Image: David Hartt Portrait © Ager Carlsen for Pin-Up Magazine. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
David Hartt will transform John Vanderlyn’s monumental painting ‘Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles’ (1818–19) into a contemporary installation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Titled ‘Peripheries,’ the site-specific commission will be on view from September 25, 2026, through February 7, 2027, in Gallery 735 at The Met Fifth Avenue.
Hartt’s installation will combine two Direct View LED screens with film, photography and an original score by composer and musician Jeff Parker. The work is conceived as an architectural intervention within the museum’s circular gallery, using movement, shifting angles of vision and imagery drawn from Vanderlyn’s panorama to recast the experience of the historical painting.
Vanderlyn’s detailed depiction of Versailles is among the largest surviving panoramas in the United States. In Hartt’s project, the 19th-century image becomes the starting point for an examination of place, perspective, representation and cultural memory. The installation brings the historical painting into dialogue with contemporary documentation of Versailles and the changing urban landscape of Paris.
Hartt’s moving-image material was filmed at locations including Versailles, the Boulevard Périphérique and central Paris. The project also draws on photographs of the palace grounds by Eugène Atget and on the cinematic language of French New Wave cinema. Together, these sources connect the formal structure of Vanderlyn’s panorama with later ways of recording and imagining the city.
The title ‘Peripheries’ refers to the installation’s visual and conceptual movement away from established centers toward the margins. At The Met, Hartt’s intervention is intended to redirect visitors’ attention across and beyond the panorama, encouraging alternative views of the French capital and of the histories that are often placed outside dominant accounts. The museum says the installation explores the constant reinvention of the French capital, and opens a space to reconsider representation and cultural memory.
Hartt, a Canadian artist born in 1967, is identified by The Met as a multidisciplinary artist. His commission will occupy the gallery housing Vanderlyn’s work rather than presenting the historical painting as a static backdrop. The result will be a layered encounter between painting, architectural display, moving image, photography and sound.
‘David Hartt: Peripheries’ will be free with museum admission. The exhibition is made possible by Jan and Warren Adelson in honor of Eugénie Prendergast and by The Modern Circle, and will remain on view at The Met Fifth Avenue through February 7, 2027.
