Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Noto, Sicily, September 5, 1947
Richard Avedon American
Not on view
Richard Avedon believed this early street portrait of a young boy in Sicily was the genesis of his long fashion and portrait career. On the occasion of The Met’s groundbreaking 2002 exhibition on the artist, curators Maria Morris Hambourg and Mia Fineman described the work as "a kind of projected self-portrait" in which "a boy stands there, pushing forward to the front of the picture. . . . He is smiling wildly, ready to race into the future. And there, hovering behind him like a mushroom cloud, is the past in the form of a single, strange tree—a reminder of the horror that split the century into a before and after, a symbol of destruction but also of regeneration."
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