New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands

The Metropolitan Museum’s collection of Islamic art, which has been mostly out of view for the past eight years, reopens today in spectacular fashion, installed in 15 beautiful galleries.

The Met's new galleries of Islamic art open today

The new galleries, which cost $40 million, display long-held treasures ranging from gorgeous Persian carpets to intricate wood carvings, colorful mosaics, pottery, silverwork and magical miniature paintings.

The 1,200 objects span more than 1,000 years of Islamic culture. They were commissioned by Umayyad caliphs, Iranian shahs, Ottoman sultans and other rich Muslim patrons in locales as far-flung from Mecca as India to the east and the Iberian Peninsula to the west.

The closing of the galleries had nothing to do with the events of Sept. 11 or the resulting wars in Islamic countries. It was part of a planned renovation that began with the redesign of the space beneath it, the former museum cafeteria that became the galleries of Roman art. The new Islamic galleries are arrayed around the atrium of the new Roman Court and occupy roughly the same footprint as the original ones. You can’t see into the Roman Court, but light comes in through perforated wooden screens.

If there’s any politics involved in the reopening, it may be in the renaming of the galleries. Instead of Islamic Art, the words above the entrance read Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia. Curators say this rather lengthy designation is meant to more accurately reflect the specific areas represented by the Met collection. In case there’s any doubt as to where you are, however, the map that greets visitors is titled “The Islamic World.”

Visitors accustomed to orienting themselves in history and reading all the wall text may find themselves getting bogged down in the dizzying succession of unfamiliar dynasties: Sasanian, Umayyad, Abbasid, Samanid, Ghaznavid, Fatimid, Artuqid, Zangid, Mamluk – and we haven’t even gotten to the Ottoman and the Moorish culture of Al-Andalus in Spain.

Posted by Eugene Boyko on 01/11/2011. Filed under Newsbreak. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry