The Cloisters (also known as the Met Cloisters) is a museum in Fort Tryon Park, straddling the neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood, in Upper Manhattan, New York City. The museum specializes in European medieval art and architecture, with a focus on the Romanesque and Gothic periods. Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it contains a large collection of medieval artworks shown in the architectural settings of French monasteries and abbeys. Its buildings are centered around four cloisters—the Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont, and Trie-sur-Baïse—that were acquired by American sculptor and art dealer George Grey Barnard in France before 1913 and moved to New York. Barnard's collection was bought for the museum by financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. Other major sources of objects were the collections of J. P. Morgan and Joseph Brummer.
The museum's building was designed by the architect Charles Collens, on a site on a steep hill, with upper and lower levels. It contains medieval gardens and a series of chapels and themed galleries, including the Romanesque, Fuentidueña, Unicorn, Spanish, and Gothic rooms. The design, layout, and ambiance of the building are intended to evoke a sense of medieval European monastic life. It holds about 5,000 works of art and architecture, all European and mostly dating from the Byzantine to the early Renaissance periods, mainly during the 12th through 15th centuries. The objects include stone and wood sculptures, tapestries, illuminated manuscripts, and panel paintings, of which the best known include the Early Netherlandish Mérode Altarpiece and the –1505 Flemish The Unicorn Tapestries.
Rockefeller purchased the museum site in Fort Washington in 1930 and donated it to the Metropolitan in 1931. Upon its opening on May 10, 1938, the Cloisters was described as a collection "shown informally in a picturesque setting, which stimulates imagination and creates a receptive mood for enjoyment"."The Opening of the Cloisters". The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Volume 21, No. 5, 1926. pp. 113–116
History Formation The basis for the museum's architectural structure came from the collection of George Grey Barnard, an American sculptor and collector who almost single-handedly established a medieval art museum near his home in the Fort Washington section of Upper Manhattan. He was a successful sculptor who had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, but his income was not enough to support his family. Barnard was a risk-taker and led most of his life on the edge of poverty. He moved to Paris in 1883, where he studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He lived in the village of Moret-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, between 1905 and 1913, and he began to deal in 13th- and 14th-century European objects to supplement his earnings. In the process, he built a large personal collection of what he described as "antiques", at first by buying and selling stand-alone objects with French dealers, then by the acquisition of in situ architectural artifacts from local farmers.
Barnard was primarily interested in the abbeys and churches founded by monastic orders from the 12th century. Centuries of pillage and destruction during wars and revolutions led to stones from many of these buildings being reused by local populations. Barnard was a pioneer in seeing the value in such artifacts, but he often met with hostility from local and governmental groups. Yet he was an astute negotiator who had the advantage of a professional sculptor's eye for superior stone carving, and by 1907 he had built a high-quality collection at relatively low cost. He allegedly paid $25,000 for the Trie buildings, $25,000 for the Bonnefort, and $100,000 for the Cuxa cloisters. His success led him to adopt a somewhat romantic view of himself. He recalled bicycling across the French countryside and unearthing fallen and long-forgotten Gothic masterworks along the way. He claimed to have found the tomb effigy of Jean d'Alluye lying face down, in use as a bridge over a small stream. By 1914, he had gathered enough artifacts to open a gallery in Manhattan.
Barnard often neglected his personal finances, and was so disorganized that he often misplaced the origin or provenance of his purchases. He sold his collection to John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1925 during one of his recurring monetary crises. The two had been introduced by architect William W. Bosworth.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased his collection, including structures that became the foundation and core of the museum. Rockefeller and Barnard were polar opposites in both temperament and outlook, and they did not get along; Rockefeller was reserved, Barnard exuberant. English painter and art critic Roger Fry was the Metropolitan's chief European acquisition agent, and he acted as an intermediary. Rockefeller eventually acquired Barnard's collection for around $700,000, retaining Barnard as an advisor.
In 1927, Rockefeller hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of one of the designers of Central Park, and the Olmsted Brothers firm to create a park in the Fort Washington area. In February 1930, Rockefeller offered to build the Cloisters for the Metropolitan. Under consultation with Bosworth, he decided to build the museum at a site at Fort Tryon Park, which they chose for its elevation, views, and accessible but isolated location. The land and existing buildings were purchased that year from the C. K. G. Billings estate and other holdings in the Fort Washington area. The Cloisters building and adjacent gardens were designed by Charles Collens. They incorporate elements from abbeys in Catalonia and France. Parts were disassembled stone by stone and shipped from Sant Miquel de Cuixà, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Bonnefont-en-Comminges, Trie-sur-Baïse and Froville to New York City, where they were reconstructed and integrated into a cohesive whole. Construction took place over a five-year period beginning in 1934."The Cloisters Museum and Gardens ". The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved May 15, 2016 In 1933, Rockefeller donated several hundred acres of the New Jersey Palisades clifftops across the river, which he had purchased over several years for the Palisades Interstate Park Commission to preserve the land from further development. The Cloisters' new building and gardens were officially opened on May 10, 1938, though the public was not allowed to visit until four days later.
Early acquisitions
Rockefeller financed the purchase of many of the early collection of works, often buying independently and then donating the items to the museum. His financing of the museum has led to it being described as "perhaps the supreme example of curatorial genius working in exquisite harmony with vast wealth". The second major donor was the industrialist J. P. Morgan, founder of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, who spent the last 20 years of his life acquiring artworks, "on an imperial scale" according to art historian Jean Strous, spending some $900 million (inflation adjusted) in total. After his death, his son J. P. Morgan Jr. donated a large number of works from the collection to the Metropolitan."The Making of a Collection: Islamic Art at the Metropolitan ". Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. Retrieved August 19, 2018
A further major early source of objects was the art dealer Joseph Brummer (1883–1947), long a friend of a curator at the Cloisters, James Rorimer. Rorimer had long recognized the importance of Brummer's collection, and purchased large quantities of objects in the months after Brummer's sudden death in 1947. According to Christine E. Brennan of the Metropolitan, Rorimer realized that the collection offered works that could rival the Morgan Collection in the Metropolitan's Main Building, and that "the decision to form a treasury at The Cloisters was reached... because it had been the only opportunity since the late 1920s to enrich the collection with so many liturgical and secular objects of such high quality." These pieces, including works in gold, silver, and ivory, are today held in the Treasury room of the Cloisters.Brennan, Christine. "A Treasury for The Cloisters". Metropolitan Museum of Art, March 5, 2015. Retrieved August 19, 2018
Collection The museum's collection of artworks consists of about 5,000 pieces. They are displayed across a series of rooms and spaces, mostly separate from those dedicated to the installed architectural artifacts. The Cloisters has never focused on building a collection of masterpieces; rather, the objects are chosen thematically yet arranged simply to enhance the atmosphere created by the architectural elements in the particular setting or room in which they are placed. To create the atmosphere of a functioning series of cloisters, many of the individual works, including capitals, doorways, stained glass, and windows are placed within the architectural elements themselves.
Panel paintings and sculpture
The museum's best-known panel painting is Robert Campin's c. 1425–28 Mérode Altarpiece, a foundational work in the development of Early Netherlandish painting, which has been at The Cloisters since 1956. Its acquisition was funded by Rockefeller and described at the time as a "major event for the history of collecting in the United States"."The Merode Altarpiece, a great and famous landmark in the history of western painting, by the Master of Flémalle, has been acquired for the Cloisters ". Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 9, 1957. Retrieved March 30, 2018 The triptych is well preserved with little overpainting, glossing, dirt layers, or paint loss."Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece) ". Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved March 17, 2017 Other panel paintings in the collection include a Nativity triptych altarpiece attributed to a follower of Rogier van der Weyden,"Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden: The Nativity ". Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved August 19, 2017 and the Jumieges panels by an unknown French master.
The 12th-century English walrus ivory Cloisters Cross contains more than 92 intricately carved figures and 98 inscriptions. A similar 12th-century French metalwork reliquary cross contains six sequences of engravings on either side of its shaft, and across the four sides of its lower arms. Further pieces of note include a 13th-century English Enthroned Virgin and Child statuette, a c. 1490 German statue of Saint Barbara, and an early 16th-century boxwood Miniature Altarpiece with the Crucifixion. Other significant works include fountains and baptismal fonts, chairs, aquamaniles (water containers in animal or human form), bronze lavers, alms boxes and playing cards.
The museum has an extensive collection of medieval European frescoes, ivory statuettes, reliquary wood and metal shrines and crosses, as well as examples of the very rare Gothic boxwood miniatures. It has liturgical metalwork vessels and rare pieces of Gothic furniture and metalwork. Many pieces are not associated with a particular architectural setting, so their placement in the museum may vary. Some of the objects have dramatic provenance, including those plundered from the estates of aristocrats during the French Revolutionary Army's occupation of the Southern Netherlands. The Unicorn tapestries were for a period used by the French army to cover potatoes and keep them from freezing. The set was purchased by Rockefeller in 1922, and six of the tapestries hung in his New York home until they were donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1938.
Illuminated manuscripts