The Metropolitan Museum of Art has long been renowned for its collection of American sculpture, in particular its world-famous American Neoclassical marbles. This volume contains eight papers presented at a symposium held at the Museum on October 26, 2001, upon the publication of American Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The contributors, who include art historians, museum professionals, and independent scholars, offer a fascinating cross section of current thematic interests and scholarly approaches to American sculpture. Each contributor takes as their starting point a sculpture or group of sculptures in the Metropolitan's collection, presenting a wide variety of approaches to the study and understanding of these works.

Themes of the American West have been enduringly popular, and 'The American West in Bronze' features sixty-five iconic bronzes that display a range of subjects, from portrayals of the noble Indian to rough-and-tumble scenes of rowdy cowboys to tributes to the pioneers who settled the lands west of the Mississippi. Fascinating texts offer a fresh look at the roles that artists played in creating interpretations of the "vanishing West"--Whether based on fact, fiction or something in-between. These artists, including Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington, embody a range of life experiences and artistic approaches."'The American West in Bronze, 1850-1925' is the first full-scale exhibition to explore the aesthetic and cultural impulses behind the creation of statuettes with American western themes, which have been so popular with audiences then and now. Both the exhibition and this accompanying catalogue offer a fresh look at the multifaceted roles played by these sculptors in creating three-dimensional interpretations of western life, whether based on historical fact, mythologized fiction, or most often, something in-between. Examples by such archetypal representatives of the West as Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell are complemented by the work of sculptors such as James Earle Fraser and Paul Manship, who contributed to the popularity of the American bronze statuette even though their western subjects were less frequent."--Publisher's description.

"This book provides the first institutional and social history of America's first hall of fame, the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, from its dynamic opening in 1901 through its protracted decline in the late twentieth century and brief return to relevancy in 2017-when, in response to the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, Governer Andrew Cuomo called for the removal of the Hall's busts of Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Sheila Gerami examines in depth what is arguably the least studied project of Stanford White, one of the most distinguished architects of the Gilded Age. Originally designed for New York University's new campus in the Bronx, the Hall once housed ninety-eight bronze busts of men and women deemed "great Americans" within its elegant colonnade, including the likes of George Washington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, and Robert E. Lee. Gerami argues that the rise and fall of this public art memorial mirrors the nation's changing conception of what comprises a hero and what it means to be great in America"--

Portraits. We know what they are, but why do we make them? Americans have been celebrating themselves in portraits since the arrival of the first itinerant portrait painters to the colonies. They created images to commemorate loved ones, glorify the famous, establish our national myths, and honor our shared heroes. Whether painting in oil, carving in stone, casting in bronze, capturing on film, or calculating in binary code, we spend considerable time creating, contemplating, and collecting our likenesses. In this sumptuously illustrated book, Richard H. Saunders explores our collective understanding of portraiture, its history in America, how it shapes our individual and national identity, and why we make portraits - whether for propaganda and public influence or for personal and private appreciation. American Faces is a rich and fascinating view of ourselves.

The present volume, Publications of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1964-2005, is a successor to a volume published by the Museum in 1965 entitled Publications of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1870-1964. These two bibliographic volumes endeavor to list all the known books, pamphlets, and serial publications bearing the Museum's imprint, and issued by the institution during the first 135 years of its existence (through June 2005). The first volume was compiled by Albert TenEyck Gardner, at the time an Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, and the present volume has been compiled from the Annual Reports issued by the Museum during the relevant years. Together the two volumes testify to the tremendous contributions made to knowledge by the curators and conservators of the Metropolitan and by the many other experts who have contributed to the Museum's exhibition catalogues. Various issues of the Bulletin emphasize the great sweep of the Museum's acquisitions during these years, and the exhibition catalogues--a number of them Alfred H. Barr Jr., Award or the George Wittenborn Award--testify to the continuity of the institution's dedicated program to enrich people's lives through knowledge of art. (This title was originally published in 2006.)

A dynamic, scholarly engagement with Susanne Bier's work

Text by Patricia Cronin, William H. Gerdts. Preface by Maura Reilly.

"Malvina Hoffman's Races of Mankind and the Materiality of Race in Early Twentieth-Century Sculpture and Photography" is a monographic study of a racial exhibit created in the 1930s for the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History. The exhibit, the Races of Mankind, was comprised of 104 figurative sculptures made by a single sculptor, Malvina Hoffman. The dissertation focuses on Hoffman's attempts to reconcile the demands of anthropology and racial science with the constraints of her artistic training and medium. Sculpture, the dissertation argues, was both the most ideal and most tendentious vehicle for the Field Museum's representation of race. Hoffman's training as a sculptor and her sensibility to form and embodiment offered a distinct and compelling mode with which to encode and embed race in real bodies. Yet Hoffman's sculptures co-existed with photographs, plaster casts, and mannequins, in the museum and had to differentiate themselves from these other objects while incorporating their tactile and visual effects into the representation of race. The dissertation studies the problem of sculpture in the natural history museum from a diverse range of media, disciplines, and histories, with special reliance on recent theoretical and methodological advances in museum studies, histories of anthropology, and postcolonial and critical race studies, in order to produce an expanded account of sculpture and American art