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In celebration of the new millennium, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Fireworks! Four Centuries of Pyrotechnics in Prints and Drawings, on view June 6 through September 17, 2000. Drawn primarily from the Museum's collection, the exhibition will feature more than 100 prints and drawings depicting fireworks displays from the 16th to the early 20th century. Artists represented will include Antonio Tempesta, Jacques Callot, Claude Lorrain, Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, Jean-Louis Desprez, Francesco Piranesi, Winslow Homer, Edgar Degas, and the lithographers Currier and Ives, among others.
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Photographs by anonymous amateurs whose "happy accidents" and "successful failures" resulted in surprising and tantalizing works of art are the subject of Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 6, 2000. Dating from the 1910s through the 1960s — a period that saw the camera's emergence as a nearly ubiquitous and easy-to-use accessory of modern life — these photographs reflect the spirit of their time in refreshingly honest and often unexpected ways. Although never intended for public display — most of the approximately 90 photographs on view were discovered at flea markets, in shoeboxes, or in family albums — these found images often bring to mind the work of such master photographers as Walker Evans, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus.
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Fifty-three paintings, watercolors, and drawings by 18 of the greatest artists who worked in France in the 19th and early 20th century comprise the Annenberg collection, which will return to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for six months beginning June 6, 2000. This annual event, now in its sixth year, provides an exceptional opportunity for visitors to experience this renowned private collection. The works are shown in the Museum's Nineteenth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries, hung together in three central rooms, surrounded by the Met's own collection of 19th-century European paintings.
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A series of 14 recent etchings by London painter Leon Kossoff (b. 1926) will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning March 28. Based on paintings by the 17th-century French artist Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), the etchings are the result of a period of intense, first-hand study of the Baroque master's canvases during the 1995 Poussin exhibition at London's Royal Academy. After Nicolas Poussin: New Etchings by Leon Kossoff, which will be installed in the North Mezzanine Gallery of the Museum's Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, runs through August 13.
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In celebration of the 300th anniversary of the birth of the 18th-century French artist Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a major loan exhibition of 66 works that will survey the artist's distinguished career as a still-life and genre painter. On view from June 27 through September 3, 2000, Chardin will be the first exhibition in New York devoted to the artist and the first in the United States in more than 20 years.
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A Century of Design, Part II: 1925-1950 — the second in a four-part series of exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art surveying design in the 20th century — will display more than 50 objects from the Museum's collection to demonstrate the dynamic rise of Modernism and its influence on public perception of everyday objects, such as furniture, housewares, and decorative objects. On view in the Museum's Gallery for Modern Design and Architecture from May 9 through October 29, 2000, the exhibition will follow the advancement of design in Europe during the second quarter of the 20th century — from Art Deco through the influences of the Bauhaus school, Functionalism, Russian Constructivism, and organic Scandinavian design.
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American Modern, 1925 — 1940: Design for a New Age, an exhibition tracing the rise of a distinctively American modern design aesthetic through the efforts of approximately 50 of its creative pioneers, will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 16, 2000 through January 7, 2001. Drawn exclusively from the Museum's collection and from the John C. Waddell Collection, a major promised gift to the Metropolitan, this landmark exhibition features more than 150 objects — including furniture, clocks, appliances, posters, textiles, radios, tableware, and even a bathroom sink — by such leading designers as Norman Bel Geddes, Donald Deskey, Paul Frankl, Raymond Loewy, Isamu Noguchi, Eliel Saarinen, Walter Dorwin Teague, Walter von Nessen, and Russel Wright.
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The Metropolitan Museum's series of thematic installations devoted to the art of Paul Klee (1879 — 1940) continues with Klee's Line, on view March 17 through July 9, 2000. The selection of 21 works explores Klee's varied use of line, which evolved over the years from exact naturalism to spidery playfulness to thick contours. In addition, Klee used different types of line for different subjects.
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(March 27, 2000) — The Metropolitan Museum of Art today named Michael Belkin to the post of Chief Technology Officer, effective April 24.
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This press kit for Masterpieces of Japnaese Art from the Mary Griggs Burke Collection includes a general release about the exhibition, immediately following, as well as these four releases, to which you can link by clicking on their titles: