The New Greek and Roman Galleries at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art
The new Greek and Roman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are the triumphant result of 15 years of re-design, including five years of construction. They are magnificent. As you walk through the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court (site of the former cafeteria), illuminated by skylights, you can feel as if you are in the sculpture garden of an ancient Roman patrician.
19 Jun 2007 12:00
Joel Simpson
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Visual Arts
The new Greek and Roman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (opened April 20) are the triumphant result of 15 years of re-design, including five years of construction. They are magnificent. As you walk through the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court (site of the former cafeteria), illuminated by skylights, you can feel as if you are in the sculpture garden of an ancient Roman patrician.
The floor is colored marble, and a second story has been added to enhance the original grand design of the gallery, originally installed between 1912 and 1926. Of course, many of the sculptures, in all their magnificence, are missing heads or noses (one lower torso of an athelete is connected to the statue’s foot by a thick chromium rod replacing a missing calf, evoking ancient Special Olympics), but the damage to ancient pieces sculpture and architectural ruins has been a part of our classical aesthetic since the eighteenth century and even before.
JOEL SIMPSON has been photographing since he was a teenager in the 1960s. Since then he's pursued careers in college teaching (English, French and Italian), jazz piano, and music software. His photographic art work has shown in six New York area galleries, as well as in Texas, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Seattle, and has been published in View Magazine (Brussels), and in the Center for Fine Art Photography’s Artist Showcase. In the fall of 2007 there will be a major article on his body projections in Eyemazing, a photography quarterly published in Amsterdam, for which he is the New York correspondent. From 2003 to 2006 he wrote for M: The New York Art World, and he is currently curating a large photography show at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn, NY, entitled Sun-Pictures to Mega-Pixels: Archaic Processes to Alternative Realities (www.wahcenter.org).
