Barnes & Noble
150 East 86th St. at Lexington Ave.
Tuesday, December 13, free, 7:00
212-369-2180
www.rizzoliusa.com
stores.barnesandnoble.com
On December 13, the Met moves slightly northeast as museum curator and educator Kathryn Calley Galitz discusses her new book, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings (Skira Rizzoli, September 2016, $75), at the Barnes & Noble on Eighty-Sixth St. and Lexington Ave. The deluxe book examines five hundred classic works, divided into four chronological sections, “Before 1450,” “1450-1750,” “1750-1900,” and “After 1900,” from the ca. 3800-3700 BCE Central Iran “Storage Jar with Mountain Goats” to Kerry James Marshall’s 2014 “Untitled (Studio).” In addition to full-color photos of each piece, the book includes a bibliography and artist-based index. “Every painting has a story to tell. It should come as no surprise, then, that The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings reveals so many intriguing stories,” Met director Thomas P. Campbell writes in the foreword, opposite Georges Braque’s “Still Life with Metronome (Still Life with Mandola and Metronome).” In her essay “Painting through the Ages,” Galitz explains, “As for the qualifier ‘masterpiece,’ it is indeed a loaded term whose inherent subjectivity goes without saying. We each have our own idea of what constitutes greatness, just as, over time, the canon of acknowledged masterpieces has been subject to the vagaries of taste — both scholarly and popular. . . . That a painting completed in 2015 is included in the same volume as works that have enjoyed masterpiece status for centuries may come as a surprise, but its presence forces us to question the imposition of an arbitrary time frame on the notion of a masterpiece.” Many of the reproductions are full pages, allowing readers to delve into the details of some of what makes these works so special. (Getting the prestigious front cover, by the way, is Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s “Joséphine-Éléonore-Marie-Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn, Princesse de Broglie,” while Ogata Kōrin’s “Irises at Yatsuhashi [Eight Bridges]” occupies the back.) I started to list some of my personal favorites here, but that would have just gone on . . . and on . . . and on. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Masterpiece Paintings is a beautifully designed book that will make you gasp again and again, much like a trip through the Met’s spectacular galleries does.