By Andrew Goldstein. From artnet news. Posted on 9/24/18.
Earlier this month, presiding over his first press conference as the newly installed director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Max Hollein stood at the spotlit entrance to tenebrous galleries and spoke about the artist being surveyed within. “Delacroix is a defining figure in European art in the 19th century,” he said. “He is one of the great colorists in art history. But his work is always about human nature in all its complexities.”
Such a trajectory of thinking—to begin with the wide-angle historical view, take in the surface allure, and then drill down into the more philosophical implications—is a hallmark of the Austrian-born museum prodigy’s approach to art, and one of the reasons why his arrival at the institution widely viewed as the greatest encyclopedic museum in the world has been cause for such excitement among those in the field.
Such a trajectory of thinking—to begin with the wide-angle historical view, take in the surface allure, and then drill down into the more philosophical implications—is a hallmark of the Austrian-born museum prodigy’s approach to art, and one of the reasons why his arrival at the institution widely viewed as the greatest encyclopedic museum in the world has been cause for such excitement among those in the field.
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