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Installation of Contemporary Aboriginal Painting Opens at Metropolitan Museum
Sunday, January 3, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
An installation of 14 bold and colorful paintings created by contemporary Aboriginal Australian artists will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on December 15. Drawn from a U. S. private collection, Contemporary Aboriginal Painting from Australia will provide an introduction to Aboriginal painting, which has become Australia's most celebrated contemporary art movement and has attained prominence within the international art world. The installation will present works created primarily over the past decade by artists from the central desert, where the contemporary painting movement began, and from adjoining regions, to which the movement spread. The works on view—all of which have never before been on public display—will feature paintings by prominent artists, including some of the founders of the contemporary movement, as well as emerging figures. This is the first presentation of contemporary Australian Aboriginal painting to be held at the Metropolitan Museum.
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Metropolitan Museum Celebrates 35th Anniversary of Packard Collection Acquisition
Sunday, January 3, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
In 1975, The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired, by gift and purchase, more than 400 works of Japanese art from collector Harry G. C. Packard (1914-1991). This daring acquisition instantly transformed the Museum into an institution with one of the finest collections of its kind in the West, comprised of encyclopedic holdings from the Neolithic period through the 19th century.
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Exhibition Featuring Musical Instruments of Pacific Islands Goes on View at Metropolitan Museum
Sunday, January 3, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
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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Rare North Italian Renaissance Drawings Featured in New Installation at Metropolitan Museum
Sunday, January 3, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
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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Surface Tension at Metropolitan Museum Features Contemporary Photographs from the Collection
Sunday, January 3, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
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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Mythical Architectural Drawings by Contemporary Artist Pablo Bronstein Featured in Fall Exhibition at Metropolitan Museum
Sunday, January 3, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
Pablo Bronstein at the Met is a presentation of new work by the London-based artist, addressing the history and future of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and will be shown at the Museum from October 6, 2009, through February 21, 2010. Several large ink drawings by the artist will suggest a mythical history of the Metropolitan Museum, imagining the building under construction. A series of computer drawings will focus on hypothetical futures of the Museum. This will be the artist's first solo exhibition in New York.
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Marble Sculpture Attributed to Michelangelo on Loan to Metropolitan Museum from French Republic
Sunday, January 3, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
The marble sculpture Young Archer, attributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (Caprese 1475- Rome 1564), is now on view in the Vélez Blanco Patio in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The fragmentary marble figure of a nude youth, which is missing arms and lower legs, was retained previously in the Fifth Avenue mansion that has housed the Cultural Services office of the French Embassy for decades. The sculpture is on special loan to the Metropolitan Museum for ten years from the French Republic, Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs.
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Metropolitan Museum Exhibition Features 100 Iconic American Paintings That Tell Stories of Everyday Life
Sunday, January 3, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
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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Landmark Exhibition Devoted to Art of Samurai Opens at Metropolitan Museum October 21
Sunday, January 3, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
"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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Exhibition of Rare Du Paquier Porcelain at Metropolitan Museum
Sunday, January 3, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
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.