Ny Times

Dressed to Kill, From Head to Toe
Met Show Recalls Bashford Dean, Armor Curator
The Metropolitan Museum began collecting arms and armor almost as soon as it began collecting paintings, and in manycases the donors were the same. The baronial impulse that drove rich Americans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to hang old masters in the dining room also encouraged them to display suits ofarmor in the front hall. William Randolph Hearst, one of the most enthusiastic collectors, had an entire armory in his Riverside Drive penthouse: enough pikes, halberds, helms, hauberks, greaves,gauntlets, cuisses and cuirasses to outfit a crusade.

Arms and armor officially became a department at the Met in 1912, and the museum is commemorating this centennial and the department’s foundingcurator with a small exhibition, “Bashford Dean and the Creation of the Arms and Armor Department,” that opened on Tuesday in the Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Gallery. (Mr. Sulzberger, the former publisher ofThe New York Times who died last week, was another newspaperman with a fondness for arms and weaponry.) Most of the objects on display are not remarkable — or not when compared with some of the morespectacular hardware in the galleries nearby: the four mounted knights cantering down the middle of the Bloomberg Court, say, or the two side-by-side, before-and-after suits of armor made for HenryVIII, one when he was young and slender and another when he was fat and gouty.

A couple of the pieces in the Bashford Dean show are not even authentic. They’re replicas — very good ones — that werefabricated in a sort of chop shop that Dean established at the Met for repairing armor that was broken or dinged and replacing parts of an armor set that were missing. Most of the other objects — somehelmets, breastplates, a couple of swords — all of which are connected to Bashford Dean in one way or another, are stuff that the Met, whose armorial holdings are vast, seldom bothers to take out of...