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Approximately 40 exquisite photographs of a bygone era, taken by one of photography's great early artists, will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from January 15 through April 21, 2002. Benjamin Brecknell Turner: Rural England Through a Victorian Lens presents an impressive series of large-format scenes depicting quintessentially English subjects: ruined castles and abbeys; thatched barns, crumbling cottages and half-timbered houses; woodland paths and ancient oaks. Turner's picturesque and poetic images reveal a rough-hewn beauty in rustic subjects and express a moral value found in tradition, nature, and rural life and labor.
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Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy will be the first full-scale exhibition devoted to Caravaggio's most gifted follower, Orazio Gentileschi, and to Orazio's celebrated daughter, Artemisia. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from February 14 through May 12, 2002, the exhibition will feature approximately 50 works by Orazio and 35 by Artemisia, and will be the first exhibition to treat these two remarkable artists in depth.
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A major traveling exhibition of ancient Chinese art from Sichuan will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 6, 2002. Featuring a spectacular selection of works of art, Treasures from a Lost Civilization: Ancient Chinese Art from Sichuan explores the fascinating world of the art, material culture, and spiritual life of ancient Sichuan, and illustrates the fundamental changes that archaeology has brought to our understanding of the history of Chinese art.
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Sphinx and crocodile, magnificent colossi, and delicate hieroglyphs are but a few of the treasures to be found in Along the Nile: Early Photographs of Egypt, an exhibition of 43 exquisitely preserved 19th-century photographs of one of the world's oldest and most mysterious civilizations. On view from September 11 through December 30 in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Howard Gilman Gallery, these early camera images of Egypt's landscapes, inhabitants, and dramatically imposing monuments—from Cairo to sand-swept Nubia—are drawn from the renowned Gilman Paper Company Collection as well as from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.
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The grand imperial vision, refinement, and opulence for which the Mughal rulers of India (1526-1858) were renowned found ultimate expression in their jeweled arts. In a dazzling display opening to the public on October 18, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present "Treasury of the World": Jeweled Arts of India in the Age of the Mughals, a landmark exhibition of more than 300 spectacular examples of Mughal and other related jeweled objects from The al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait National Museum. The presentation at the Metropolitan is a pioneering effort to show Mughal-period jeweled arts, for which The al-Sabah Collection is unrivaled in scope and scale.
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Over time and across cultures, extraordinary manipulations of the body have occurred as concepts of beauty have continued to evolve. Extreme Beauty:
The Body Transformed – an exhibition opening December 6 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art – will offer a unique opportunity to see fashion as the practice of some of the most extreme methods to conform to shifting concepts of the physical ideal. Various zones of the body – neck, shoulders, bust, waist, hips, and feet – have been constricted, padded, truncated, or extended through a variety of techniques. The more than 100 costumes and accessories in the exhibition – ranging from a 16th-century iron corset to Thierry Mugler's notorious "Motorcycle" bustier – will be augmented by anthropological and ethnographic examples and by paintings, prints, and drawings, including caricatures by Gilray, Cruikshank, Daumier and Vernet.
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To complement the major exhibition Signac 1863-1935: Master Neo-Impressionist, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present paintings, drawings, and watercolors – selected entirely from the Museum's own collections – by Charles Angrand, Henri-Edmond Cross, Maximilien Luce, Hippolyte Petitjean and other artists who, like Paul Signac, exuberantly followed the groundbreaking techniques of optical painting introduced in the 1880s by Georges Seurat. On view at the Metropolitan from October 2 through December 30, 2001, Neo-Impressionism: The Circle of Paul Signac will feature some 60 works by these artists as well as by the better-known Signac and Seurat.
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Dress Rehearsal: Origins of The Costume Institute – opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on August 1 – is the second of the two-part installation (the pendent to Curios and Treasures) surveying one of the world's largest and most renowned costume collections. Costume collecting at the Metropolitan began in 1946 with the transfer of the collection of the former Museum of Costume Art, which had been founded in 1937 by a theater-oriented group of civic leaders under the direction of the New York philanthropist and savant Irene Lewisohn. That collection formed the core of The Costume Institute's now-comprehensive current holdings of more than 80,000 costumes and accessories.
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On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 9 through December 30, 2001,Signac 1863-1935: Master Neo-Impressionist, will be the first major retrospective of the artist's work in nearly 40 years. Best known for his luminous Mediterranean seascapes rendered in a myriad of "dots" – and later mosaic-like squares – of color, Signac adapted the "pointillist" technique of Georges Seurat with stunning visual impact. The exhibition will feature 121 works, including some 70 oils and a rich selection of Signac's watercolors, drawings, and prints, providing an unprecedented overview of the artist's 50-year career.
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Masterpieces of early French photography and groundbreaking modern photographs created since 1960 – both the earliest and most recent chapters in the history of the 160-year-old medium – will be on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition celebrating the first decade of collecting by the Museum's Department of Photographs. Photographs: A Decade of Collecting will open on June 5, 2001.