iThe Metropolitan Museum of ArtUpper East Side
David Hartt: Peripheries
Multidisciplinary artist David Hartt transforms John Vanderlyn's 19th-century painting Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles into a site-specific installation exploring place and perspective.
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You stand in the middle of a round room and Versailles runs all the way around you: John Vanderlyn's 1818–19 panorama, 12 feet high and 165 feet long. Now two large transparent LED screens stand inside that circle, in places picking up where the painted gardens leave off.
David Hartt filmed from Versailles to the Boulevard Périphérique and through central Paris, looking for breaks in the landscape where 200 years of political change show. He also borrows from French New Wave film and Eugène Atget's photographs of the palace grounds, and Jeff Parker wrote the score. The screens complete the painting in places and cut into it in others, so where you stand changes what you see. Vanderlyn painted the canvas for a rotunda he built in City Hall Park; it didn't pay, and he toured a 165-foot painting for the rest of his life.
It's one painting and one film in one room, Gallery 735 of the American Wing, free with Museum admission, through February 7, 2027.
Look for
The 165-foot Versailles
Vanderlyn's oil wraps the whole gallery in the palace and its gardens, with the perspective adjusted to the curve of the wall.
Vanderlyn painting himself in
Look right of the Basin de Latone for the artist himself, painted into the scene pointing out Czar Alexander I and the King of Prussia.
The two transparent screens
Two large LED screens stand in the round gallery; you see the painting through them, and their film completes or breaks into the painted view.
Paris out to the Périphérique
Hartt's footage runs from Versailles to the ring road and through central Paris, focusing on spots where two centuries of political upheaval left marks.
Good for
- An Hour Or Less
- Locals Who've Seen It All
- Nerding Out
Skip if
You want a gallery of objects: this is one painting and a two-screen video installation.
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Image credits
9
- David Hartt: PeripheriesCourtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Collection in Focus: Modern European CurrentsPhoto: Ariel Ione Williams, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
- Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to NowCourtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- Taryn Simon | Father Country I Do Love YouCourtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- The Metropolitan Museum of ArtHugo Schneider, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
- Neue Galerie New YorkFrancesca.hyanna19 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumAjay Suresh, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
- Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design MuseumEpicgenius, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- American Museum of Natural HistoryIngfbruno, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0