History

George Barnard’s 1907 rescue of Cuxa’s cloister, motivated by genuine alarm at the ongoing physical destruction of a major surviving Romanesque monument, exemplifies a specific and consequential pattern of early-20th-century American collecting in which wealthy individuals and institutions actively purchased and relocated entire architectural ensembles from Europe — a practice that, whatever its debatable ethics by contemporary heritage-preservation standards, in Cuxa’s specific case demonstrably saved genuine medieval fabric that might otherwise have continued disintegrating or being scattered as ordinary building material across rural France. John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s subsequent 1938 expansion, transforming Barnard’s original private exhibit into the fully institutionalised Cloisters museum within the Metropolitan Museum of Art, situates the Cuxa cloister within one of the most historically significant assemblages of relocated medieval European architecture anywhere in North America.

The abbey’s own 1919 refoundation and subsequent Cistercian restoration, occurring in parallel with its most famous architectural feature’s permanent relocation to New York, gives Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa a genuinely unusual dual identity: a still-active French monastic community occupying a partially reconstructed medieval site, while the cloister’s most celebrated original stonework remains permanently installed thousands of miles away as a major American museum’s namesake centrepiece — two institutions, one in rural Pyrenean France and one in Manhattan, both claiming meaningful connection to the same medieval monastic heritage.