Cloisterered Away
the met’s medieval haven uptown
Today is a beautiful spring day. You could go for a run, you could sit on Low steps, and maybe if you are feeling cultural, you could go to a museum. Unless you are already a huge fan of 13th century Madonnas, The Cloisters—a branch of the medieval art collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art perched at the very top of Manhattan—is probably not an obvious choice. Medieval art does not necessarily appeal to New York City art enthusiasts who often seem most interested in art that pushes boundaries. (Just look at the around-the-block lines for the Whitney Biennial.) And art from the medieval era is most likely the last thing students of the antiquity-obsessed core want to look at in their free time. Curator in Charge of The Cloisters Peter Barnet recognizes this. He knows that “in the 21st century, medieval art is not everyone’s favorite [kind of art].” One has to wonder how The Cloisters—a self-defined anachronism—manages to survive in the trendy and crowded New York art scene.
The Cloisters’ aura is hard to evoke in writing. The best way to describe it, perhaps, is to explain how to get to the museum. Take the 1 train to 168th street and switch to the A train, riding it to 190th street. You will emerge from a typically grey and smelly subway stop, and take a 10-minute walk up the hill to Fort Tryon Park. You can catch a bus directly to the museum, but for the full effect you have to walk. (Just because it is located above 125th street, Fort Tryon Park is not to be feared. As both Barnet and the first two minutes of the stroll will tell you, it has “improved tremendously” in the past 10 years.)
After 20 minutes of moving along the crest of Washington Heights and through a diverse collection of joggers, octogenarians shuffling hand-in-hand, and seven-year-olds on scooters, a stone bell tower appears. This tower mimics bell towers of monasteries around the Mediterranean, and through the small windows at the top (just below the bells) is Barnet’s office.
The Cloisters was born in the second quarter of the 20th century when John D. Rockefeller Jr. asked the American sculptor and art collector George Grey Barnard (also the sculptor of the bronze god Pan in front of Lewisohn) to give his extensive collection of medieval sculpture and architectural elements to the Metropolitan Museum. Rockefeller, who financed and spearheaded the project, donated some of his own medieval art (including the famed unicorn tapestries) and ultimately endowed The Cloisters. He even negotiated the conversion of the land surrounding the museum into a public park and made arrangements with the New Jersey government to ensure that the land across the river would remain forested and beautiful to look at. The crowning achievement was the construction of a museum building that echoes the Romanesque and Gothic complexes in Europe where the pieces in Barnard’s collection originated.
Rockefeller and the Met did not create a museum—they recreated an experience of Medieval Europe. And by placing The Cloisters in a location with breathtaking views of the Hudson that one does not readily associate with New York City, they created an experience that is both a destination and an escape. It is this focus on the broad experience that surrounds art, not just the art itself, which allows The Cloisters to “compete very well,” according to Barnet, in the densely populated museum world.
Barnet describes The Cloisters as “the closest thing we have in the United States” to a real medieval building. The museum is primarily a framework for a series of cloisters, arcades, and other structures that have been reconstructed from authentic architectural fragments. One moves from vast rooms with exposed wooden beams along the ceilings, to chapels with stained glass windows and real 14th century altarpieces, to a dimly lit room with walls completely covered in tapestries. While there are wall tags and some galleries furnished with glass cases filed with treasury pieces, The Cloisters are still more castle than museum, complete with all the details one imagines when reading about Lancelot.
Barnet and his colleagues work hard to keep The Cloisters looking like Don Quixote’s fantasies realized. There have been extensive efforts to preserve the architecture and to light the complex in a manner that displays the art the way it really would have appeared in the middle ages. While Barnet says there are no plans to revert to the lighting scheme of Rockefeller’s day, which consisted only of natural light and candles, there is a concerted effort to stay true to the institution’s original mission: to create a medieval oasis in the middle of Washington Heights. The museum has a niche in the New York art scene precisely because it is the odd one out—its goal is to construct an environment for viewing art that is completely different from that of the archetypal New York museum or gallery. The Cloisters is, despite its artistically conservative collection, a museological revolution.
The consequences of this experiential approach to art are far reaching. Museum Educator Nancy Wu described the wide range of experiences visitors seek and have available to them at The Cloisters. There are “school children that invariably learn history and are introduced to the Middle Ages” who come on field trips to see the descriptions in their textbooks come to life. There are “people who have a romantic notion about the Middle Ages as having a peace lost to today’s society, and they can find that at The Cloisters.” And there are religious groups who discover the profundity and spirituality of religious medieval art in the context of The Cloisters.
Wu notes that numerous ArtHum and LitHum classes visit The Cloisters. And after a short walk through the museum, it becomes clear that The Cloisters may be able act as SparkNotes for medieval literature. The renowned 15th century South Netherlandish tapestries depicting The Hunt of the Unicorn feature the medieval decorative motif of “millefleur”—literally, thousand flowers—which is explicitly described by Boccaccio in The Decameron. Wu says that these tapestries, which portray the unicorn being subdued by a virginal maiden, have a sexual interpretation. The tapestries are essentially a visual expression the same issues of control—or lack of control—of sexuality that Boccaccio and other medieval authors’ works grapple with.
The Cloisters not only teaches the power of context, but also provides a museum experience that does not feel forced. Walking into a typical gallery with individual works spread on a whitewashed track-lit wall, you cannot help feeling like an analytical surgeon compelled to set your brain to a clinical disassembly of the meaning of work laid out in front of you. Viewing art at The Cloisters does not feel like this. Rather than dissecting works of art, one absorbs their meaning. The Cloisters is, essentially, an opportunity to learn history and art history by osmosis. It seems that The Cloisters has found a solution to the riddle of making art that many deem archaic and irrelevant appealing. Instead of pushing medieval art into the 21st century and manipulating it to fit into a contemporary context, The Cloisters chooses to manipulate you instead: it pushes you back in time.\\\