American religion at The Met Cloisters

Abstract

This article traces the religious history of The Cloisters, the branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to medieval European architecture and art in northern Manhattan, providing a case study of how Americans have used images of the medieval to articulate a moralistic American spirituality. It focuses on particular moments in the museum’s history—the 1914 museum created by sculptor George Grey Barnard; the 1938 opening of The Met Cloisters, funded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; its reception in the mid-twentieth century; a series of Episcopal Masses in the 1970s; and the spring 2018 exhibit Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination—in order to unpack and contextualize the changes and constants in the visual vocabulary of religion at this museum. Throughout the twentieth century, founders, donors, curators, critics, and visitors saw a “right” way to respond emotionally to The Cloisters. One’s response to the museum demonstrated not only one’s sensitivity but also one’s character, especially the moral superiority of elite white Protestant men. In the twenty-first century, the design of Heavenly Bodies and its reception both drew upon and pushed back against the masculine Protestant paradigm of American medievalism that had long been established at The Cloisters.

Keywords: :

• The Cloisters
• Metropolitan Museum of Art
• museum
• religion
• spirituality
• Protestant
• medieval
• medievalism

Archival material from the following collections

• Barnard, George Grey. Papers. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Archives.

• The Cloisters Library and Archives. Special Collections, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• Rockefeller Family Archives. Rockefeller Archive Center.

Notes

1 In future references, I use the colloquial name for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met. I refer to its Cloisters Museum and Gardens as The Met Cloisters or simply The Cloisters.

2 As Timothy Husband writes, it is difficult to determine the precise provenance of Barnard’s cloisters. Elements Barnard labeled as from the Cistercian abbey at Bonnefont were later found to be from the Franciscan monastery at Tarbes and other nearby monuments, and he eventually combined the Trie and Larreule elements into one cloister (2013).

3 The categories of “Romanesque” and “Gothic” have varied and unstable meanings. They have been applied to a wide range of architectural styles, objects, and, in the case of the latter, literature. They are a product of later periods rather than precise descriptors of medieval or medievalist productions (Curran 2003: xxv; Cleaver and Lepine 2012, xiv).

4 Working class access to The Met had been hard won several decades earlier, when a grassroots campaign successfully lobbied for The Met to open its doors on Sunday in 1891. Nearly half of the 100,000 names on a petition to The Met were said to be from immigrant Jews (Joselit 2007, 142).

5 Although GTS began to grant degrees to women in 1971, and women had been able to take classes at GTS for several decades prior to that, there is no record of female students participating in the 1972 Mass (Donovan 1996; Cloisters Library).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

rachel b. gross

Rachel B. Gross is Associate Professor and John and Marcia Goldman Chair in American Jewish Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. She is a religious studies scholar who is interested in finding religion in unexpected places. She is the author of Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice (New York University Press, 2021), a 2021 National Jewish Book Award finalist in American Jewish Studies.[email protected]