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Founded in 1917, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College is one of the finest college or university collections in the United States, serving as an invaluable educational resource for aspiring art scholars. While the museum is closed in 2010 for renovations, 20 of their masterpieces—19 paintings and one sculpture—are on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for five months in the special exhibition Side by Side: Oberlin's Masterworks at the Met. These include the great Ter Brugghen painting Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene (one of the most important North Baroque paintings in the U.S.), Cézanne's Viaduct at l'Estaque, Kirchner's Self-Portrait as a Soldier, and a striking Kirchner sculpture. Each of these works is integrated into the Metropolitan Museum's excellent collection, creating new, provocative juxtapositions.
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A new installation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art explores themes of birthday celebrations and long life in Chinese art. Drawn entirely from the Museum's collection and promised gifts, and on view in The Florence and Herbert Irving Galleries for Chinese Decorative Arts, Celebration: The Birthday in Chinese Art showcases more than 50 works—paintings, garments, and decorative art objects—depicting the birthday and longevity themes that were pervasive in China especially during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. While the earliest work in the installation is a 13th-century painting, most date from the 16th to 18th centuries. Celebration includes several works never before exhibited, including a monumental 18th-century tapestry (kesi) woven in silk and gold with the character for longevity shou as well as a recently acquired lacquer box with mother-of-pearl inlays capturing a party setting and lively boys at play. The installation will remain on view through August 15, 2010.
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The renowned 15th-century sculptors Jean de la Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier labored together for more than 25 years on a grand and complex commission: the tomb of John the Fearless (Jean sans Peur, 1371–1419), the second Duke of Burgundy, and his wife, Margaret of Bavaria, which featured 41 alabaster mourning figures, among other elements. Following the precedent of the mourners carved for the tomb of Philip the Bold, the first Duke of Burgundy, de la Huerta and Le Moiturier created astonishingly realistic and highly individualized pleurants (mourners) that serve as a permanent record of the lavish funeral of one of the richest men in medieval France. The figures express a broad range of powerful emotions—from melancholy to desolation—through facial expression, gesture, and the eloquent draping of garments. The renovation of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, France—where 37 of the statuettes from the tomb of John the Fearless are housed—provides an opportunity for the unprecedented loan of these figures for the exhibition The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy, opening March 2 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first venue in an eight-city tour. Three additional figures from the tomb of John the Fearless (now in the collections of the Louvre, the Musée National du Moyen Âge, and the Cleveland Museum of Art) and three from the tomb of Philip the Bold will also be shown, along with an architectural element (Cleveland Museum of Art and Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, respectively). The installation at the Metropolitan will be supplemented by related works from the Museum's collection, including the monumental Enthroned Virgin from the convent at Poligny (established by John the Fearless and Margaret of Bavaria) that was carved by Claus de Werve.
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The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy
(opening Tuesday, March 2) – an unprecedented loan from the Musée des Beaux Arts in Dijon of 38 dramatic alabaster statuettes, considered among the most sumptuous and innovative of the late Middle Ages.
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In a special presentation at The Cloisters museum and gardens—The Metropolitan Museum of Art's branch devoted to the art and architecture of the Middle Ages—some 30 citizens of Nijmegen (The Netherlands) wearing historically accurate attire based on medieval designs will participate in a lecture demonstration with costume historian Desirée Koslin. The program will take place twice on Sunday, February 28, 2010, at 1:00 p.m. and again at 3:00 p.m., and will focus on 15 different costumes. Although they are of contemporary construction, each unique costume relates to a specific depiction in one of several well-known illuminated manuscripts of the 15th century. Costumes featured in the demonstration will include those that would have been worn by dukes, duchesses, ladies of the court, and merchants, as well as citizens, servants, and peasants. The costumed citizens of Nijmegen will be available for photographs by the public—taken without flash—during the intermission. The event is free with Museum admission.
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A new installation opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on February 6, Mastering the Art of Chinese Painting: Xie Zhiliu (1910-1997) , demonstrates how Chinese artists learned their craft from earlier masterpieces and from nature. It showcases more than 100 works—including paintings, sketches, drawings, calligraphies, and poetry manuscripts—by Xie Zhiliu (pronounced "shay jer leo"), one of modern China's leading artists and connoisseurs. It also marks the centenary of his birth. A number of his sketches and copies will be accompanied by photographs of the works that inspired him and by his own completed works, in order to trace how he developed his unique style. Drawn primarily from a recent gift to the Metropolitan Museum from the artist's daughter Sarah Shay, the works on view comprise the first solo exhibition of Xie Zhiliu's works to be organized outside China.
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A unique window into the lavish French courts of the Valois dukes of Burgundy and Berry will be offered at The Metropolitan Museum of Art this spring with the simultaneous opening, on March 2, of two landmark exhibitions: The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry and The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculpture from the Court of Burgundy. The former features the exquisitely illustrated pages of a luxurious prayer book that belonged to Jean de Berry (1340–1416); the latter shows expressive alabaster figures from the tomb of his nephew, John the Fearless (Jean sans Peur, 1371–1419).
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In the 1860s and 1870s, long before the embrace of collage techniques by avant-garde artists of the early 20th century, aristocratic Victorian women were experimenting with photocollage. Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art February 2 – May 9, 2010, is the first exhibition to comprehensively examine this little-known phenomenon. Whimsical and fantastical Victorian photocollages, created using a combination of watercolor drawings and cut-and-pasted photographs, reveal the educated minds as well as accomplished hands of their makers. With subjects as varied as new theories of evolution, the changing role of photography, and the strict conventions of aristocratic society, the photocollages frequently debunked stuffy Victorian clichés with surreal, subversive, and funny images. Featuring 48 works from public and private collections—including many that have rarely or never been exhibited before—Playing with Pictures will provide a fascinating window into the creative possibilities of photography in the 19th century.
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Sounding the Pacific: Musical Instruments of Oceania, the first exhibition devoted to the subject ever mounted by an art museum, will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on November 17. Featuring more than 50 outstanding works—including percussion, wind, and string instruments and forms unique to the Pacific—the exhibition will explore not only the diverse forms of Oceanic musical instruments but also the many different roles they play, or played, in Pacific cultures, from announcing the onset of war, to embodying the voices of supernatural beings or softly enticing a lover. Drawn primarily from the Museum's collection, the exhibition will showcase the objects that were created and used from the early 19th to the late 20th century in all five regions of Oceania: Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia, Australia, and Island Southeast Asia. The works on view include instruments ranging from small flutes and ocarinas used for private entertainment or courtship, to massive slit gongs played in performances for entire communities, in which the thundering beats can carry for miles.
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North Italian Drawings, 1410–1550: Selections from the Robert Lehman Collection and the Department of Drawings and Prints, on view from November 3, 2009–January 31, 2010, features 31 exceedingly rare drawings from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Robert Lehman Collection, with an additional nine chosen from the Department of Drawings and Prints. The installation showcases a period in Italian art that saw the emergence of drawing as an essential tool for artists and includes a selection of works that illustrate the versatility of the medium over more than a century. Drawings from the later 15th century show how artists used the medium to work out elaborate, multi-figured compositions, and several works from the 16th century reveal the close relationship between drawing and painting.
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Photographs are often perceived as transparent windows onto a three-dimensional world. Yet photographs also have their own material presence as physical objects. Contemporary artists who exploit this apparent contradiction between photograph as window and photograph as object are featured in Surface Tension: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 15, 2009, through May 16, 2010. The exhibition presents 30 works that play with the inherent tension between the flatness of the photograph and the often lifelike illusion of depth.
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From the decade before the Revolution to the eve of World War I, many of America's most acclaimed painters captured in their finest works the temperament of their respective eras. They recorded and defined the emerging character of Americans as individuals, citizens, and members of ever-widening communities. Opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art this fall, American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915 will bring together for the first time more than 100 of these iconic pictures that tell compelling stories of life's tasks and pleasures. The first overview of the subject in more than 35 years, the exhibition includes loans from leading museums and private lenders—and many paintings from the Metropolitan's own distinguished collection. American Stories features masterpieces by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Sloan, and George Bellows, and notable works by some of their key colleagues.
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"What Japan was, she owed to the samurai. They were not only the flower of the nation but its root as well." From Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe (1907)
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The Du Paquier ceramic manufactory, founded by Claudius Innocentius du Paquier in Vienna in 1718, was only the second factory in Europe able to make true porcelain in the manner of the Chinese. This small porcelain enterprise developed a highly distinctive style that remained Baroque in inspiration throughout the history of the factory, which was taken over by the State in 1744. Imperial Privilege: Vienna Porcelain of Du Paquier, 1718–44, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 21, 2010, charts the history of the development of the Du Paquier factory, setting its production within the historic and cultural context of Vienna in the first half of the 18th century. The exhibition features more than 100 works, half drawn from the Metropolitan Museum's superb collection, and half from the premier private collection of this material.
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The first comprehensive exhibition of Luo Ping's paintings ever presented in America, Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733-1799) will bring together nearly 60 works, including many Chinese "National Treasures," by one of the most celebrated painters in 18th-century China. Complemented by 27 pieces from American collections, this momentous international-loan exhibition will reveal the range and brilliance of the artist's vision as well as his place among his peers. Highlights of the exhibition will include the sensational handscroll Ghost Amusements (ca. 1766)—one of the best known paintings in the late imperial China—depicting the world of ghosts that, he claimed, he had seen with his own eyes. The youngest of the so-called "Eight Eccentrics," a group of highly individualistic artists active in the prosperous metropolis of Yanzhou, Luo Ping was an extraordinary artist, whose works influenced the course of later Chinese painting.
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Although lacquer is used in many Asian cultures, the art of carving lacquer is unique to China. Showcasing some 50 wondrously wrought examples, Cinnabar: The Chinese Art of Carved Lacquer, opening on August 6, will explore the development of this important artistic tradition from the 13th to the 18th century. Drawn from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's holdings as well as the collection of Florence and Herbert Irving, the installation will feature a number of masterworks, including newly acquired, rare 13th-century lacquer boxes for holding incense or cosmetics, and a recently restored eight-panel screen depicting a birthday celebration in an elaborate private compound. Dated 1773, this screen has never before been exhibited in public.