The MET Expands its Program with Launch of The Met Breuer in March 2016

The Met will launch its first season of programming in the landmark building by Marcel Breuer on Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York, when The Met Breuer opens to the public on Thursday, March 10, 2016.

Whitney Museum of American Art. Construction. Photograph © Rothschild.

The Met will develop and present programming at The Met Breuer for a period of eight years, following a collaborative agreement between the Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, which was formerly housed in the building and is relocating to its new museum facility in downtown Manhattan this May. In addition to exhibitions and performance, The Met Breuer will host a wide range of educational and public programming for visitors of all ages, connecting audiences with practicing artists through art-making, talks, and activities in the galleries. A dedicated page on the Met’s website—www.metmuseum.org/MetBreuer—will be updated regularly with detailed information on The Met Breuer’s exhibitions and programs.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will launch its first season of programming in the landmark building by Marcel Breuer on Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York, when The Met Breuer opens to the public on Thursday, March 10, 2016. Encompassing major monographic and thematic exhibitions, new commissions, performances, and an artist-in-residence series, the inaugural season at The Met Breuer will enable visitors to engage with the art of the 20th and 21st centuries through the global breadth and historical reach of the Met's unparalleled collection and scholarly resources.

“The launch of The Met Breuer marks the start of an exciting new chapter for the Museum, allowing us additional space to expand our modern and contemporary visual and performing arts program, as we concurrently redesign and rebuild our Southwest Wing,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “We believe that contemporary art is best understood as an integral part of a broader continuum of creativity—spanning cultures, eras, and genres—and this perspective will continue to infuse our activities in all three of our locations: on Fifth Avenue, at The Cloisters, and at The Met Breuer.”

The Whitney was opened in 1966 and was designed whilst Breuer was at the height of his career. With its granite clad walls, its single window and its protruding overhang, the front of the Whitney is quite intimidating. It is unlike any other building in its vicinity and very sculptural. The space was designed with minimal internal supports and windows so that it could be extremely flexible, changing as and when it needed to suit each exhibition.

Venue.- Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York. US

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Whitney Museum of American Art by Marcel Breuer, 1966. Photography by Ezra Stoller.

Whitney Museum of American Art by Marcel Breuer, 1966. Photograph by Ed Lederman.

Whitney Museum extension in New York. Crane Tv video screenshot. OMA's Shohei Shigematsu. On New York City. 重松象平 .

House in MoMA Garden, Marcel Breuer, New York, NY, 1949. Gelatin Silver Print 16″ × 20″. By Ezra Stoller. "Beyond Architecture". Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery.

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Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer, born in Hungary in 1902, was educated under the Bauhaus manifesto of “total construction”; this is likely why Breuer is well known for both his furniture designs as well as his numerous works of architecture, which ranged from small residences to monumental architecture and governmental buildings. His career flourished during the Modernist period in conjunction with architects and designers such as founder of Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.

Breuer began his career as first a student, then a teacher at the Bauhaus, a position that he secured in 1925. Incidentally, it was also the year that Breuer earned recognition for his design of the “Wassily” chair, a tubular steel chair – sleek and functional – that represented the industrial aesthetic and formal simplicity of the Modernist period.

In 1937 he was invited by instructor and colleague Walter Gropius to become a faculty member at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, he and Gropius worked together in a joint architectural firm. In 1941, Breuer split off from Gropius and opened his own practice. Much of Breuer’s early work was an exploration into post-war living. Projects like the “bi-nuclear house” were among many that were developed from this period by Breuer and his contemporaries. This was an era of the post-war boom, new materials and industries, prefabrication and the commodity of home ownership. By the 1950's, Breuer designed approximately sixty private residences.

Breuer’s career made a turning point when he was commissioned in 1953 to design the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Headquarters in Paris. This public and monumental building marked Breuer’s return to Europe and public projects. It was also around this time that Breuer established a satellite office in Paris to oversea other European commissions while still working on projects in the United States.

In 1963, Breuer began work on the Whitney Museum of Art in New Yor Ckity, probably one of his best-known public projects. The museum clearly speaks to Breuer’s Brutalist design tendencies – the primary use of concrete, the top-heavy form, and minimal glazing. Over the next few decades, Breuer designed housing projects, various buildings in universities and schools across the country, museums, research centers, the US Embassy in the Netherlands, and several buildings for the United States government in Washington. His design career was also filled with various iterations of the “Wassily” chair and other furnishings whose aesthetic still carries associations and influence today.

Marcel Breuer died in New York, United States, in 1981 at the age of 71.