So... hi, Jemima,
it's really nice to see you.
I'm Marco Leona.
I'm the head of
scientific research here at the Met.
So I'm not a curator,
I'm not a conservator, but I work
on a few of these works of art
that we're seeing, and I'm very
interested in the aspects of colour,
technology and technique.
It'll be really nice to walk with you
through the museum.
Yes, and my name is Jemima Kirke,
and I am an actress and an artist.
And I'm really looking forward
to walking through the museum with you
and showing you
some of my favourite pieces,
and then talking about why.
The museum is closed to the public now.
We're reopening on August 29.
Some staff are here.
Our amazing security
and visitor-services staff are here
to prepare for the reopening,
but otherwise the museum is closed.
Many of the galleries are dark.
I'm wearing a mask
because of course we'll...
we'll be requiring visitors
to do that for safety.
Always wear your mask, please,
wherever you go,
unless you're at home.
So I'm going up the great stairs.
We're going to the galleries
where the paintings are.
So we're going to see Van Gogh.
This is Van Gogh's Irises.
Yeah.
Reprinted and reprinted
in lots of people's kitchens.
Absolutely.
And for the iris blossoms
he overlaid the blue colour
of the blossom at the edges,
to really shade it,
with a modern synthetic dye
that had just been invented.
Which shows this beautiful
cool blue pink.
It was called eosin.
Unfortunately it fades very rapidly.
We have to use x-rays
to do a chemical analysis
of the painting, point by point.
And we detect one element
that's associated with that colour:
bromine.
And where we see that,
tracing the shape of the petals,
we can tell that that would have been
pink over blue,
which gave a purple tone,
while the background
was entirely paint.
And Van Gogh himself wrote:
"Paintings fade like flowers."
Now we are in the 19th-century
French paintings galleries.
And here we are
with the Courbet paintings.
We have
The Woman in the Waves here.
I'm curious. Why did you pick these
paintings and what drew you to them?
I always loved Courbet's depiction
of the nude and women in general,
because, especially for,
you know, the 19th century,
there's something so perverse
about the way he depicts women.
He painted their breasts
in a very graphic way.
She has her arms up, you know,
really displaying everything.
He really overtly sexualises women
in this way,
that some women might be upset with.
But I find it quite a strong depiction
of women's sexuality.
He rejects traditionalism in that way.
But then again
he is using tradition, right?
So this is very much a classical image.
It's to Venus,
but, as you say,
he paints a real woman.
She has hair,
her flesh is really physical,
three-dimensional.
"Palpable" maybe is the right word,
exactly.
There's another interesting fact
that I discovered,
reading up about this painting.
This painting was donated
to the Met by Louisine Havemeyer.
She was one of the great collectors
of the turn of the century in New York.
She had to really beg her husband
to buy this painting,
very famously at the time.
The husband was very conservative,
that kind of Victorian sensibility,
where he did not want
to hang the nudes around.
But she, the lady,
asked to buy this one,
which maybe goes with that female
empowerment that you were talking about.
Because
he paints these
highly sexualised women.
One perspective,
as a woman you really appreciate it.
There is something empowering
about that.
We'll move down to Joos van Cleve,
which is downstairs.
This is one painting
that you were very interested in.
Joos van Cleve.
The Holy Family.
And again I'm thinking...
Yeah, it's very small,
and it's also hung very high.
I mean, I chose this one,
but the truth is, you know,
that I could have chosen any
of the Joos van Cleve holy-family works.
You know,
one thing I always find important
about these holy-family paintings,
a few things...
The hands... they're so important.
And it's always different.
Here, the baby Jesus or what-have-you
is holding the breast
in a very specific way.
I was also thinking about how Joseph
is always on the outside,
and how these ideas and these paintings
have influenced how we....
The notion of a family today.
And a family is that it's the mother
and the child,
and the father supports the mother
and the child from the outside.
You know, I wonder how much of that
has come from these early paintings.
They were meant to do that in a way,
to shape society in that way.
Yeah, and the choice of the artist
is clearly that of...
creating a contemporary painting
and a contemporary scene.
So Mary and Joseph are dressed
in contemporary clothing.
And I think that is all part
of what he's doing to connect the theme
to the market, to the audience,
and make it really something
they could relate to, you know.
Contemporary figures
in contemporary costumes.
We're going through the galleries.
And we're getting
to another beautiful picture of a woman.
Young Woman with a Lute.
Which is one of our beautiful Vermeers.
As a painter,
some of the paintings that I love
come from a fascination
with how something is made.
You know,
the skill with which it was done.
And this is one of them, you know.
It's kind of chiaroscuro, if you will.
It's just so intense in this painting.
The dark and the light contrast.
And to paint the dark room
and to fill it
with one tiny light source
is a very difficult thing to do.
And Vermeer does that a lot.
It's almost a theatrical device.
In fact,
the name for that is repoussoir,
from the French, "pushing back",
which is actually used
in stage practice,
where you put something really big
in the foreground,
you partially obscure the figures
in the background or middleground,
and you push them back
and create that sense of depth.
So he's taking a space
that's very small,
because if you think
of those townhouses in Amsterdam,
they're really narrow and deep.
So, as you were saying,
not a lot of light inside,
the spaces are small
because the houses are not wide...
But here he gives us all the clues
to deconstruct the scene.
There's a lot more there
than what meets the eye.
We'll walk up
towards the Greek and Roman galleries.
Again, those are more my selection,
if you want.
I'll switch the view here...
to our Greek and Roman galleries.
And they're...
they're just amazing now because
we have this beautiful natural light.
And of course all we see now
is white statues
because they're very old.
So I'll take you now to the statues,
where we'll try to imagine
a little bit of the colour.
Here we have an example.
It's a statue
from the first century AD.
And this one, if you look closely,
it can still show
a little bit of colour.
It's mostly black, white,
and it's been scrubbed and cleaned,
but if you see here...
Do you see that the colour
is actually under a crust of dirt?
And that's where we as scientists
and conservators in the museum say:
don't try this at home!
If you find in your garden
a Roman statue, don't try to clean it,
because you may take away
some really important remains.
So just leave it like that,
bring it to us.
I'm not counting on it.
So now...
from the first century AD
we're going back...
six hundred years,
to the beginning of Greece and Rome.
This is the kouros,
the portrait of a youth,
which is one
of the classic pieces
of early Greek art, Attic.
So we're in Athens here.
And this is an idealised statue
of a youth.
It was a grave marker.
So it's a funerary monument.
And it's at the beginning
of classical Greek sculpture.
So you see an image
that owes a little bit
to the Egyptian style,
where it's more...
It's not as loose, if you want,
or as dynamic as later.
So what you're seeing here,
you see a lot of this kind of pink tone,
which is due largely to the fact
that it was underground
for a good part of 2,000 years,
I believe.
And so soil got stuck to the surface.
But we work with a German scientist,
using some chemical-analysis techniques,
and found that all over the surface
there are traces of colour.
I wonder if I can show you.
In some cases
you can still perceive it, so...
I don't know if you can see the eyes.
But if you can see the eyes, you can see
that the cornea and the iris...
You can see how the iris is outlined,
and so...
That was one of the ways
that the statue gained individuality,
and also it connected with the viewer.
If you put the eyes in, it really...
Now there's a relation,
you're looking at a person
Jemima, it was really great
talking to you.
I hope that we really can come back live
and bring you back here, so...
Yes, I would love to.
Thank you, have a good day
and enjoy the Met all to yourself.
- Bye-bye, cheers.
- Bye.
