Evergreen Monoliths

Since 1881, visitors approaching the Metropolitan Museum of Art from Central Park have been able to glimpse the towering, tapering form of Cleopatra’s Needle (ca. fifteenth century B.C.), one of two granite obelisks that stood beside a temple to the Egyptian sun god Atum in Heliopolis. In an 1889 letter to his younger brother, Theo, Van Gogh compared this type of ancient monument and its beautiful “lines and proportions” to the modest Mediterranean cypresses of southern France.