Met Museum Tour with Art Historian Page Knox

Guided Visit at the Met in NYC with Art Historian Page Knox

Friday, June 9th, 11:00am – 1:00pm
This program is full – email [email protected] to be added to the waitlist

Art historian and Columbia University Professor, Dr. Page Knox will lead this special visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dr. Knox will give a tour of the much anticipated exhibition Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, as well as the two acclaimed photography exhibitions Richard Avedon: Murals and Berenice Abbott’s New York Album. Don’t miss this special visit with a true Met Museum insider!

CECILY BROWN: For more than twenty-five years, Cecily Brown (b. 1969) has transfixed viewers with sumptuous color, bravura brushwork, and complex narratives that relate to some of Western art history’s grandest and oldest themes. After moving to New York from London in the 1990s, she revived painting for a new generation alongside a handful of other artists—many of them also women—at the very moment critics were questioning its import and relevance. The first full-fledged museum survey of Brown’s work in New York since she made the city her home, Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid assembles a select group of some fifty paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and monotypes from across her career to explore the intertwined themes of still life, memento mori,mirroring, and vanitas—symbolic depictions of human vanity or life’s brevity—that have propelled her dynamic and impactful practice for decades.

RICHARD AVEDON: The MURALS are society portraits. In them, Avedon assembles giants of the late twentieth century—members of Andy Warhol’s Factory, architects of the Vietnam war, and demonstrators against that war—who together shaped an extraordinarily turbulent era of American life. Presented in one gallery, their enormous portraits will stage an unlikely conversation among historically opposed camps, as well as contemporary viewers. The formal innovations of Avedon’s high style—of starkly lit bodies in an unsparing white surround—are best realized in these works, where subjects jostle and crowd the frame, and bright voids between them crackle with tension. Uniting the murals with session outtakes and contemporaneous projects, the exhibition will track Avedon’s evolving approach to group portraiture, through which he so transformed the conventions of the genre.

BERENICE ABBOTT: In January 1929, after eight years in Europe, the American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) boarded an ocean liner to New York City for what was meant to be a short visit. Upon arrival, she found the city transformed and ripe with photographic potential. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,” she recalled. With a handheld camera, Abbott traversed the city, photographing its skyscrapers, bridges, elevated trains, and neighborhood street life. She pasted these “tiny photographic notes” into a standard black-page album, arranging them by subject and locale. Abbott’s New York album marks a key turning point in her career.

The group will meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY] by 10:50am. Recommended trains: 8:51am from New Canaan or 8:53am from Darien or 9:24am from Stamford.

Cost: $75 members | $85 non-members

Register here:

Please note registration and payment for this program is non-refundable. In the event you must cancel, we will consider your purchase a donation and will happily issue you a donation receipt.