The Subway Sun/Free Concerts
Artist
Fred Cooper
United States, 1883 - 1962
Date1938
MediumOffset Lithograph
Dimensions16 1/4 x 22 in. (41.3 x 55.9 cm)
ClassificationsPoster
Credit LinePoster House Permanent Collection
Object numberPH.8045
DescriptionThe Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) opened New York City’s original underground subway line in October 1904. In order to entice people to regularly use the subway, the IRT printed two in-car poster campaigns, The Elevated Express and The Subway Sun, that highlighted each borough’s unique attractions.This edition of The Subway Sun, designed by Fred Cooper, advertises The Metropolitan Museum of Art (popularly known as the Met). The Met opened at its current location on Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street in 1880 with the goal of bringing art from around the world to the American people. As New York’s elite moved further uptown during this decade, Fifth Avenue developed into a residential row surrounded by parks and museums. Starting in 1918, the New York Symphony Society (now the New York Symphony Orchestra) began hosting an annual season of free concerts at the Met. These were tremendously popular and attended by tens of thousands of visitors. During the Depression, the Met offered a series of extension programs, partnering with community organizations to bring parts of its collection to the wider New York City population. These traveling exhibitions, known as Neighborhood Circulating Exhibitions, were presented in public libraries, high schools, colleges, and settlement houses. The initiative was largely successful and expanded over the course of nine years, ending in 1942. Cooper situates the visitors here in the Ancient Near Eastern Art gallery between two Lamassu (monumental winged lions with human heads)—some of the most prized objects in the collection. The statues were given to the Met by John D. Rockefeller in 1932, an exceptional acquisition acknowledged by one visitor’s expression of awe.
On View
Not on view
