over their shoulders, and are shown in front of a plain black background. In addition, it is likely that the creation of both works involved the use of a camera obscura.

Art often derives from those moments when we wish the world to stand still.

In moments like these I realize how much sensory experience falls through the cracks between our words.

I think that sometimes we need permission to stop and adore, and a work of art grants us that.

The world feels like a surfeit of details that refuse to coalesce.

A mother at the American Wing fountain hands her child two coins: “One wish for yourself,” she says, “and another, just as big, for someone else.” I have never heard this before and immediately know I will say it to my children one day.

They are daughters who look like their mothers’ pasts, fathers who look like their sons’ futures.