BELLES LETTRES
I knew there would be trouble when, in 2013, The Metropolitan Museum of Art hired a Chief Digital Officer and abandoned its metal admission pins. Then, in February 2016, to coincide with the opening of the The Met Breuer, the museum unveiled a new brand identity, adopting “The Met,” spelled out in squat cherry red letters, as its official logo. Designed by Wolff Olins, the company that guided the Tate through its phenomenal expansion, the intent was to bring the museum into the twenty-first century.
The new logo, bright and informal, leaves me longing for the DaVinci-style M that served as the museum’s logo, perfectly, for 45 years. That single letter, based on a Renaissance woodcut in the collection by Fra Luca Pacioli, looked as if it had been hand-drafted, with regulating lines and circles sketched finely around it. It was instantly recognizable, and carried rich connotations: history, geometry, mathematics, proportion, rigor, rhythm, beauty.
The new swollen run-on letters are, by comparison, garish. They’re shaped messily and meet messily, like lumps of Play-Doh. What suffers the most are the E’s, whose center strokes tilt upward like trumpets. The lower E even gives over its top left corner to the soft shoulder of the preceding M. And the two T’s are entirely different: the first kicks its little leg to the left, the second to the right. These no longer letters, they’re cartoons. The Met, one of our country’s most storied cultural institution, has reshaped its logo for illiterates.