Joy for the Looking

For the past three years, half of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been closed down for remodeling, and much of the museum's impressive trove of old and modern masters has been hidden away from public view. Last week the nation's No. 1 repository of art reopened its picture galleries: 44 completely modernized rooms equipped with every device designed to make picture-viewing easy and enjoyable. In the first two days, more than 25.000 visitors trooped (admission: free) into the refurbished picture galleries on Manhattan's upper Fifth Avenue to enjoy one of the world's greatest collections of European paintings. The richness and the variety of the collection of 700 paintings, ranging from medieval Italian and Flemish primitives to Picasso and Matisse, brought a common reaction: "Why I never knew that was in the Met."

Sea-Fresh Standout. In two rooms alone there were 19 Rembrandts. including a masterfully calm and triumphant self-portrait and the reverent, mystical Head of Christ. In other rooms, there was a breath-taking assemblage of masterpieces by Velasquez, Goya and El Greco (including his stark, disturbing View of Toledo*) that could not be equaled in any museum outside of Spain. Pieter Bruegel's ecstatically tranquil Harvesters dominated one room. Caravaggio's Musicians another. In the galleries devoted to modern painters. Pablo Picasso's peaceful Woman in White, recently acquired from the Museum of Modern Art, and Edouard Manet's great, sea-fresh Boating were standouts.

If the quantity and quality of what the Met had to show was impressive, so was the way it was shown. Metropolitan Curator of Paintings Theodore Rousseau Jr. had arranged the pictures in chronological order rather than by nationalities, so that the gallerygoer got, in addition to the pleasure of seeing great art, an easy-to-take education in the history of European painting.

The decor of each gallery was adapted to the pictures it housed: one roomful of Rembrandts was placed against rich red brocade draperies; against a green brocade background Titian's Venus and the Lute Player took on a sensual grandeur. Other rooms were done in soft pastel shades or fine-grained wood veneers: Jan Vermeer's wonderfully clean Young Woman with a Water Jug was flanked by two exquisite German vases in a cool green room.

Windowed Nook. Curator Rousseau, who believes that "a museum should be essentially a theater where a visitor can find delight and entertainment," had done everything possible to make the galleries a refreshing place in which to wander and look. In the larger galleries, unobtrusive labels over each painting gave the name of the artist, so that it was no longer necessary to squint closely at a picture to see who did it. Conveniently placed in the chronological order of the galleries was a windowed nook. There gallerygoers may rest on comfortable couches, smoke and contemplate either Central Park and the Manhattan skyline outside or a masterpiece like Rodin's Eternal Springtime inside.

The 44 galleries opened last week represented only a part of Metropolitan Director Francis Henry Taylor's $9,600,000 refurbishing program. Still to be opened later this year are 51 other galleries, six period rooms, a new auditorium equipped for televising art, a new restaurant seating 300.

Beaming at the opening of the picture galleries was Director Taylor, proudly playing host to directors and curators of the world's top museums, assembled for a congress on art history and muscology. Taylor's comment on the new galleries: "For the first time, you can really see what we've got here."

Not to be confused with El Greco's View and Plan of Toledo, painted c. 1609, which now hangs in Toledo's Greco Museum.

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