Connoisseur’s New York - In-depth & behind the scenes

In 1870, at the launch of the Metropolitan Museum, speaker Joseph Choate called for his wealthy audience to do their patriotic duty by turning ‘pork into porcelain’. Little could he know that two generations later it would be transformed into the greatest museum in the world. Prior to the American Civil War (1861–65), the old New Amsterdam ‘patroons’ and the new merchant élite had bought into the charms of the Hudson River school; seen best, and exclusively, in the archives of the New York Historical Society. After the war collectors moved in on the Barbizon school, pioneered support for the Impressionists, and gradually New York became synonymous with the avant-garde.

‘Connoisseur’s New York’ recognises that the Empire City has created an entire cultural universe that is best understood when viewed with world experts and with the luxury of the private view. Just prior to the First World War J.P. Morgan shipped his collection back to New York. Taking a year to pack – it had filled the entire basement of the V&A – it finally found its home in his renaissance-style mid-town palace. The curators at the Morgan Library can pull out a Gutenberg Bible, a Folio Shakespeare, a tenth-century hispano-arab Codex or the Très Riches Heures.  

The Gilded Age, or the age of the Robber Baron, built its regal aspirations to connoisseurship on the blood and sweat of a million lives. Nowhere is the contrast between past and present more striking than in the juxtaposition of the Whitney Museum of American Art —bold, modern, and restless— and the timeless Old Master treasures of the Frick Collection; and few things reveal the city’s diversity as a walk through Chelsea, with all the latest ‘hot’ warehouse galleries such as Gagosian and Boone. When the Rockefellers took to art, there was enough money and range of taste within one New York ‘tribe’ to supply a patron for the mediaeval Cloisters, to create a gallery of Oceanic art at the Met, or to provide a founder of the Museum of Modern Art. A private view at MoMA guides us through the world’s ‘exemplary’ collection. Art Deco skyscrapers lead us through vertiginous views to Grand Central’s Oyster Bar. 

Central Park – a verdant urban paradise – prepares us for a day’s escape to the Hudson Valley with a view of the Rockefellers’ hilltop estate, Kykuit. Perhaps most moving of all is Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan. This autobiography in three dimensions comprises a dozen buildings that skilfully essay the history of twentieth-century architecture from Mies van der Rohe to Frank Gehry.