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List of artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide

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Painting detail for cover of current edition from 2012
Painting used for the cover of the 1983 paperback edition
Painting used for the 1983 hardcover edition, and also for the paperback edition of the 1987 "fourth printing" of the 1983 edition
Painting used for the cover of the 2000 third impression of the second edition from 1994

The List of artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide is a list of the artists indexed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art museum guide. The guide, with a foreword by the museum director Philippe de Montebello, was first produced in 1983 and the edition from 1994 has been digitized.

This guide was a new pocketbook version of the magazine-format guidebook published in 1972 as Guide to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, edited by Nora Beeson during Thomas Hoving's tenure.[1] That guidebook was the first to include fold-out museum maps of the collection wings.[2] This guide, with color illustrations followed by concise descriptions, was updated in 1983 and 1994 as The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (edited by Kathleen Howard during Philippe de Montebello tenure), and under the same name in 2012 (edited by Harriet Whelchel, Margaret Aspinwall and Elisa Urbanelli during Thomas P. Campbell tenure).

Background

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Montebello claimed that the idea for the guide "to present a profile of the Met in terms of its strengths and weaknesses", came from the museum's senior editor Kathleen Howard in 1978 and took 5 years to make, based on a pocket-sized format inspired by the guidebook from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum of Nuremberg.[3] Montebello drew up a list of 1,200 highlights and these were reconciled with the lists of the curators of the various collection to create 800 objects to be photographed and included.[3] The museum's collections are spread throughout several wings in the Fifth Avenue location in addition to The Cloisters museum and gardens in northern Manhattan. The entire collection houses over two million objects, tens of thousands of which are on view at any given time. The museum guide has been designed to highlight the various major sections based on the importance of their holdings in the "over-all hierarchy of the arts and public response".[3] This explains why European paintings are represented by 87 pages, as opposed to 23 for Egyptian works of art.[3]

In the following list from the index, the artist's name is followed by the location of one of their works and its page number in the guide. For artists with more than one work in the guide, or for works by artists not listed here, see the online guidebook, the Metropolitan Museum of Art website or the corresponding Wikimedia Commons category. Of artists listed, there are only 7 women, including Rosalba Carriera, Mary Cassatt, Louise Bourgeois, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Georgia O'Keeffe, Élisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun, and Susan Rothenberg.[4] For the complete list of artists and their artworks in the collection, see the website.

References

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  1. ^ 1972 guidebook in magazine format on Google books
  2. ^ Review of 1972 guidebook on nytimes website
  3. ^ a b c d Best of the Metropolitan in new art guidebook article February 4th 1984 in the New York Times
  4. ^ Julia Margaret Cameron and Mary Quant were listed in the 1983 edition but were eventually dropped from the catalog over the course of a decade
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