This is the first thorough investigation of the Brummer brothers’ remarkable career as dealers in antiques, curiosities and modernism in Paris and New York over six decades (1906-1964). A dozen specialists aggregate their expertise to explore extant dealer records and museum archives, parse the wide-ranging Brummer stock, and assess how objects were sourced, marketed, labelled, restored, and displayed. The research provides insights into emerging collecting fields as they crystallised, at the crossroads between market and museum. It questions the trope of the tastemaker; the translocation of material culture, and the dealers’ prolific relationships with illustrious collectors, curators, scholars, artists, and fellow dealers.

The study of provenance—the history of the creation and ownership of an artefact, work of art, or specimen—provides insights into the history of taste and collecting, illuminating the social, economic, and historic trends in which an object was created and collected. It is as much a history of people as it is of objects, and its study often reveals intricate networks of relationships, patterns of activity and motivations. This book promotes the study of the history of collecting and collections in all their variety through the lens of provenance, and explores the subject as a cross-disciplinary activity. Perhaps for the first time in a publication, it draws on expertise ranging from art history and anthropology, to natural history and law, looking at periods from antiquity through the 18th century and the Holocaust era to the present, and materials from Europe and the Americas to China and the Pacific. The issues raised are wide-ranging, touching on aspects of authenticity, cultural meaning and material transformation and economic and commercial drivers, as well as collector and object biography. The book fills a gap in the study of collecting and provenance, taking the subject holistically and from multiple standpoints, better to reflect the widening interest in provenance from a range of disciplinary perspectives. This book will be a service to the field, from established scholars and museum professionals to students of collecting history, cultural heritage, and museum studies.

This publication presents a comprehensive catalogue of the works by Pablo Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum. Comprising 34 paintings, 59 drawings, 12 sculptures and ceramics, and more than 400 prints, the collection reflects the full breadth of the artist's multi-sided genius as it asserted itself over the course of his long career.

Fernand Leger (1881-1955) is the only modern artist to choose modernity itself as his subject. From his early series Contrastes de formes (1913-14), the first fully abstract works to emerge from Cubism, through his last realistic paintings of construction workers from the early 1950s, Leger's lifelong subject was the pulse and dynamism of contemporary life.

The untold chronicles of the looting and collecting of ancient Mesoamerican objects. This book traces the fascinating history of how and why ancient Mesoamerican objects have been collected. It begins with the pre-Hispanic antiquities that first entered European collections in the sixteenth century as gifts or seizures, continues through the rise of systematic collecting in Europe and the Americas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ends in 1940—the start of Europe’s art market collapse at the outbreak of World War II and the coinciding genesis of the large-scale art market for pre-Hispanic antiquities in the United States. Drawing upon archival resources and international museum collections, the contributors analyze the ways shifting patterns of collecting and taste—including how pre-Hispanic objects changed from being viewed as anthropological and scientific curiosities to collectible artworks—have shaped modern academic disciplines as well as public, private, institutional, and nationalistic attitudes toward Mesoamerican art. As many nations across the world demand the return of their cultural patrimony and ancestral heritage, it is essential to examine the historical processes, events, and actors that initially removed so many objects from their countries of origin.

Portrait sculptures are among the most vibrant records of ancient Greek and Roman culture. They represent people of all ages and social strata: revered poets and philosophers, emperors and their family members, military heroes, local dignitaries, ordinary citizens, and young children. The Met's distinguished collection of Greek and Roman portraits in stone and bronze is published in its entirety for the first time in this volume. Paul Zanker, a leading authority on Roman sculpture today, has brought his exceptional knowledge to the study of these portraits; in presenting them, he brings the ancient world to life for contemporary audiences. Each work is lavishly illustrated, meticulously described, and placed in its historical and cultural context. The lives and achievement of significant figures are discussed in the framework of the political, social, and practical circumstances that influenced their portrait's forms and styles—from the unvarnished realism of the late Republican period to the idealizing and progressively abstract tendencies that followed. Analyses of marble portraits recarved into new likenesses after their original subjects were forgotten or officially repudiated provide especially compelling insights. Observations on fashions in hairstyling, which typically originated with the Imperial family and spread as fast as the rulers' latest portraits could be distributed, not only edify and amuse but also link the Romans' motives and appetite for imitation to our own. More than a collection catalogue, Roman Portraits is a thorough and multifaceted survey of ancient portraiture. Charting the evolution of this art from its origins in ancient Greece, it renews our appreciation of an connection to these imposing, timeless works.