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Virtual Lecture: How a Grolierite Shaped the Metropolitan Museum of Art
October 21 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm EDT
Sponsored by The Grolier Club
Dr. Jonathan Conlin talks about former Grolier Club librarian Henry Watson Kent’s role in shaping The Met into a great cultural institution.
Join Grolier Club and Thomas J. Watson Library friends online as Dr. Jonathan Conlin gives a livestreamed talk called “‘An Archaic American’? How a Grolierite Helped Make the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Former Grolier Club librarian Henry Watson Kent (1866-1948) was an important figure behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s evolution into one of the world’s greatest cultural institutions. Dr. Jonathan Conlin, author of the newly-published book The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People (Columbia U. Press), will explore how Kent’s “Yankee” pedigree and previous experience at the Slater Memorial Museum (Norwich, CT) shaped his Met career between 1905-1940, particularly his role in creating the museum’s American Wing and Education Department. As John Cotton Dana of Newark Museum and Kent’s Met colleagues recognized, he was an innovator, but also “an archaic American” who occasionally appeared hidebound by tradition and deference to his trustees. (Kent is known as well for inventing the Grolier Club’s idiosyncratic library cataloging system.)
Jonathan Conlin is Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton. Born in New York, he studied History and Modern Languages at Oxford, before moving to the Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of Cambridge for his Masters and PhD. In 2006 he published the first history of the National Gallery (London), which he recently re-wrote as the Gallery’s official bicentenary history. In 2019 he published an award-winning biography of the art collector, oil magnate and philanthropist Calouste Gulbenkian, Mr Five Per Cent (Profile). His book The Met will be available for sale and signing at the lecture.