"Mademoiselle V. . . in the Costume of an Espada", Édouard Manet (1862)

"The galleries of 19th-century European painting and sculpture are the Metropolitan Museum’s most popular attraction," says Holland Cotter. "And after they were closed for renovation in August, some very sad scenes ensued. Tourists expecting Monets and Renoirs by the roomful left the museum distraught, hopes dashed. Met regulars who count on having certain things just so — Cézanne’s “Card Players” right there, in that gallery, on that wall, forever — wandered about in a daze, their coordinates thrown off. As late as last weekend you could find people peering forlornly through gaps in barriers that blocked gallery doorways while reinstallations were still under way." (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

"Still Life with Peaches", Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1881)

"Well, now such vigils are over," says Holland Cotter. The galleries have reopened with most of their familiar sights and a few significant changes. First, 10 new exhibition spaces have been added, to make a grand total of 32. Second, the 19th-century timeline has been pushed decisively into the 20th century. Third, in galleries where “European” has always really meant “French,” German, Scandinavian and even American artists have been added. (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

"Prayer in the Mosque" (1871) , Jean-Léon Gérôme

"The new galleries are identical in design to the existing ones. And with them, the museum once again demonstrates its genius for finding space where, to all appearances, none remains. The extra space has allowed the museum to exhibit fresh things. It also permits a chronological view of 19th-century European art — organized by Gary Tinterow and Rebecca Rabinow, curators in the Met’s 19th-century, modern and contemporary art department — to unfold at leisure, illustrated by one of the world’s great collections of such material," says Holland Cotter. (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - "Madame Jacques-Louis Leblanc" (1823)

"The story starts with Ingres, and with one look at his portraits you understand the appeal of 19th-century art to modern eyes," says Holland Cotter. "This isn’t an art about kings and saints, salvation and damnation. It’s about ordinary comforts and secular exultations, and about people whom, even when they are different from us in circumstance or age, we could imagine being." (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

"Jo, La Belle Irlandaise" (1866) - Jean-Désiré-Gustave Courbet.

"For the first time at the Met, Courbet has a room of his own. It is centrally placed, and it should be," says Holland Cotter. "For decades art historians have been calling Courbet our first modern artist. I would also call him our first postmodern artist, one whose radically eclectic, deeply skeptical, hierarchy-smashing work only began to fully make sense after the liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s." (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

"The Organ Rehearsal" (1885) - Henry Lerolle.

One of a handful of paintings uncovered in storage during the reorganization of the galleries is also in this room: “The Organ Rehearsal” (1885) by Henry Lerolle, unexhibited for nearly a century. "With its palette of beiges, creams and dove-grays, it’s a beautiful thing, with a silhouetted figure of a woman that might have come straight from “La Grande Jatte,” which Seurat was painting at the time," says Holland Cotter. (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Ilia Efimovich Repin - portrait of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (1884)

And there is the portrait of the Russian writer Vsevolod Garshin (1855-1888), by his friend Ilia Efimovich Repin. "Talk about sad scenes," says Holland Cotter. Garshin came from a family plagued with mental illness and was unstable himself. A vehement pacifist, he was drafted into the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78 and the ordeal undid him. After writing a story, based on personal experience, about a wounded soldier who lay four days in a field face to face with the corpse of a man he had shot, he committed suicide at 33. (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

"The Dressing Room" (1892) - Pierre Bonnard

"At this point in the reinstallation things shift gears. In one room we’re looking at 19th-century realist portraiture. In the next we’re standing in Bonnard’s 20th-century dining room with its woozy colors and half-abstract forms. In Bonnard, the 19th-century bourgeois sublime, one with connections to Ingres via Degas, lives on," says Holland Cotter. (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Vincent van Gogh - “L'Arlésienne" (1889)

"There are details to quibble with, but what the reinstallation unquestionably delivers is what most people want: perspective," says Holland Cotter. "And it delivers it in a wealth of visual links from gallery to gallery. When we look from an anonymous oil sketch of a nude based on neo-classical models to Courbet’s sacrilegious version of the same, we understand in a flash what revolution means. And when we look from a portrait by Cézanne of his wife to van Gogh’s “Arlésienne,” to Picasso’s “Gertrude Stein,” we put history together the way it really is put together, not in a straight line but seen around corners or glimpsed through cracks in the barriers." (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Lire l'article "Age of Splendor Expands" de Holland Cotter http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/arts/design/07euro.html?_r=1&oref=slogin