The Plaster Cast Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Examining the large cast collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, this book takes a closer look at those many forgotten pieces which continue to serve the public in a range of new locations. The Metropolitan, unlike most other American institutions, continued to value its casts even after they declined in popularity in the early twentieth century. It did not submit them to the wholesale destruction of casts seen elsewhere. The Met’s casts reproduced works of sculpture and architecture, primarily from the western world. They can now be found in dozens of schools, museums, and foundations from Mississippi to Taipei. Each location that houses Metropolitan Museum casts has its own story, illustrating the ways in which plaster casts can participate in visual culture. They transmit not only ideas and images over space and time, but also elicit discussion about educational methodologies, historical preservation, the recycling and re-use of historical objects, and divergent attitudes to gender and race. This book places the Metropolitan’s collection of casts into historical and contemporary contexts and also describes their widely varied modern presentations to demonstrate the possibilities that casts continue to offer. The material will be of interest to scholars in the fields of Art History, Material Culture, the History of Collecting, Visual Culture, Classical Culture, Colonial Studies, and Historic Preservation, among others.