title: Diplomacy (game)

text: After each Fall move, newly acquired supply centers become owned by the occupying player, and each power's supply center total is recalculated; players with fewer supply centers than units on the board must disband units, while players with more supply centers than units on the board are entitled to build units in their Home centers (supply centers controlled at the start of the game). Players controlling no supply centers are eliminated from the game, and if a player controls 18 or more (being more than half) of the 34 supply centers, they are the winner. Players who remain may also agree to a draw – around half of all games will end in a draw.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Several boardgames based on "Diplomacy" have been commercially published. Additionally, many fans of the game have created hundreds of variants of their own, using altered rules on the standard map, standard rules on a different map, or both.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: The rules allow for games with two to six players, closing parts of the standard board, but these are used only in casual play, and are not considered standard "Diplomacy" in tournament, postal, or most forms of online play. For example, if there are six players, everyone plays one country and Italy is not used; for five players, Italy and Germany are not used. The original rules did not include additional guidelines, but the Avalon Hill set included suggestions, such as individual players using multiple countries, and additions.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Another approach to solving the problem of fewer than seven players is the use of the Escalation Variant Rules by Edi Birsan:


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: This is done without negotiations and may result in two players declaring the same province. However, in order to build there they still must own it and the province must be open. Players may choose any supply center as a HOME for example: EDI, DEN, ROM


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: It is also suggested that for games with 2–4 players that the 'Gunboat' rule applies which means that there are no discussions.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: For 4 or 5 players, it is suggested that the 'Wilson' or 'Public Press' rule applies which means that all discussions must take place in the open at the table with no whispers or secret signals.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: The following is an alternative way to play the game of "Diplomacy" when fewer than seven players are present.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Six Players: Eliminate Italy. Italian units hold in position and defend themselves, but don't support each other. Units belonging to any of the players can support them in their holding position. If Italian units are forced to retreat, they're disbanded.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Four Players: One player plays Britain, and the other three play the following pairs: Austria/France, Germany/Turkey, and Italy/Russia.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Three Players: One player controls Britain/Germany/Austria; the second, Russia/Italy; and the third, France/Turkey. Or one player plays Britain/Austria; one plays France/Russia; one plays Germany/Turkey. In this version Italy is not played.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Three Players (alternative): One person plays Russia while the other two control Britain/France/Germany and Austria/Italy/Turkey.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Two Players: This version can be played as a World War I simulation. One player controls Britain/France/Russia while the other plays Austria/Germany/Turkey. Italy is neutral and Italian territory can't be entered. The game begins in 1914. Before the Fall 1914 adjustments, flip a coin. Italy joins the winner of the toss in Spring 1915. The first player to control 24 supply centers wins. This is also a way for two new players to learn the rules.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: In games for 2, 3, or 4 players, supply-center ownership is computed for each individual country, even though the same person plays more than one country. As with the regular rules, adjustments must be made by each country in accordance with its supply-center holdings.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: There have been six commercially released variants of "Diplomacy" — "Machiavelli", "Kamakura", "Colonial Diplomacy", "Hundred", "Ard-Rí" and "Classical". "Imperial" is a boardgame with enough similarities to be described as a Diplomacy variant by some.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: "Machiavelli" was published by Battleline Publications, later taken over by Avalon Hill. Set in Renaissance Italy, the board is controlled by the Republic of Florence, the Republic of Venice, the Duchy of Milan, the Kingdom of Naples, the Papacy, Valois France, Habsburg Austria, and the Ottoman Turks. The game introduces many rules changes such as money, bribery, three seasons per year, garrisons, and random events such as plague and famine. It features scenarios tailored for as few as four and as many as eight players.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Published by Avalon Hill in 1994. It is set in Asia in the late 19th century, and much of the board is controlled by various colonial powers: the United Kingdom, the Russian Empire, the Empire of Japan, Holland, Ottoman Empire, China, and France. The game introduces three special features:


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: "Hundred" is a map for three players by Andy D. Schwarz based on the Hundred Years' War created in 1996 and published by Stupendous Games in 2000.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: "Ard-Rí" is a map by Stuart John Bernard based on pre-Christian Ireland (though it anachronistically includes Vikings), created in 1998, and published by Stupendous Games in 2000. Ard-Rí happens to also be the name of a hnefatafl variant played in Ancient Ireland.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: "Classical" is a map by Andy D. Schwarz and Vincent Mous based on the ancient world after the death of Alexander the Great, created in 1998, and published by Stupendous Games in 2000.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Based on the Three Kingdoms in Ancient China, it was created by Edi Birsan to introduce the basic ideas of the main game to a Chinese audience with a setting more close to their own historical experience. It was published by MJS Creations in 2008.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: A wide range of other variants of "Diplomacy" have been created and played without being commercially published. These include settings such as the ancient and renaissance world. Some variants use new maps and rules, while others simply vary the original game, such as the Fleet Rome variant which replaces the starting Italian army in Rome with a fleet.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: One of the most notable non-commercially published is the Youngstown variant which is an extension of the normal map, including Asia and colonies there. For example, in addition to the usual home centers, France starts with a fleet in Saigon (in Cochinchina). Three new Powers were added – India, China, and Japan - with powers without historical Asian colonies being given more home centers. The variant was named after the city of Youngstown, Ohio where the variant was invented.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: The Ancient Mediterranean by Don Hessong is a five-player variant centered around the Mediterranean Sea. Similarly to classic, the map has 34 supply centers and requires 18 for a solo victory. It features 5 playable nations: Rome, Carthage, Greece, Egypt, and Persia, all of which start out with two armies and a fleet. The game starts at Spring AD 1. The map is not historically accurate, as at no point in history did the map of the Mediterranean Sea look as such.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: One of the largest and most renowned variants in the Internet Diplomacy community is Europa Renovatio, a massive variant by vdiplomacy.com user Technostar. Set in 1450, players lead one of 36 different nations in Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. The variant is based on the map of Europa Universalis IV, which is set in 1444.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: "Diplomacy" is played at a number of formal tournaments in many nations. Most face-to-face "Diplomacy" tournaments longer than one day are associated with either a "Diplomacy"-centered convention (such as DipCon or Dixiecon) or a large multi-game convention (such as the Origins Game Fair or the World Boardgaming Championships). Some conventions are centered on the games and have a highly competitive atmosphere; others have more focus on meeting and socializing with other players from the postal or e-mail parts of the hobby.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: In some tournaments, each game ends after a specified number of game-years, to ensure that all players can play in all rounds without limiting the tournament structure to one round per day. At other events, a game continues until a winner is determined or a draw is voted. Tournaments in Europe are generally played with a specific end year whereas tournaments in North America more often are played until someone wins or a draw is agreed.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: The World Diplomacy Convention (WDC or World DipCon) is held annually in different places in the world. The winner of WDC is considered to be the World Champion of "Diplomacy". WDC was first held in 1988 in Birmingham, England, and was held at two-year intervals before becoming an annual event. WDC's site moves among four regions: North America, Europe, Australasia, and the rest of the world, with a requirement that successive WDC's are always held in different regions.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: The North American Diplomacy Convention (DipCon) is held annually in different places in North America, to determine the North American Champion of "Diplomacy". DipCon was first held in 1966 in Youngstown, Ohio. DipCon's site rotates among West, Central, and East regions.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: The European Diplomacy Convention (Euro DipCon) is held annually in different places in Europe, to determine the European Champion of "Diplomacy".


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Many of the larger multi-game conventions, such as the World Boardgaming Championships, Gen Con, Origins, ManorCon, TempleCon, and Dragonflight also host "Diplomacy" tournaments. On occasion, WDC or DipCon will be held in conjunction with one of these conventions.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: In addition, many of the larger local and regional clubs host tournaments on an annual basis and always encourage visitors from the local area as well as any travelers from around the globe.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: The play-by-email field is constantly changing. There are numerous tournaments generally associated with different websites. As of 2008 there were no official events sanctioned by the manufacturer (Wizards/Avalon Hill). There have been and continue to be events with various sizes and self designated titles such as:


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Despite the length of face-to-face "Diplomacy" games, there are people who organize ad hoc games, and there are also various clubs that have annual tournaments and monthly club games.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: To overcome the difficulty of assembling enough players for a sufficiently large block of time together, a play-by-mail game community has developed, either via Postal or Internet "Diplomacy", using either humans to adjudicate the turns or automatic adjudicators.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Since the 1960s, "Diplomacy" has been played by mail through fanzines. The play-by-mail (PBM) hobby was created in 1963 by Dr. John Boardman of New York City. He did so in carbon-copied typed flyers, recruiting players through his science fiction fanzine "Knowable". His flyers became an ongoing publication under the "Graustark" title, and led directly to the formation of other zines. By May 1965 there were eight "Diplomacy" zines. By the end of 1967 there were dozens of zines in the US, and by 1970 their editors were holding gatherings. In 1969, Don Turnbull started the first UK-based "Diplomacy" zine, "Albion". These were "affectionately" known as "Dippy zines". Prior to the 1980s, most had circulations of about 50 subscribers, but some had hundreds.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: By 1972, both the US and UK hobbies were forming organizations. In the 1980s, there were over sixty zines, such as "Diplomacy World" and the like, in the main list of the North American Zine Poll, peaking at 72 zines in 1989; and there were nearly as many in the major Zine Poll of the British part of the hobby.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Competition was fierce, leading some "Diplomacy" PBM players to "go to great lengths to win". In the UK, this included, in a few cases, bribery, blackmail, and even forging mail from other players or the Gamemaster, as well as mail interference (for example altering a letter to ensure a missed deadline was marked in time by a forged postmark). According to reviewer Martin Croft, in the early 1980s, Two players managed to get into trouble with the police ... [while] involved in complex negotiations about an attack on the gamer playing Britain. To avoid postal delays, one sent the other a telegram which read ATTACK ON LIVERPOOL CONFIRMED. Both spent some time explaining to the police that it was only a game.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: In the 1990s and 2000s, the number of postal "Diplomacy" zines has reduced as new players instead joined the part of the hobby that plays over the internet via e-mail or on websites. In April 2010, "Graustark" itself ceased publication. As of 2011, there are only a few active postal zines published in the US, one each in Canada and Australia, and several in the UK and elsewhere. In order to reduce postage and printing costs, as well as for environmental reasons, several zines (e.g. 'Western Front', 'Maniacs Paradise' ) are distributed to subscribers via emailed links to the zine's web page when a new issue appears, or are emailed out as pdf files, for subscribers to read on screen, or print out as they choose. Some zines maintain a dual existence as paper and digital publications.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: The first known electronic "Diplomacy" zine was "Mad As Hell," distributed on Usenet in 1982. "Diplomacy" has been played through e-mail on the Internet since the 1983 debut of "The Armchair Diplomat" on Compuserve. The GEnie online service offered fully automated versions of "Diplomacy" and variants to subscribers.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: There are also several implementations for smartphones, like Droidippy, Diplicity (Android), and Conspiracy, all of them free. Realpolitik for Android also has a hot-seat mode for local play. While Subterfuge provides a modern adaptation.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Avalon Hill released a computer game version of "Diplomacy" in 1984 for the IBM PC. "Computer Gaming World" in 1994 described it as "a flop".


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Hasbro Interactive released a computer game version of "Diplomacy" (called "Avalon Hill's Diplomacy") in 1999 under the MicroProse label, and developed by Meyer/Glass Interactive. A major fault, like with the Avalon Hill version, was that the computer AI was considered poor, one reviewer remarking "Gamers of any skill level will have no trouble whatsoever whaling on the computer at even the highest difficulty setting."


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Paradox Interactive released a new computer version in 2005, which was given negative reviews, partly due to the odd grunts the game used to express the reactions of the AI players during the Movement phase. None of the computer games supported either text or voice chat, which limited the possibilities for complicated alliances. In 2011, artificial intelligence scholars noted that work on "Diplomacy"-focused AI has been carried out since mid-1980s, but so far this endeavour met "little success".


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: The first artificial-intelligence "Diplomacy" conquest was organized in 2015 as part of the International Computer Game Association.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: In November 2022, Meta Platforms announced that they had developed an AI to play "Diplomacy" online at a competitive level, ranking in the top 10% of players.


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: In his 1977 book "The Comprehensive Guide to Board Wargaming", Nick Palmer thought that despite "primitive" movement and combat rules, "the game has an extraordinary charm all its own, based on the fascinating interplay of alliances between the seven players”. He concluded, "This can be strongly recommended to anyone interested in games of multi-player negotiation".


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: Larry Harris commented: "I am convinced that Allan Calhamer's masterpiece should be part of every high school curriculum. Don't tell the kids, but it teaches history, geography, the art of political negotiation, and something else — some healthy critical skepticism. By the time you get into high school, you have a pretty good idea that not everyone always tells the truth. But a good game of Diplomacy helps you to understand how skillful some people can be at fooling you!"


title: Diplomacy (game)

text: "Diplomacy" was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Adventure Hall of Fame in 1994.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: Nazi eugenics refers to the social policies of eugenics in Nazi Germany, composed of various pseudoscientific ideas about genetics. The racial ideology of Nazism placed the biological improvement of the German people by selective breeding of "Nordic" or "Aryan" traits at its center. These policies were used to justify the involuntary sterilization and mass-murder of those deemed "undesirable".


title: Nazi eugenics

text: Eugenics research in Germany before and during the Nazi period was similar to that in the United States (particularly California), by which it had been heavily inspired. However, its prominence rose sharply under Adolf Hitler's leadership when wealthy Nazi supporters started heavily investing in it. The programs were subsequently shaped to complement Nazi racial policies.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: Those targeted for murder under Nazi eugenics policies were largely people living in private and state-operated institutions, identified as "life unworthy of life" (). They included prisoners, degenerates, dissidents, and people with congenital cognitive and physical disabilities ()people who were considered to be feeble-minded. In fact being diagnosed with "feeblemindedness" (}) was the main label approved in forced sterilization, which included people who were diagnosed by a doctor as, or otherwise seemed to be:


title: Nazi eugenics

text: All of these were targeted for elimination from the chain of heredity. More than 400,000 people were sterilized against their will, while up to 300,000 were murdered under the "Aktion T4" euthanasia program. Thousands more also died from complications of the forced surgeries, the majority being women from forced tubal ligations.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: In June 1935, Hitler and his cabinet made a list of seven new decrees, in which number 5 was to speed up the investigations of sterilization.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: In German, the concept of "eugenics" was mostly known under the term of "Rassenhygiene" or "racial hygiene". The loanword "Eugenik" was in occasional use, as was its closer loan-translation of "Erbpflege". An alternative term was "Volksaufartung" (approximately "racial improvement").


title: Nazi eugenics

text: The early German eugenics movement was led by Wilhelm Schallmayer and Alfred Ploetz. Henry Friedlander wrote that although the German and American eugenics movements were similar, the German movement was more centralized and did not contain as many diverse ideas as the American movement. Unlike the American movement, one publication and one society, the German Society for Racial Hygiene, represented all eugenicists.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: Edwin Black wrote that after the eugenics movement was well established in the United States, it was spread to Germany. California eugenicists began producing literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and sending it overseas to German scientists and medical professionals. By 1933, California had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other U.S. states combined. The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by California's.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: In 1927, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology (KWIA), an organization which concentrated on physical and social anthropology as well as human genetics, was founded in Berlin with significant financial support from the American philanthropic group, the Rockefeller Foundation. German professor of medicine, anthropology and eugenics Eugen Fischer was the director of this organization, a man whose work helped provide the scientific basis for the Nazis' eugenics policies. The Rockefeller Foundation even funded some of the research conducted by Josef Mengele before he went to Auschwitz.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: Upon returning from Germany in 1934, where more than 5,000 people per month were being forcibly sterilized, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe bragged to a colleague:


title: Nazi eugenics

text: Eugenics researcher Harry H. Laughlin often bragged that his Model Eugenic Sterilization laws had been implemented in the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws. In 1936, Laughlin was invited to an award ceremony at Heidelberg University in Germany (scheduled on the anniversary of Hitler's 1934 purge of Jews from the Heidelberg faculty), to receive an honorary doctorate for his work on the "science of racial cleansing". Due to financial limitations, Laughlin was unable to attend the ceremony and had to pick it up from the Rockefeller Institute. Afterwards, he proudly shared the award with his colleagues, remarking that he felt that it symbolized the "common understanding of German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics."


title: Nazi eugenics

text: Hitler believed the nation had become weak, corrupted by dysgenics, the infusion of degenerate elements into its bloodstream.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: The racialism and idea of competition, termed social Darwinism in 1944, were discussed by European scientists and also in the Vienna press during the 1920s. Where Hitler picked up the ideas is uncertain. The theory of evolution had been generally accepted in Germany at the time, but this sort of extremism was rare.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: In his "Second Book", which was unpublished during the Nazi era, Hitler praised Sparta, (using ideas perhaps borrowed from Ernst Haeckel), adding that he considered Sparta to be the first "Völkisch State". He endorsed what he perceived to be an early eugenics treatment of deformed children:


title: Nazi eugenics

text: In organizing their eugenics program the Nazis were inspired by the United States' programs of forced sterilization, especially on the eugenics laws that had been enacted in California.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, enacted on July 14, 1933, allowed the compulsory sterilisation of any citizen who according to the opinion of a "Genetic Health Court" "suffered" from a list of alleged genetic disorders and required physicians to register every case of hereditary illness known to them, except in women over 45 years of age. Physicians could be fined for failing to comply.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: In 1934, the first year of the Law's operation, nearly 4,000 people appealed against the decisions of sterilization authorities. A total of 3,559 of the appeals failed. By the end of the Nazi regime, over 200 Hereditary Health Courts () were created, and under their rulings over 400,000 persons were sterilized against their will.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: The Hadamar Clinic was a mental hospital in the German town of Hadamar used by the Nazi-controlled German government as the site of Action T4. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927. Hartheim Killing Facility was also part of the euthanasia programme where the Nazis murdered individuals they deemed disabled. At first, patients were transported in gas vans, where passengers were poisoned or asphyxiated using the engine exhaust during transit. Gas chambers were developed later and used pure carbon monoxide gas to murder the patients.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: In its early years, and during the Nazi era, the Clinic was strongly associated with theories of eugenics and racial hygiene advocated by its leading theorists Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer, and by its director Otmar von Verschuer. Under Fischer, the sterilization of so-called Rhineland Bastards was undertaken. Grafeneck Castle was one of Nazi Germany's killing centers, and today it is a memorial place dedicated to the victims of "Aktion T4".


title: Nazi eugenics

text: The Law for Simplification of the Health System of July 1934 created Information Centers for Genetic and Racial Hygiene, as well as Health Offices. The law also described procedures for 'denunciation' and 'evaluation' of persons, who were then sent to a Genetic Health Court where sterilization was decided.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: Information to determine who was considered 'genetically sick' was gathered from routine information supplied by people to doctor's offices and welfare departments. Standardized questionnaires had been designed by Nazi officials with the help of Dehomag (a subsidiary of IBM in the 1930s), so that the information could be encoded easily onto Hollerith punch cards for fast sorting and counting.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: In Hamburg, doctors gave information into a Central Health Passport Archive (), under something called the 'Health-Related Total Observation of Life'. This file was to contain reports from doctors, but also courts, insurance companies, sports clubs, the Hitler Youth, the military, the labor service, colleges, etc. Any institution that gave information would get information back in return. In 1940, the Reich Interior Ministry tried to impose a Hamburg-style system on the whole Reich.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: After the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, it became compulsory for both marriage partners to be tested for hereditary diseases in order to preserve the perceived racial purity of the Aryan race. Everyone was encouraged to carefully evaluate his or her prospective marriage partner eugenically during courtship. Members of the SS were cautioned to carefully interview prospective marriage partners to make sure they had no family history of hereditary disease or insanity, but to do this carefully so as not to hurt the feelings of the prospective fiancée and, if it became necessary to reject her for eugenic reasons, to do it tactfully and not cause her any offense.


title: Nazi eugenics

text: The Nazi's policies on abortions were conceived of alongside the general Nazi eugenics program. Upon coming to power, the Nazis restricted advertisements on the sale of contraceptives. In May 1933, the Nazis reintroduced earlier laws outlawing the advertisement of abortion procedures and abortifacients to the public. In September of the same year, the Berlin Council of Physicians warned its members that "proceedings will be taken against every evil-doer who dares to injure our sacred healthy race." Abortion procedures were placed under strict political control. Abortions for eugenic reasons were also prohibited during this period, but in some hereditary health courts such abortions were exempt from punishment. (This consideration extended to the exemption of punishment for a Jewish couple who attempted to procure an abortion in 1938, on the basis that the law did not protect Jewish embryos.)


title: Robert Capa

text: Robert Capa (born Endre Ernő Friedmann; October 22, 1913 – May 25, 1954) was a Hungarian-American war photographer and photojournalist as well as the companion and professional partner of photographer Gerda Taro. He is considered by some to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history.


title: Robert Capa

text: Capa had fled political repression in Hungary when he was a teenager, moving to Berlin, where he enrolled in college. He witnessed the rise of Hitler, which led him to move to Paris, where he met and began to work with Gerta Pohorylle. Together they worked under the alias Robert Capa and became photojournalists. Though she contributed to much of the early work, she quickly created her own alias 'Gerda Taro' and they began to publish their work separately. He subsequently covered five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and the First Indochina War, with his photos published in major magazines and newspapers. He was killed when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam.


title: Robert Capa

text: During his career he risked his life numerous times, most dramatically as the only civilian photographer landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, and the liberation of Paris. His friends and colleagues included Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck and director John Huston.


title: Robert Capa

text: In 1947, for his work recording World War II in pictures, U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded Capa the Medal of Freedom. That same year, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers. Hungary has issued a stamp and a gold coin in his honor.


title: Robert Capa

text: Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann to the Jewish family of Júlia (née Berkovits) and Dezső Friedmann in Budapest, Austria-Hungary on October 22, 1913. His mother, Julianna Henrietta Berkovits was a native of Nagykapos (now Veľké Kapušany, Slovakia) and Dezső Friedmann came from the Transylvanian village of Csucsa (now Ciucea, Romania). At the age of 18, he was accused of alleged communist sympathies and was forced to flee Hungary.


title: Robert Capa

text: He moved to Berlin where he enrolled at Berlin University where he worked part-time as a darkroom assistant for income and then became a staff photographer for the German photographic agency, Dephot. It was during that period that the Nazi Party came into power, which made Capa, a Jew, decide to leave Germany and move to Paris.


title: Robert Capa

text: He became professionally involved with Gerta Pohorylle, later known as Gerda Taro, a German-Jewish photographer who had moved to Paris for the same reasons he did. The two of them decided to work under the alias Capa at this time. The two of them later separated aliases and published their work independently. Capa and Taro developed a romantic relationship alongside their professional one. Capa proposed and Taro refused, but they continued their involvement. He also shared a darkroom with French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, with whom he would later co-found the Magnum Photos cooperative.


title: Robert Capa

text: Capa's first published photograph was of Leon Trotsky making a speech in Copenhagen on "The Meaning of the Russian Revolution" in 1932.


title: Robert Capa

text: From 1936 to 1939, Capa worked in Spain, photographing the Spanish Civil War, along with Gerda Taro, his companion and professional photography partner, and David Seymour. Taro died when the motor vehicle on which she was travelling (apparently standing on the footboard) collided with an out-of-control tank. She had been returning from a photographic assignment covering the Battle of Brunete.


title: Robert Capa

text: It was during that war that Capa took the photo now called "The Falling Soldier", purporting to show the death of a Republican soldier. The photo was published in magazines in France and then by "Life magazine" and "Picture Post". The authenticity of the photo was later questioned, with evidence including other photos from the scene suggesting it was staged. "Picture Post," a pioneering photojournalism magazine published in the United Kingdom, had once described then twenty-five year old Capa as "the greatest war photographer in the world."


title: Robert Capa

text: Capa accompanied then journalist and author Ernest Hemingway to photograph the war, which Hemingway would later describe in his novel, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940). "Life" magazine published an article about Hemingway and his time in Spain, along with numerous photos by Capa.


title: Robert Capa

text: In December 2007, three boxes filled with rolls of film, containing 4,500 35mm negatives of the Spanish Civil War by Capa, Taro, and Chim (David Seymour), which had been considered lost since 1939, were discovered in Mexico. In 2011, Trisha Ziff directed a film about those images, entitled "The Mexican Suitcase".


title: Robert Capa

text: In 1938, he traveled to the Chinese city of Hankou, now within Wuhan, to document the resistance to the Japanese invasion. He sent his images to "Life" magazine, which published some of them in its May 23, 1938 issue.


title: Robert Capa

text: At the start of World War II, Capa was in New York City, having moved there from Paris to look for work, and to escape Nazi persecution. During the war, Capa was sent to various parts of the European Theatre on photography assignments. He first photographed for "Collier's Weekly", before switching to "Life" after he was fired by Collier's. He was the only "enemy alien" photographer for the Allies. On October 7, 1943 Robert Capa was in Naples with "Life" reporter Will Lang Jr., and there he photographed the Naples post office bombing.


title: Robert Capa

text: A group of images known as "The Magnificent Eleven" were taken by Capa on D-Day. Taking part in the Allied invasion, Capa was attached to the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division ("Big Red One") on Omaha Beach. The US personnel attacking Omaha Beach faced some of the heaviest resistance from German troops inside the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall. Photographic historian A. D. Coleman has suggested that Capa traveled to the beach in the same landing craft as Colonel George A. Taylor, commander of the 16th Infantry Regiment, who landed 1½ hours after the first wave, near Colleville-sur-Mer.


title: Robert Capa

text: Capa subsequently stated that he took 106 pictures, but later discovered that all but 11 had been destroyed. This incident may have been caused by Capa's cameras becoming waterlogged at Normandy, although the more frequent allegation is that a young assistant accidentally destroyed the pictures while they were being developed at the photo lab in London. However, this narrative has been challenged by Coleman and others. In 2016, John G. Morris, who was picture editor at the London bureau of "Life" in 1944, agreed that it was more likely that Capa captured 11 images in total on D-Day. The 11 prints were included in "Life" magazine's issue on June 19, 1944, with captions written by magazine staffers, as Capa did not provide "Life" with notes or a verbal description of what they showed.


title: Robert Capa

text: The captions have since been shown to be erroneous, as were subsequent descriptions of the images by Capa himself. For example, men described by "Life" as taking cover behind a hedgehog obstacle were members of Gap Assault Team 10 – a combined US Navy/US Army demolition unit tasked with blowing up obstacles and clearing the way for landing craft.


title: Robert Capa

text: Capa took photographs during the Allied invasion of France in 1944. His picture "The Shaved Woman of Chartres", taken on 16 August 1944, shows a woman whose head has been shaved as a punishment for collaboration with the Nazis.


title: Robert Capa

text: On April 18, 1945, Capa captured images of a fight to secure a bridge in Leipzig, Germany. These pictures included an image of Raymond J. Bowman's death by sniper fire. This image was published in a spread in "Life" magazine with the caption "The picture of the last man to die."


title: Robert Capa

text: In 1947 Capa traveled to the Soviet Union with his friend, the American writer John Steinbeck. They originally met when they shared a room in an Algiers hotel with other war correspondents before the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943. They reconnected in New York, where Steinbeck told him he was thinking about visiting the Soviet Union, now that the war was over.


title: Robert Capa

text: Capa suggested they go there together and collaborate on a book, with Capa documenting the war-torn nation with photographs. The trip resulted in Steinbeck's, "A Russian Journal", which was published both as a book and a syndicated newspaper serial. Photos were taken in Moscow, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Batumi and among the ruins of Stalingrad. They remained good friends until Capa's death; Steinbeck took the news of Capa's death very hard.


title: Robert Capa

text: In 1947, Capa founded the cooperative venture Magnum Photos in Paris with Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Vandivert, David Seymour, and George Rodger. It was a cooperative agency to manage work for and by freelance photographers, and developed a reputation for the excellence of its photo-journalists. In 1952, he became the president.


title: Robert Capa

text: Capa toured Israel during its founding and while it was being attacked by neighboring states. He took the numerous photographs that accompanied Irwin Shaw's book, "Report on Israel".


title: Robert Capa

text: In 1953 he joined screenwriter Truman Capote and director John Huston in Italy where Capa was assigned to photograph the making of the film, "Beat the Devil". During their off time they, and star Humphrey Bogart, enjoyed playing poker.


title: Robert Capa

text: In the early 1950s, Capa travelled to Japan for an exhibition associated with Magnum Photos. While there, "Life" magazine asked him to go on assignment to Southeast Asia, where the French had been fighting for eight years in the First Indochina War. Although he had claimed a few years earlier that he was finished with war, Capa accepted the job. He accompanied a French regiment located in Thái Bình Province with two "Time-Life" journalists, John Mecklin and Jim Lucas. On 25 May 1954, the regiment was passing through a dangerous area under fire when Capa decided to leave his jeep and go up the road to photograph the advance. Capa was killed when he stepped on a landmine near the road.


title: Robert Capa

text: He was 40 at the time of his death. He is buried in plot #189 at Amawalk Hill Cemetery (also called Friends Cemetery), Amawalk, Westchester County, New York along with his mother, Julia, and his brother, Cornell Capa.


title: Robert Capa

text: Capa was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, where his parents were tailors; Capa's mother was a successful fashion shop owner, and his father was an employee of her shop. Capa had two brothers, a younger brother, Cornell Capa and an older brother, László Friedmann. Cornell moved to Paris in 1936 to join his older brother Capa, where he found an interest in photography instead of staying in the field of medicine. Not much is known of Capa's older brother László, except that he married Angela Maria Friedmann-Csordas in 1933. He died a year later and was buried next to his father in the Kozma Utca Jewish Cemetery.


title: Robert Capa

text: At the age of 18, Capa moved to Vienna, later relocated to Prague, and finally settled in Berlin: all cities that were centers of artistic and cultural ferment in this period. He started studies in journalism at the German Political College, but the Nazi Party instituted restrictions on Jews and banned them from colleges. Capa relocated to Paris, where he adopted the name 'Robert Capa' in 1934. At that time, he had already been a hobby-photographer.


title: Robert Capa

text: In 1934 "André Friedman", as he still called himself then, met Gerda Pohorylle, a German Jewish refugee. The couple lived in Paris where André taught Gerda photography. Together they created the name and image of "Robert Capa" as a famous American photographer, and at the beginning of the war both photographers published their work under the pseudonym of Robert Capa. Gerda took the name Gerda Taro and became successful in her own right. She travelled with Capa to Spain in 1936 intending to document the Spanish Civil War. In July 1937, Capa traveled briefly to Paris while Gerda remained in Madrid. She was killed near Brunete during a battle. Capa, who was reportedly engaged to her, was deeply shocked and never married.


title: Robert Capa

text: In February 1943 Capa met Elaine Justin, then married to the actor John Justin. They fell in love and the relationship lasted until the end of the war. Capa spent most of his time in the frontline. Capa called the redheaded Elaine "Pinky," and wrote about her in his war memoir, "Slightly Out of Focus". In 1945, Elaine Justin broke up with Capa; she later married Chuck Romine.


title: Robert Capa

text: Some months later Capa became the lover of the actress Ingrid Bergman, who was touring in Europe to entertain American soldiers. In December 1945, Capa followed her to Hollywood. The relationship ended in the summer of 1946 when Capa traveled to Turkey.


title: Robert Capa

text: The government of Hungary issued a postage stamp in Capa's honor in 2013. That same year it issued a 5,000 forint ($20) gold coin, also in his honor, showing an engraving of Capa.


title: Robert Capa

text: His younger brother, Cornell Capa, also a photographer, worked to preserve and promote Robert's legacy as well as develop his own identity and style. He founded the International Fund for Concerned Photography in 1966. To give this collection a permanent home, he founded the International Center of Photography in New York City in 1974. This was one of the foremost and most extensive conservation efforts on photography to be developed. Indeed, Capa and his brother believed strongly in the importance of photography and its preservation, much like film would later be perceived and duly treated in a similar way.


title: Robert Capa

text: Capa is known for redefining wartime photojournalism. His work came from the trenches as opposed to the more arms-length perspective that was the precedent. He was famed for saying, "If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough."


title: Robert Capa

text: He is credited with coining the term Generation X. He used it as a title for a photo-essay about the young people reaching adulthood immediately after the Second World War. It was published in 1953 in "Picture Post" (UK) and "Holiday" (USA). Capa said, "We named this unknown generation, The Generation X, and even in our first enthusiasm we realised that we had something far bigger than our talents and pockets could cope with."


title: Robert Capa

text: In 1947, for his work recording World War II in pictures, U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded Capa the Medal of Freedom Citation The International Center of Photography organized a travelling exhibition titled "This Is War: Robert Capa at Work", which displayed Capa's innovations as a photojournalist in the 1930s and 1940s. It includes vintage prints, contact sheets, caption sheets, handwritten observations, personal letters and original magazine layouts from the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. The exhibition appeared at the Barbican Art Gallery, the International Center of Photography of Milan, and the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya in the fall of 2009, before moving to the Nederlands Fotomuseum from October 10, 2009 until January 10, 2010.


title: Robert Capa

text: As a young boy, Capa was drawn to the Munkakör (Employment Circle), a group of socialist and avant-garde artists, photographers, and intellectuals centered around Budapest. He participated in the demonstrations against the Miklós Horthy regime. In 1931, just before his first photo was published, Capa was arrested by the Hungarian secret police, beaten, and jailed for his radical political activity. A police official's wife—who happened to know his family—won Capa's release on the condition that he would leave Hungary immediately.


title: Robert Capa

text: The "Boston Review" has described Capa as "a leftist, and a democrat—he was passionately pro-Loyalist and passionately anti-fascist ..." During the Spanish Civil War, Capa travelled with and photographed the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), which resulted in his best-known photograph.


title: Robert Capa

text: The British magazine "Picture Post" ran his photos from Spain in the 1930s accompanied by a portrait of Capa, in profile, with the simple description: "He is a passionate democrat, and he lives to take photographs."


title: The Cloisters

text: The Cloisters, also known as the Met Cloisters, is a museum in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, New York City. The museum, situated in Fort Tryon Park, specializes in European medieval art and architecture, with a focus on the Romanesque and Gothic periods. Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it contains a large collection of medieval artworks shown in the architectural settings of French monasteries and abbeys. Its buildings are centered around four cloisters—the Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont and Trie—that were acquired by American sculptor and art dealer George Grey Barnard in France before 1913, and moved to New York. Barnard's collection was bought for the museum by financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Other major sources of objects were the collections of J. P. Morgan and Joseph Brummer.


title: The Cloisters

text: The museum's building was designed by the architect Charles Collens, on a site on a steep hill, with upper and lower levels. It contains medieval gardens and a series of chapels and themed galleries, including the Romanesque, Fuentidueña, Unicorn, Spanish, and Gothic rooms. The design, layout, and ambiance of the building are intended to evoke a sense of medieval European monastic life. It holds about 5,000 works of art and architecture, all European and mostly dating from the Byzantine to the early Renaissance periods, mainly during the 12th through 15th centuries. The varied objects include stone and wood sculptures, tapestries, illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings, of which the best known include the c. 1422 Early Netherlandish "Mérode Altarpiece" and the c. 1495–1505 Flemish "Hunt of the Unicorn" tapestries.


title: The Cloisters

text: Rockefeller purchased the museum site in Washington Heights in 1930, and donated it and the Bayard collection to the Metropolitan in 1931. Upon its opening on May 10, 1938, the Cloisters was described as a collection "shown informally in a picturesque setting, which stimulates imagination and creates a receptive mood for enjoyment".


title: The Cloisters

text: The basis for the museum's architectural structure came from the collection of George Grey Barnard, an American sculptor and collector who almost single-handedly established a medieval art museum near his home in the Fort Washington section of Upper Manhattan. Although he was a successful sculptor who had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, his income was not enough to support his family. Barnard was a risk taker and led most of his life on the edge of poverty. He moved to Paris in 1883 where he studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He lived in the village of Moret-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, between 1905 and 1913, and began to deal in 13th- and 14th-century European objects to supplement his earnings. In the process he built a large personal collection of what he described as "antiques", at first by buying and selling stand-alone objects with French dealers, then by the acquisition of "in situ" architectural artifacts from local farmers.


title: The Cloisters

text: Barnard was primarily interested in the abbeys and churches founded by monastic orders from the 12th century. Following centuries of pillage and destruction during wars and revolutions, stones from many of these buildings were reused by local populations. A pioneer in seeing the value in such artifacts, Barnard often met with hostility to his effort from local and governmental groups. Yet he was an astute negotiator who had the advantage of a professional sculptor's eye for superior stone carving, and by 1907 he had built a high-quality collection at relatively low cost. Reputedly he paid $25,000 for the Trie buildings, $25,000 for the Bonnefort and $100,000 for the Cuxa cloisters. His success led him to adopt a somewhat romantic view of himself. He recalled bicycling across the French countryside and unearthing fallen and long-forgotten Gothic masterworks along the way. He claimed to have found the tomb effigy of Jean d'Alluye face down, in use as a bridge over a small stream. By 1914 he had gathered enough artifacts to open a gallery in Manhattan.


title: The Cloisters

text: Barnard often neglected his personal finances, and was so disorganized that he often misplaced the origin or provenance of his purchases. He sold his collection to John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1925 during one of his recurring monetary crises. The two had been introduced by the architect William W. Bosworth. Purchased for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the acquisition included structures that would become the foundation and core of the museum. Rockefeller and Barnard were polar opposites in both temperament and outlook and did not get along; Rockefeller was reserved, Barnard exuberant. The English painter and art critic Roger Fry was then the Metropolitan's chief European acquisition agent and acted as an intermediary. Rockefeller eventually acquired Barnard's collection for around $700,000, retaining Barnard as an advisor.


title: The Cloisters

text: In 1927 Rockefeller hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of one of the designers of Central Park, and the Olmsted Brothers firm to create a park in the Fort Washington area. In February 1930 Rockefeller offered to build the Cloisters for the Metropolitan. Under consultation with Bosworth, he decided to build the museum at a site at Fort Tryon Park, which they chose for its elevation, views, and accessible but isolated location. The land and existing buildings were purchased that year from the C. K. G. Billings estate and other holdings in the Fort Washington area. The Cloisters building and adjacent gardens were designed by Charles Collens. They incorporate elements from abbeys in Catalonia and France. Parts from Sant Miquel de Cuixà, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Bonnefont-en-Comminges, Trie-sur-Baïse and Froville were disassembled stone-by-stone and shipped to New York City, where they were reconstructed and integrated into a cohesive whole. Construction took place over a five-year period from 1934. Rockefeller bought several hundred acres of the New Jersey Palisades, which he donated to the State in an effort to preserve the view from the museum. The Cloisters' new building and gardens were officially opened on May 10, 1938, though the public was not allowed to visit until four days later.


title: The Cloisters

text: Rockefeller financed the purchase of many of the early collection of works, often buying independently and then donating the items to the museum. His financing of the museum has led to it being described as "perhaps the supreme example of curatorial genius working in exquisite harmony with vast wealth". The second major donor was the industrialist J. P. Morgan, founder of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, who spent the last 20 years of his life acquiring artworks, "on an imperial scale" according to art historian Jean Strous, spending some $900 million (inflation adjusted) in total. After his death, his son J. P. Morgan Jr. donated a large number of works from the collection to the Metropolitan.


title: The Cloisters

text: A further major early source of objects was the art dealer Joseph Brummer (1883–1947), long a friend of a curator at the Cloisters, James Rorimer. Rorimer had long recognized the importance of Brummer's collection, and purchased large quantities of objects in the months after Brummer's sudden death in 1947. According to Christine E. Brennan of the Metropolitan, Rorimer realized that the collection offered works that could rival the Morgan Collection in the Metropolitan's Main Building, and that "the decision to form a treasury at The Cloisters was reached... because it had been the only opportunity since the late 1920s to enrich the collection with so many liturgical and secular objects of such high quality." These pieces, including works in gold, silver, and ivory, are today held in the Treasury room of the Cloisters.


title: The Cloisters

text: The museum's collection of artworks consists of approximately five thousand individual pieces. They are displayed across a series of rooms and spaces, mostly separate from those dedicated to the installed architectural artifacts. The Cloisters has never focused on building a collection of masterpieces, rather the objects are chosen thematically yet arranged simply to enhance the atmosphere created by the architectural elements in the particular setting or room in which they are placed. To create the atmosphere of a functioning series of cloisters, many of the individual works, including capitals, doorways, stained glass, and windows are placed within the architectural elements themselves.


title: The Cloisters

text: The museum's best-known panel painting is Robert Campin's c. 1425–28 "Mérode Altarpiece", a foundational work in the development of Early Netherlandish painting, which has been at The Cloisters since 1956. Its acquisition was funded by Rockefeller and described at the time as a "major event for the history of collecting in the United States". The triptych is well preserved with little overpainting, glossing, dirt layers or paint loss. Other panel paintings in the collection include a Nativity triptych altarpiece attributed to a follower of Rogier van der Weyden, and the "Jumieges panels" by an unknown French master.


title: The Cloisters

text: The 12th-century English walrus ivory Cloisters Cross contains over ninety-two intricately carved figures and ninety-eight inscriptions. A similar 12th-century French metalwork reliquary cross contains six sequences of engravings on either side of its shaft, and across the four sides of its lower arms. Further pieces of note include a 13th-century, English "Enthroned Virgin and Child" statuette, a c. 1490 German statue of Saint Barbara, and an early 16th-century boxwood Miniature Altarpiece with the Crucifixion. Other significant works include fountains and baptismal fonts, chairs, aquamaniles (water containers in animal or human form), bronze lavers, alms boxes and playing cards.


title: The Cloisters

text: The museum has an extensive collection of medieval European frescoes, ivory statuettes, reliquary wood and metal shrines and crosses, as well as examples of the very rare Gothic boxwood miniatures. It has liturgical metalwork vessels and rare pieces of Gothic furniture and metalwork. Many pieces are not associated with a particular architectural setting, so their placement in the museum may vary. Some of the objects have dramatic provenance, including those plundered from the estates of aristocrats during the French Revolutionary Army's occupation of the Southern Netherlands. The Unicorn tapestries were for a period used by the French army to cover potatoes and keep them from freezing. The set was purchased by Rockefeller in 1922 and six of the tapestries hung in his New York home until donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1938.


title: The Cloisters

text: The museum's collection of illuminated books is small, but of exceptional quality. J.P. Morgan was a major early donor, but although his taste leaned heavily towards rare printed and illuminated books, he donated very few to the Metropolitan, instead preserving them at the Morgan Library. At the same time, the consensus within the Met was that the Cloisters should focus on architectural elements, sculpture and decorative arts to enhance the environmental quality of the institution, whereas manuscripts were considered more suited to the Morgan Library in lower Manhattan. The Cloisters' books are today displayed in the Treasury room, and include the French "Cloisters Apocalypse" (or "Book of Revelation", c. 1330, probably Normandy), Jean Pucelle's "Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux" (c. 1324–28), the "Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg", attributed to Jean Le Noir and the "Belles Heures du Duc de Berry" (c. 1399–1416) attributed to the Limbourg brothers. In 2015 the Cloisters acquired a small Netherlandish Book of Hours illuminated by Simon Bening. Each is of exceptional quality, and their acquisition was a significant achievement for the museum's early collectors.


title: The Cloisters

text: A coat of arms illustrated on one of the leaves of the "Cloisters Apocalypse" suggests it was commissioned by a member of the de Montigny family of Coutances, Normandy. Stylistically it resembles other Norman illuminated books, as well as some designs on stained glass, of the period. The book was in Switzerland by 1368, possibly at the abbey of Zofingen, in the canton of Aargau. It was acquired by the Met in 1968.


title: The Cloisters

text: The "Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux" is a very small early Gothic book of hours containing 209 folios, of which 25 are full-page miniatures. It is lavishly decorated in grisaille drawings, historiated initials and almost 700 border images. Jeanne d'Évreux was the third wife of Charles IV of France, and after their deaths the book went into the possession of Charles' brother, Jean, duc de Berry. The use of grisaille (shades of gray) drawings allowed the artist to give the figures a highly sculptural form, and the miniatures contain structures typical of French Gothic architecture of the period. The book has been described as "the high point of Parisian court painting", and evidence of "the unprecedentedly refined artistic tastes of the time".


title: The Cloisters

text: The "Belles Heures" is widely regarded as one of the finest extant examples of manuscript illumination, and very few books of hours are as richly decorated. It is the only surviving complete book attributed to the Limbourg brothers. Rockefeller purchased the book from Maurice de Rothschild in 1954, and donated it to the Metropolitan.


title: The Cloisters

text: The very small "Bonne de Luxembourg" manuscript (each leaf 12.5 × 8.4 × 3.9 cm) is attributed to Jean le Noir, and noted for its preoccupation with death. It was commissioned for Bonne de Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy, daughter of John the Blind and the wife of John II of France, probably at the end of her husband's life, c. 1348–49. It was in a private collection for many years, and thus known only through poor-quality photographic reproductions until acquired by the museum in 1969. Produced in tempera, grisaille, ink, and gold leaf on vellum, it had been rarely studied and was until that point misattributed to Jean Pucelle. Following its acquisition, it was studied by art historians, after which attribution was given to Le Noir.


title: The Cloisters

text: While examples of textile art are displayed throughout the museum, there are two dedicated rooms given to individual series of tapestries, the South Netherlandish "Nine Heroes" (c. 1385) and Flemish"The Hunt of the Unicorn" (c. 1500). The Nine Heroes room is entered from the Cuxa cloisters. Its 14th-century tapestries are one of the earliest surviving examples of tapestry, and are thought to be the original versions following widely influential and copied designs attributed to Nicolas Bataille. They were acquired over a period of twenty years, involving the purchase of more than 20 individual fragments which were then sewn together during a long reassembly process. The chivalric figures represent the scriptural and legendary Nine Worthies, who consist of three pagans (Hector, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar), three Jews (Joshua, David and Judas Maccabeus) and three Christians (King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon). Of these, five figures survive: Hector, Caesar, Joshua, David and Arthur. They have been described as representing "in their variety, the highest level of a rich and powerful social structure of later fourteenth-century France".


title: The Cloisters

text: The "Hunt of the Unicorn" room can be entered from the hall containing the "Nine Heroes" via an early 16th-century door carved with representations of unicorns. The unicorn tapestries consist of a series of large, colourful hangings and fragment textiles designed in Paris and woven in Brussels or Liège. Noted for their vivid colourization—dominated by blue, yellow-brown, red, and gold hues—and the abundance of a wide variety of flora, they were produced for Anne of Brittany and completed c. 1495–1505. The tapestries were purchased by Rockefeller in 1922 for about one million dollars, and donated to the museum in 1937. They were cleaned and restored in 1998, and are now hung in a dedicated room on the museum's upper floor.


title: The Cloisters

text: The large "Nativity" panel (also known as "Christ is Born as Man's Redeemer") from c. 1500, South Netherlandish (probably in Brussels), "Burgos Tapestry" was acquired by the museum in 1938. It was originally one of a series of eight tapestries representing the salvation of man, with individual scenes influenced by identifiable panel paintings, including by van der Weyden. It was badly damaged in earlier centuries: it had been cut into several irregular pieces and undergone several poor-quality restorations. The panel underwent a long process of restoration from 1971, undertaken by Tina Kane and Alice Blohm of the Metropolitan's Department of Textile Conservation. It is today hung in the Late Gothic hall.


title: The Cloisters

text: The Cloisters' collection of stained glass consists of around three hundred panels, generally French and Germanic and mostly from the 13th to early 16th centuries. A number were formed from handmade opalescent glass. Works in the collection are characterized by vivid colors and often abstract designs and patterns; many have a devotional image as a centerpiece. The majority of these works are in the museum's Boppard room, named after the Carmelite church of Saint Severinus in Boppard, near Koblenz, Germany. The collection's pot-metal works (from the High Gothic period) highlight the effects of light, especially the transitions between darkness, shadow and illumination. The Met's collection grew in the early 20th century when Raymond Picairn made acquisitions at a time when medieval glass was not highly regarded by connoisseurs, and was difficult to extract and transport.


title: The Cloisters

text: Jane Hayward, a curator at the museum from 1969 who began the museum's second phase of acquisition, describes stained glass as "unquestioningly the preeminent form of Gothic medieval monumental painting". She bought c.1500 heraldic windows from the Rhineland, now in the Campin room with the "Mérode Altarpiece". Hayward's addition in 1980 led to a redesign of the room so that the installed pieces would echo the domestic setting of the altarpiece. She wrote that the Campin room is the only gallery in the Met "where domestic rather than religious art predominates...a conscious effort has been made to create a fifteenth-century domestic interior similar to the one shown in [Campin's] "Annunciation" panel."


title: The Cloisters

text: Other significant acquisitions include late 13th-century grisaille panels from the Château-de-Bouvreuil in Rouen, glass work from the Cathedral of Saint-Gervais-et-Saint-Protais at Sées, and panels from the Acezat collection, now in the Heroes Tapestry Hall.


title: The Cloisters

text: The building is set into a steep hill, and thus the rooms and halls are divided between an upper entrance and a ground-floor level. The enclosing exterior building is mostly modern, and is influenced by and contains elements from the 13th-century church at Saint-Geraud at Monsempron, France, from which the northeast end of the building borrows especially. It was mostly designed by the architect Charles Collens, who took influence from works in Barnard's collection. Rockefeller closely managed both the building's design and construction, which sometimes frustrated the architects and builders.


title: The Cloisters

text: The building contains architecture elements and settings taken mostly from four French abbeys, which between 1934 and 1939 were transported, reconstructed, and integrated with new buildings in a project overseen by Collins. He told Rockefeller that the new building "should present a well-studied outline done in the very simplest form of stonework growing naturally out of the rocky hill-top. After looking through the books in the Boston Athenaeum ... we found a building at Monsempron in Southern France of a type which would lend itself in a very satisfactory manner to such a treatment."


title: The Cloisters

text: The architects sought to both memorialize the north hill's role in the American Revolution and to provide a sweeping view over the Hudson River. Construction of the exterior began in 1935. The stonework, primarily of limestone and granite from several European sources, includes four Gothic windows from the refectory at Sens and nine arcades. The dome of the Fuentidueña Chapel was especially difficult to fit into the planned area. The east elevation, mostly of limestone, contains nine arcades from the Benedictine priory at Froville and four flamboyant French Gothic windows from the Dominican monastery at Sens.


title: The Cloisters

text: Located on the south side of the building's main level, the Cuxa cloisters are the museum's centerpiece both structurally and thematically. They were originally erected at the Benedictine Abbey of Sant Miquel de Cuixà on Mount Canigou, in the northeast Spanish Pyrenees, which was founded in 878. The monastery was abandoned in 1791 and fell into disrepair; its roof collapsed in 1835 and its bell tower fell in 1839. About half of its stonework was moved to New York between 1906 and 1907. The installation became one of the first major undertakings by the Metropolitan after it acquired Barnard's collection. After intensive work over the fall and winter of 1925–26, the Cuxa cloisters were opened to the public on April 1, 1926.


title: The Cloisters

text: The quadrangle-shaped garden once formed a center around which monks slept in cells. The original garden seemed to have been lined by walkways around adjoining arches lined with capitals enclosing the garth. It is impossible now to represent solely medieval species and arrangements; those in the Cuxa garden are approximations by botanists specializing in medieval history. The oldest plan of the original building describes lilies and roses. Although the walls are modern, the capitals and columns are original and cut from pink Languedoc marble from the Pyrenees. The intersection of the two walkways contains an eight-sided fountain.


title: The Cloisters

text: The capitals were carved at different points in the abbey's history and thus contain a variety of forms and abstract geometric patterns, including scrolling leaves, pine cones, sacred figures such as Christ, the Apostles, angels, and monstrous creatures including two-headed animals, lions restrained by apes, mythic hybrids, a mermaid and inhuman mouths consuming human torsos. The motifs are derived from popular fables, or represent the brute forces of nature or evil, or are based on late 11th- and 12th-century monastic writings, such as those by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). The order in which the capitals were originally placed is unknown, making their interpretation especially difficult, although a sequential and continuous narrative was probably not intended. According to art historian Thomas Dale, to the monks, the "human figures, beasts, and monsters" may have represented the "tension between the world and the cloister, the struggle to repress the natural inclinations of the body".


title: The Cloisters

text: The Saint-Guilhem cloisters were taken from the site of the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, and date from 804 AD to the 1660s. Their acquisition around 1906 was one of Barnard's early purchases. The transfer to New York involved the movement of around 140 pieces, including capitals, columns and pilasters. The carvings on the marble piers and column shafts recall Roman sculpture and are coiled by extravagant foliage, including vines. The capitals contain acanthus leaves and grotesque heads peering out, including figures at the Presentation at the Temple, Daniel in the Lions' Den and the Mouth of Hell, and several pilasters and columns. The carvings seem preoccupied with the evils of hell. Those beside the mouth of hell contain representations of the devil and tormenting beasts, with, according to Young, "animal-like body parts and cloven hoofs [as they] herd naked sinners in chains to be thrown into an upturned monster's mouth".


title: The Cloisters

text: The Guilhem cloisters are inside the museum's upper level and are much smaller than originally built. Its garden contains a central fountain and plants potted in ornate containers, including a 15th-century glazed earthenware vase. The area is covered by a skylight and plate glass panels that conserve heat in the winter months. Rockefeller had initially wanted a high roof and clerestory windows, but was convinced by Joseph Breck, curator of decorative arts at the Metropolitan, to install a skylight. Breck wrote to Rockefeller that "by substituting a skylight for a solid ceiling ... the sculpture is properly illuminated, since the light falls in a natural way; the visitor has the sense of being in the open; and his attention, consequently, is not attracted to the modern superstructure."


title: The Cloisters

text: The Bonnefont cloisters were assembled from several French monasteries, but mostly come from a late 12th-century Cistercian at Bonnefont-en-Comminges, southwest of Toulouse. The abbey was intact until at least 1807, and by the 1850s all of its architectural features had been removed from the site, often for decoration of nearby buildings. Barnard purchased the stonework in 1937. Today the Bonnefont cloisters contain 21 double capitals, and surround a garden that contains many features typical of the medieval period, including a central wellhead, raised flower beds and lined with wattle fences. The marbles are highly ornate and decorated, some with grotesque figures. The inner garden has been set with a medlar tree of the type found in "The Hunt of the Unicorn" tapestries, and is centered around a wellhead placed at Bonnefont-en-Comminges in the 12th century. The Bonnefont is on the upper level of the museum and gives a view of the Hudson River and the cliffs of the Palisades.


title: The Cloisters

text: The Trie cloisters was compiled from two late 15th- to early 16th-century French structures. Most of its components came from the Carmelite convent at Trie-sur-Baïse in south-western France, whose original abbey, except for the church, was destroyed by Huguenots in 1571. Small narrow buttresses were added in New York during the 1950s by Breck. The rectangular garden hosts around 80 species of plants and contains a tall limestone cascade fountain at its center. Like those from Saint-Guilhem, the Trie cloisters have been given modern roofing.


title: The Cloisters

text: The convent at Trie-sur-Baïse featured some 80 white marble capitals carved between 1484 and 1490. Eighteen were moved to New York and contain numerous biblical scenes and incidents from the lives of saints. Several of the carvings are secular, including those of legendary figures such as Saint George and the Dragon, the "wild man" confronting a grotesque monster, and a grotesque head wearing an unusual and fanciful hat. The capitals are placed in chronological order, beginning with God in the act of creation at the northwest corner, Adam and Eve in the west gallery, followed by the Binding of Isaac, and Matthew and John writing their gospels. Capitals in the south gallery illustrate scenes from the life of Christ.


title: The Cloisters

text: The Cloisters' three gardens, the Judy Black Garden at the Cuxa Cloister on the main level, and the Bonnefont and Trie Cloisters gardens on the lower level, were laid out and planted in 1938. They contain a variety of rare medieval species, with a total of over 250 genera of plants, flowers, herbs and trees, making it one of the world's most important collections of specialized gardens. The garden's design was overseen by Rorimer during the museum's construction. He was aided by Margaret B. Freeman, who conducted extensive research into the keeping of plants and their symbolism in the Middle Ages. Today the gardens are tended by a staff of horticulturalists; the senior members are also historians of 13th- and 14th-century gardening techniques.


title: The Cloisters

text: The Gothic chapel is set on the museum's ground level, and was built to display its stained glass and large sculpture collections. The entrance from the upper level Early Gothic Hall is lit by stained glass double-lancet windows, carved on both sides, and acquired from the church of La Tricherie, France. The ground level is entered through a large door at its east wall. This entrance begins with a pointed Gothic arch leading to high bayed ceilings, ribbed vaults and buttress. The three center windows are from the church of Sankt Leonhard, in southern Austria, from c. 1340. The glass panels include a depiction of Martin of Tours as well as complex medallion patterns. The glass on the east wall comes from Evron Abbey, Normandy, and dates from around 1325. The apse contains three large sculptures by the main windows; two larger than life-size female saints dating from the 14th century, and a Burgundian Bishop dating from the 13th. The large limestone sculpture of Saint Margaret on the wall by the stairs dates to around 1330 and is from the church of in Lleida, Catalonia.


title: The Cloisters

text: Each of the six effigies are supreme examples of sepulchral art. Three are from the in Catalonia. The monument directly facing the main windows is the c. 1248–67 sarcophagus of Jean d'Alluye, a knight of the crusades, who was thought to have returned from the Holy Land with a relic of the True Cross. He is shown as a young man, his eyes open, and dressed in chain armor, with his longsword and shield. The female effigy of a lady, found in Normandy, dates to the mid 13th century and is perhaps of Margaret of Gloucester. Although resting on a modern base, she is dressed in high contemporary aristocratic fashion, including a mantle, cotte, jewel-studded belt and an elaborate ring necklace brooch.


title: The Cloisters

text: Four of the effigies were made for the Urgell family, are set into the chapel walls, and are associated with the church of Santa Maria at Castello de Farfanya, redesigned in the Gothic style for Ermengol X (died c. 1314). The elaborate sarcophagus of Ermengol VII, Count of Urgell (d. 1184) is placed on the left hand wall facing the chapel's south windows. It is supported by three stone lions, and a grouping of mourners carved into the slab, which also shows Christ in Majesty flanked by the Twelve Apostles. The three other Urgell tombs also date to the mid 13th century, and maybe of Àlvar of Urgell and his second wife, Cecilia of Foix, the parents of Ermengol X, and that of a young boy, possibly Ermengol IX, the only one of their direct line ancestors known to have died in youth. The slabs of the double tomb on the wall opposite Ermengol VII, contain the effigies of his parents, and have been slanted forward to offer a clear view of the stonework. The heads are placed on cushions, which are decorated with arms. The male's feet rest on a dog, while the cushion under the woman's head is held by an angel.


title: The Cloisters

text: The Fuentidueña chapel is the museum's largest room, and is entered through a broad oak door flanked by sculptures that include leaping animals. Its centerpiece is the Fuentidueña Apse, a semicircular Romanesque recess built between about 1175 to 1200 at the Saint Joan church at Fuentidueña, Segovia. By the 19th century, the church was long abandoned and in disrepair.


title: The Cloisters

text: It was acquired by Rockefeller for the Cloisters in 1931, following three decades of complex negotiation and diplomacy between the Spanish church and both countries' art-historical hierarchies and governments. It was eventually exchanged in a deal that involved the transfer of six frescoes from San Baudelio de Berlanga to the Prado, on an equally long-term loan. The structure was disassembled into almost 3,300 mostly sandstone and limestone blocks, each individually cataloged, and shipped to New York in 839 crates.


title: The Cloisters

text: It was rebuilt at the Cloisters in the late 1940s It was such a large and complex reconstruction that it required the demolition of the former "Special Exhibition Room". The chapel was opened to the public in 1961, seven years after its installation had begun.


title: The Cloisters

text: The apse consists of a broad arch leading to a barrel vault, and culminates with a half-dome. The capitals at the entrance contain representations of the Adoration of the Magi and Daniel in the lions' den. The piers show Martin of Tours on the left and the angel Gabriel announcing to The Virgin on the right. The chapel includes other, mostly contemporary, medieval artwork. They include, in the dome, a large fresco dating to between 1130 and 1150, from the Spanish Church of Sant Joan de Tredòs. The fresco's colorization resembles a Byzantine mosaic and is dedicated to the ideal of Mary as the mother of God. Hanging within the apse is a crucifix made between about 1150 to 1200 for the in Astudillo, Spain. Its reverse contains a depiction of the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), decorated with red and blue foliage at its frames. The exterior wall holds three small, narrow and stilted windows, which are nevertheless designed to let in the maximum amount of light. The windows were originally set within imposing fortress walls; according to the art historian Bonnie Young "these small windows and the massive, fortress-like walls contribute to the feeling of austerity ... typical of Romanesque churches."


title: The Cloisters

text: The Langon chapel is on the museum's ground level. Its right wall was built around 1126 for the Romanesque Cathédrale Notre-Dame-du-Bourg de Digne. The chapter house consists of a single aisle nave and transepts taken from a small Benedictine parish church built around 1115 at Notre Dame de Pontaut. When acquired, it was in disrepair, its upper level in use as a storage place for tobacco. About three-quarters of its original stonework was moved to New York.


title: The Cloisters

text: The chapel is entered from the Romanesque hall through a doorway, a large, elaborate French Gothic stone entrance commissioned by the Burgundian court for Moutiers-Saint-Jean Abbey in Burgundy, France. Moutiers-Saint-Jean was sacked, burned, and rebuilt several times. In 1567, the Huguenot army removed the heads from the two kings, and in 1797 the abbey was sold as rubble for rebuilding. The site lay in ruin for decades and lost further sculptural elements until Barnard arranged for the entrances' transfer to New York. The doorway had been the main portal of the abbey, and was probably built as the south transept door.


title: The Cloisters

text: Carvings on the elaborate white oolitic limestone doorway depict the Coronation of the Virgin and contains foliated capitals and statuettes on the outer piers; including two kings positioned in the embrasures and various kneeling angels. Carvings of angels are placed in the archivolts above the kings. The large figurative sculptures on either side of the doorway represent the early Frankish kings Clovis I (d. 511) and his son Chlothar I (d. 561). The piers are lined with elaborate and highly detailed rows of statuettes, which are mostly set in niches, and are badly damaged; most have been decapitated. The heads on the right hand capital were for a time believed to represent Henry II of England. Seven capitals survive from the original church, with carvings of human figures or heads, some of which as have been identified as historical persons, including Eleanor of Aquitaine.


title: The Cloisters

text: The Romanesque hall contains three large church doorways, with the main visitor entrance adjoining the Guilhem Cloister. The monumental arched Burgundian doorway is from Moutier-Saint-Jean de Réôme in France and dates to c. 1150. Two animals are carved into the keystones; both rest on their hind legs as if about to attack each other. The capitals are lined with carvings of both real and imagined animals and birds, as well as leaves and other fauna. The two earlier doorways are from Reugny, Allier, and Poitou in central France. The hall contains four large early-13th-century stone sculptures representing the Adoration of the Magi, frescoes of a lion and a wyvern, each from the Monastery of San Pedro de Arlanza in north-central Spain. On the left of the room are portraits of kings and angels, also from the monastery at Moutier-Saint-Jean. The hall contains three pairs of columns positioned over an entrance with molded archivolts. They were taken from the Augustinian church at Reugny. The Reugny site was badly damaged during the French Wars of Religion and again during the French Revolution. Most of the structures had been sold to a local man, Piere-Yon Verniere, by 1850, and were acquired by Barnard in 1906.


title: The Cloisters

text: The Treasury room was opened in 1988 to celebrate the museum's 50th anniversary. It largely consists of small luxury objects acquired by the Met after it had built its initial collection, and draws heavily on acquisitions from the collection of Joseph Brummer. The rooms contains the museum's collection of illuminated manuscripts, the French 13th-century arm-shaped silver reliquary, and a 15th-century deck of playing cards.


title: The Cloisters

text: The Cloisters contains one of the Metropolitan's 13 libraries. Focusing on medieval art and architecture, it holds over 15,000 volumes of books and journals, the museum's archive administration papers, curatorial papers, dealer records and the personal papers of Barnard, as well as early glass lantern slides of museum materials, manuscript facsimiles, scholarly records, maps and recordings of musical performances at the museum. The library functions primarily as a resource for museum staff, but is available by appointment to researchers, art dealers, academics and students. The archives contain early sketches and blueprints made during the early design phase of the museum's construction, as well as historical photographic collections. These include photographs of medieval objects from the collection of George Joseph Demotte, and a series taken during and just after World War II showing damage sustained to monuments and artifacts, including tomb effigies. They are, according to curator Lauren Jackson-Beck, of "prime importance to the art historian who is concerned with the identification of both the original work and later areas of reconstruction". Two important series of prints are kept on microfilm: the "Index photographique de l'art en France" and the German "Marburg Picture Index".


title: The Cloisters

text: The Cloisters is governed by the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan's collections are owned by a private corporation of about 950 fellows and benefactors. The board of trustees comprise 41 elected members, several officials of the City of New York, and persons honored as trustees by the museum. The current chairman of the board is the businessman and art collector Daniel Brodsky, who was elected in 2011, having previously served on its Real Estate Council in 1984 as a trustee of the museum and Vice Chairman of the Buildings Committee.


title: The Cloisters

text: A specialist museum, the Cloisters regularly acquires new works and rarely sells or otherwise gets rid of them. While the Metropolitan does not publish separate figures for the Cloisters, the entity as a whole spent $39 million on acquisitions for the fiscal year ending in June 2012. The Cloisters seeks to balance its collection between religious and secular artifacts and artworks. With secular pieces, it typically favors those that indicate the range of artistic production in the medieval period, and according to art historian Timothy Husband, "reflect the fabric of daily [medieval European] life but also endure as works of art in their own right". In 2011 it purchased the then-recently discovered "The Falcon's Bath", a Southern Netherlands tapestry dated c. 1400–1415. It is of exceptional quality, and one of the best preserved surviving examples of its type. Other recent acquisitions of significance include the 2015 purchase of a Book of Hours attributed to Simon Bening.


title: The Cloisters

text: The museum's architectural settings, atmosphere, and acoustics have made it a regular setting both for musical recitals and as a stage for medieval theater. Notable stagings include "The Miracle of Theophilus" in 1942, and John Gassner's adaption of "The Second Shepherds' Play" in 1954. Recent significant exhibitions include "Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures" which ran in the summer of 2017 in conjunction with the Art Gallery of Ontario and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.


title: The Cloisters

text: Since it opened in 1938, The Cloisters has been featured and referenced in many works of popular culture. One of the more prominent uses of the Cloisters as a setting took place in 1948, when director Maya Deren used its ramparts as a backdrop for her experimental film "Meditation on Violence". That year, German director William Dieterle used the Cloisters as the location for a convent school in his film "Portrait of Jennie". The 1968 film "Coogan's Bluff" used the site's pathways and lanes for a scenic motorcycle chase. In the 2021 Steven Spielberg film "West Side Story", Maria (Rachel Zegler) and Tony (Ansel Elgort) go to the Cloisters on a date.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1990 American satirical black comedy film directed and produced by Brian De Palma and starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Kim Cattrall and Morgan Freeman. The screenplay, written by Michael Cristofer, was adapted from the best-selling 1987 novel of the same name by Tom Wolfe.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: The film was a box office bomb, grossing just $15 million against its $47 million budget. The controversies surrounding the film were detailed in the 1991 book "The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood", by Julie Salamon.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: Sherman McCoy is a Wall Street bond trader who makes millions while enjoying the good life and the sexual favors of Maria Ruskin, a Southern belle gold digger. Sherman and Maria are driving back to Maria's apartment from JFK Airport when they take a wrong turn on the expressway and find themselves in the "war-zone" of the South Bronx.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: They are approached by two black youths after Sherman gets out of the car to move a tire out of the road. He jumps back into the car and Maria guns the engine in reverse, running over one of the teenagers and they drive away. Sherman initially wants to report the incident to the police, but Maria immediately talks him out of it, fearing that their affair would be publicly exposed.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: Meanwhile, alcoholic journalist Peter Fallow, anxious for a story to make good with his editor, comes upon the hit-and-run case as a rallying point for the black community calling upon Jewish district attorney Abe Weiss, who is the Bronx District Attorney seeking re-election. According to Judge Leonard White, almost all of DA Weiss' prosecutions end up with black and Puerto Rican defendants going to prison and Weiss is seeking a white defendant for purposes of convincing the minority-majority community that he is worth re-electing.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: Weiss recognizes the press coverage inherent in prosecuting the callow Sherman, who has been discovered as the owner of the car, and therefore presumed to be the hit-and-run driver, in order to cultivate the image as an avenger for the minorities and be propelled to the mayorship of New York City. As Sherman is brought to his knees, New York City fragments into different factions who use the case to suit their own cynical purposes.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: Finally, Sherman is left without any allies to support him except for the sympathetic Judge Leonard White and the remorseful Fallow. Fallow gains a tremendous advantage and insight into the case when he is dating a woman who is the sub-letting landlord of Maria's apartment, and knows of secret recordings of conversations in the apartment made by the building owners to prove that the woman is not in fact living in the rent-controlled apartment herself. She discovers information about the McCoy case (where Maria states she was driving the car), which she gives to Fallow, who in turn covertly supplies it to McCoy's defense attorney.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: Sherman gets his hands on a tape and plays the recording in court, where it reveals Maria directly contradicting the evidence she has just given, showing she has been perjuring herself and causing her to faint. Sherman plays the tape on a tape recorder inside his briefcase connected to a small loudspeaker that he holds on the desk.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: When the judge orders that he approach the bench with this evidence, he asserts that the tape is his (making it admissible evidence), resulting in his acquittal. The people in the court go into an uproar, to which Judge White launches into a tirade that they have no right to act self-righteous and smarmy, or that they are above Sherman, considering Reverend Bacon claims to help disadvantaged New Yorkers but actually engages in race baiting, or that the District Attorney Weiss pushed this case not in the interest of justice but in the interest of appealing to minority voters to further his political career by appealing to their desire to "get even". After the Judge made his point, he begs the people to be decent and change their ways, letting Sherman go.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: A year later, a large audience is applauding the premiere of Fallow's book. Fallow says that Sherman McCoy has moved away from New York City to an unknown destination, presumably to live in obscurity.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: In addition, George Plimpton has a credited cameo appearance, Geraldo Rivera has an uncredited cameo appearance, and Hanks's wife Rita Wilson has a small but intense role as the PR woman at the beginning of the movie.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: The novel of "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was a bestseller. Warner Bros. bought the rights from author Tom Wolfe for $750,000.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: The film's production was plagued by controversy. Among them were the acting choices. When the project was first pitched and Mike Nichols was attached as the original director, he wanted Steve Martin for the role of Sherman McCoy, but the studio rejected it because they thought Martin was too old for the role. Tom Wolfe wanted Chevy Chase for McCoy. Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise and Christopher Reeve were also considered for the role.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: Brian DePalma ultimately came on board to direct and offered the role of Peter Fallow to both Jack Nicholson and John Cleese (Fallow was English in the novel), but both actors turned down the role. When De Palma was unable to deliver an actor, the studio forced him to cast Bruce Willis, who had starred in the successful 1988 film "Die Hard".


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: Walter Matthau was initially offered the role of the judge, but demanded a fee of $1 million. The producers balked at meeting his price and signed Alan Arkin instead for a modest $150,000. Arkin was then replaced by Morgan Freeman when the studio decided to change the judge's ethnicity from Jewish to African American in order to respond to criticism of the film's racial politics, and dialogue was added to have the judge denounce the manipulative actions of the main characters. De Palma said he "didn't want to racially polarize" the film by having "a white judge talking morality to a basically black audience." Arkin refused to waive his payment after being recast. Edward James Olmos was also considered for the role of the judge.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: F. Murray Abraham, who had a significant part in the film, chose not to be credited because of a contract dispute. When he was denied the billing above the title that he had requested, he took his name off the picture.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: De Palma wanted Uma Thurman to play Maria Ruskin. Thurman tested for the role, but Tom Hanks felt that she wasn't right for the part and, eventually, Melanie Griffith was cast instead.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: The studio made significant changes to the source material, making Sherman McCoy more sympathetic and adding a subplot involving a minor character, Judge Leonard White (eventually played by Freeman).


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: In one notable scene in the film, Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith) arrives in New York on an Air France Concorde. The film's Second Unit Director, Eric Schwab, calculated the time and day when a runway at JFK would line up exactly with the setting sun, to serve as a backdrop, and managed to film in the single 30-second time period when this occurs in any given year, while winning a bet that he could make the scene an essential part of the movie. The 5-camera shot cost $80,000 and lasted just 10 seconds in the final cut. Schwab also directed the opening title shot—an almost equally elaborate and expensive set-up requiring a 24-hour timelapse of Manhattan, from a camera platform beside a gargoyle on top of the Chrysler Building.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: Several of the sets parodied the home decorated by Robert Denning and Vincent Fourcade for Carolyne Roehm and Henry Kravis.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: The cover of Peter Fallow's book in the film has a similar design to the original first edition of Tom Wolfe's novel from 1987.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: Cristofer's original script ended cynically with the supposed victim of the hit-and-run walking out of the hospital, suggesting that the whole scenario was concocted. That ending did not test well with audiences and was dropped.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: Sherman and Judy McCoy's luxury apartment was built on the Warner Bros. stage in Burbank, designed by Richard Sylbert. The Park Avenue exteriors were shot on location late at night, using rain effects and a prop phone booth. The lobby scenes were shot at 77 Park Avenue.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: The courthouse interior scenes were shot at Queens County Courthouse, at night. Courthouse exteriors were at the Mario Merola Building / Bronx County Courthouse. The subway entrance was fake — there is no subway station there. Another courthouse scene showing a riot in slow-motion had been shot at the Essex County Courthouse in Newark but was omitted from the film following negative reactions from test screenings.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: The 330-second Steadicam shot of Peter Fallow arriving at the Palm Court of the Winter Garden was a "tour de force" for operator Larry McConkey. He had to track backwards, get on a golf cart, ride it for , get off it again, track backwards , get into the elevator, get out again, and track for another .


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: The film itself was a critical and commercial flop when it was released. It cost an estimated US$47 million to make, but initially grossed just over US$15 million at the US box office, making it a huge box office bomb.


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: Critical reception was largely negative. The film scores a 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 52 reviews. The critical consensus reads: ""The Bonfire of the Vanities" is a vapid adaptation of a thoughtful book, fatally miscast and shorn of the source material's crucial sense of irony. Add it to the pyre of Hollywood's ambitious failures." In Leonard Maltin's annual "Movie Guide" publication, the film was given a "BOMB" rating, and described as an "appallingly heavy-handed 'comedy'".


title: The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)

text: In its review, "Variety" magazine stated, "the caricatures are so crude and the 'revelations' so unenlightening of the human condition that the satire is about as socially incisive as an entry in the "Police Academy" series." Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" denounced "Brian De Palma's gross, unfunny movie adaptation." Owen Gleiberman of "Entertainment Weekly" called it, "one of the most indecently bad movies of the year." Rita Kempley of "The Washington Post" stated "the director has become one with the buffoons Wolfe scored in his bestseller. He has not only filed Wolfe's teeth but stuck his tail between his legs," and called the film "a calamity of miscasting and commercial concessions". In "Rolling Stone", Peter Travers wrote, "On film, "Bonfire" achieves a consistency of ineptitude rare even in this era of over-inflated cinematic air bags." Gene Siskel, in "The Chicago Tribune", wrote "preview audiences have hooted the film's revisionist ending, which concludes with a sermon. I didn't hoot because I was too sad. I gave up on the movie well before the ending." In her review for the "Los Angeles Times", Sheila Benson called the film, "an overstated, cartooned film for dullards". Steven Rea of "The Philadelphia Inquirer", wrote "Big books have been bastardized by Hollywood before it's a time-honored tradition that counts Hemingway, Faulkner and the scribes of the Old Testament among its victims but you'd be hard-pressed to find an adaptation that screws up as royally as Brian De Palma's take on "The Bonfire of the Vanities". Miscast, misguided and miserably unfunny, Tom Wolfe's black satire about avarice, prejudice and criminal injustice in the loony-toon town of New York has been raped and stripped of all ambiguity and dimension", and he ended the review by saying, "What a mess".