NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- If not for the tumultuous events of 2020, “Inside the Met,” a three-part documentary about the Metropolitan Museum of Art airing on PBS on Friday (today) and May 28 might simply be a routine valentine to a great institution in the 150th year of its existence.
But things did not go as planned. Thanks to the coronavirus and the mass protests following George Floyd’s killing, the Met, like much of New York’s cultural world, faced an accounting unlike any in its history. Luckily, British documentary filmmaker Ian Denyer and his crew were there to capture some of it on film — if often in suitably flattering terms. But as the series unfolds — passing through sleepy patches and enthralling encounters with artworks, the professionals who tend them and the visitors who throng to see them — you may begin to feel that the flattery is ultimately deserved.
Denyer’s work usually has a cultural tilt. Previous subjects include William Blake, P.G. Wodehouse, British artist Ryan Gander and Chinese porcelains. “Inside the Met” was conceived to chronicle the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the museum’s incorporation in 1870.
To some extent, the roughly three-hour film makes good on its title, taking viewers behind the scenes, speaking mostly with devoted upper-echelon curators, department heads and the Met’s leadership — the director, Max Hollein, and especially the president and CEO Daniel H. Weiss — as well as select visitors and artists.
The film puts us on remarkably intimate terms with the gargantuan organism that is the Met and the many tasks that keep it running. We wander through back hallways and empty galleries, in and out of conservation labs, privy to recent (unannounced) discoveries beneath the surface of a familiar masterpiece. This is Jacques-Louis David’s large, gorgeous double portrait of the aristocratic French scientists Antoine Laurent and Marie Anne Lavoisier. It was painted in 1788 and soon toned down to fit the political mindset after the French Revolution. We also get an early look at the dazzling, freshly uncovered architectural background of a new acquisition, a tiny Renaissance Virgin and Child from 14th-century Bohemia that is now on view in Gallery 624.
We watch Crayton Sohan, the museum’s manager of rigging — of whom the narrator says “nothing big moves in the museum without his nod” — as he oversees the repositioning from vertical to horizontal, of a 3-ton ninth-century megalith lent by a Senegalese museum. And we visit some employees working from home during lockdown, including Margaret Choo, the museum’s manager of data and analytics but also an avid baker. She was chosen to make the museum’s official birthday cake and ended up eating it mostly by herself.
Over the span of this film, the Met is twice shaken. In the first episode, “The Birthday Surprise,” we see the museum on the eve of its anniversary celebration, premiering its renovated British Galleries at a fancy-dress party on the evening of March 12, 2020. In one scene, guests surveying the newly refurbished mid-18th-century dining room from Kirtlington Park — one of the Britain’s great country houses — include the current owners, who attest to the accuracy of the painted views of the grounds. A few days later, the Met goes into lockdown — the first American museum to do so — with no reopening date in sight. It is the first time in the museum’s history that it has closed for more than three days; over five months will pass before it opens again. A celebratory survey exhibition, titled “Making the Met,” that assembles 250 works from across the museum is left half-installed, “frozen in time,” as a conservator, Carolyn Riccardelli, notes, her voice cracking.
In the next, and meatiest episode, “All Things to All People?,” the Met is rocked to its very foundation. By early July 2020 the cultural sphere sees a backlash against the passive expressions of support for the Floyd protests that many arts institutions are posting online. Calls mount for these organizations to actively address the systemic racism, built into their structures over decades, if not centuries of discrimination on every front. It was asserted that, to begin with, museums needed to examine and rethink art acquisitions and exhibitions, the staging of permanent collections and the demographics of employees and boards of trustees.
“People are mad at the institution,” Weiss says, “and I did not fully see that coming” — sounding slightly naïve. But in fact, his leadership becomes more convincing as the film progresses. On July 6, the Met promises changes, publishes a statement enumerating in some detail the museum’s “commitment to anti-racism, diversity and a stronger community.” Weiss reads a bit from the statement and points to a spreadsheet derived from it. “I said to everyone, if we don’t fill this out and complete it,” he says, “then I should be replaced. I look at this on a regular basis.”
The film presents glimpses of the Met shifting into action, awakening to the possibilities implicit in its collection. There are new hires, like the impressively credentialed Patricia Marroquin Norby, the museum’s first-ever full-time curator of Native American art. Contemporary artists devise ingenious ways to interact with the collection. Miguel Luciano, a Puerto Rican visual artist and New Yorker, who sees the Met’s pre-Columbian objects as “stolen,” is also grateful that they have been preserved, giving him a chance to study them. With the help of a 3D printer, he copies a carved-wood Taino figure from around A.D. 1000, in Marge-Simpson bright blue plastic. People outside the museum will be able to touch it and if Luciano explains the object as lucidly as he does in the film, they may visit the museum to be blown away by the fierce beauty of the original.
“Inside the Met” also demonstrates that the museum has long had a loyal, diverse audience. In one of its sweetest, most illuminating sequences it follows a young Black mother from Connecticut, who grew up going to the Met when she returns with her two small daughters. We listen in as she coaches their looking, encourages their reactions and takes them through the Egyptian wing so they can see that they are “descended from kings and queens.”
In “Love and Money” the third and sleepiest episode, the museum surveys the damage of the 2020 crises — it finished the year with a drop of 83% in attendance, a loss of $150 million in operating costs and a reduction in staff of 20% — and tries to show that love fuels the museum world. The passion for art inspires people to visit, to enter the field full of youthful energy and new ideas, to collect art and then donate it and to give money for programs.
For proof, the filmmakers visit with fashion addicts crowding into the Costume Institute’s “About Time” exhibition; collectors Diane and Arthur Abbey, who gave the Met a collection of Japanese bamboo basketry that was seen in a popular exhibition in 2017; and art history student Kevin Pham, of Vietnamese descent, who is working, albeit from home, as a paid intern in the Medieval department. Finally able to visit the Cloisters in person, he is shown a tiny 16th-century album of flower studies. In an aside, we learn that all the plants depicted in it are grown by the Met’s gardeners in the Cloisters’ inner courtyard.
As with “Inside the Met” itself, it may take a die-hard Met groupie to appreciate this boggling bit of information, but maybe it, and the film, will also win some converts. It exemplifies the ways this indispensable institution is using every last thing at its disposal to engage with its audience. It is the kind of scene that leaves you optimistic that as the Met changes, it will be for the better.
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