With Splendor and Saints, Hispanic Society Shows Its Treasures
The New York Times
This gem of a museum in Upper Manhattan has reopened with an operatic eye-filler of religious sculptures we’re just learning to appreciate.
The Hispanic Society Museum and Library, founded in 1904, is one of New York’s cultural gems and, of late, one of its mysteries. Housed in a Beaux-Arts enclave called Audubon Terrace overlooking the Hudson in Washington Heights, its gallery walls are famously hung with paintings by Goya, Velázquez and Zurbarán. But the institution has been closed to a walk-in public for nearly five years.
Rumors have swirled; people have worried. Located outside the art mainstream, the Society is known to have had a hard time pulling foot traffic. Plus, the term “Hispanic,” which to the Society’s founder, Archer M. Huntington, primarily meant Iberian, has majorly changed in scope and meaning in recent decades. Given all this, could the institution hope to survive, economically and politically?
Apparently, yes. The Society plans to be fully up and running again after an interior overhaul, to be completed in 2022. And in the present, it’s staging a sort of soft reopening with a terrific teaser show of historical sculptures from Spain and the Spanish-speaking Americas at its Washington Heights home, and a survey of archival material at the Grolier Club on the Upper East Side.
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