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Medieval Costume Demonstration at The Cloisters, February 28
Wednesday, February 17, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
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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How Did Chinese Artists Learn and Practice Their Craft? Met Museum Explores the Topic in New Installation
Sunday, February 7, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
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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METROPOLITAN MUSEUM CONCERTS
MARCH 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
Early Music Exposed, A Daylong Event, Celebrates the Reopening of
The André Mertens Galleries for Musical Instruments,
Till Fellner's Beethoven Sonata Cycle Continues with "Pathétique" and "Les Adieux,"
Menahem Pressler & Gautier Capuçon Perform Together, and
Sweet Honey In The Rock Makes Its Museum Debut
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Magnificent Manuscript and Sculptures Commissioned by Two Early 15th-Century Dukes of France on View in Pair of Metropolitan Museum Exhibitions
Thursday, February 4, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
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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Photocollages Reveal Wit and Whimsy of the Victorian Era in Metropolitan Museum Exhibition Opening February 2
Wednesday, January 27, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
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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SCHEDULE OF EXHIBITIONS
SEPTEMBER 2009– AUGUST 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: Information provided below is subject to change.
To confirm scheduling and dates, call the Communications Department at (212) 570-3951.
CONTACT NUMBER FOR USE IN TEXT IS (212) 535-7710.
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Statement by The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Accident Involving Picasso's The Actor
Saturday, January 23, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
(New York, January 24, 2010)— An important painting by Pablo Picasso was accidentally damaged in the galleries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Friday afternoon, January 22. A visitor attending a class lost her balance, falling onto Picasso's The Actor, a large, Rose-period painting that was painted in winter 1904-1905. The accident resulted in an irregular vertical tear of about six inches in length in the lower right-hand corner.
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First Exhibition Ever Devoted to Bronzino at Metropolitan Museum
Thursday, January 21, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
The Drawings of Bronzino, the first exhibition ever dedicated to Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572), brings together nearly all of the 61 known drawings by, or attributed to, the great Florentine court artist of the Medici. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from January 20 through April 18, 2010, the exhibition features drawings of extraordinary beauty and rarity which are seldom on public view, and draws loans from major museums and private collections within Europe and North America, including the Galleria degli Uffizi, Musée du Louvre, British Museum, Royal Library of Windsor Castle, Ashmolean Museum, Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden, and Staatliche Museen Berlin.
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Romare Bearden's The Block and Related Drawings On View at Metropolitan Museum Beginning January 15
Thursday, January 14, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
Romare Bearden's vibrant mural-size tableau The Block (1971) and related sketches and photographs will be featured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning January 15, 2010, in a small installation of works from the collection. The Block, an ambitious 18-foot-long collage, celebrates the Harlem neighborhood in New York City that nurtured and inspired so much of the artist's life and work. Romare Bearden (1911–1988) is best known for the colorful cut-paper collages that he began making in the 1960s. Elaborate works such as The Block (1971) elevated this genre to a major art form through its unusual materials, expressionist color, abstracted forms, flattened shapes and spaces, and shifts in perspective and scale—all the while maintaining focus on the human narrative being told within a single city block.
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METROPOLITAN MUSEUM CONCERTS
FEBRUARY 2010
Thursday, January 7, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
PianoForte Continues with Peter Orth, Rafal Blechacz, and
Till Fellner's Beethoven Sonata Cycle;
Perlman Music Program Presents New Work by D. Edward Davis;
Steve Ross and the Pacifica Quartet Return
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Meissen Snuffbox Returned to Heirs of Munich-based Art Gallery
Tuesday, January 5, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
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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)