Exhibition dates: June 26 – September 7, 2003
Exhibition location: The Robert Lehman Gallery
Press Preview: Monday, June 23, 10:00 a.m. – noon
The first major retrospective devoted to the virtuoso Netherlandish mannerist Hendrick Goltzius will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 26, 2003. Hendrick Goltzius, Dutch Master (1558-1617): Drawings, Prints, and Paintings—a selection of some 80 prints, 69 drawings, and 13 paintings, including loans from collections throughout Europe and the United States—spans the artist's entire career and demonstrates his legendary mastery of a remarkably wide range of media, subject matter and styles.
One of the most versatile and accomplished draftsmen of his age, Goltzius wielded pen, chalk, metalpoint stylus, and engraver's burin alike with a technical agility and precision that astonished his contemporaries. (This despite a childhood accident in a fire that left his right hand deformed.) He spent nearly the whole of his life in Haarlem, where he established an active print publishing house, among the leading ones in Europe at the time, and belonged to an important circle of Haarlem artists devoted to the mannerist precepts of artifice, grace, and virtuoso display. Endowed with an extraordinary ability to work in different and often contradictory styles, Goltzius produced extravagantly complex and fanciful allegories and mythological scenes, as well as strikingly realistic portraits and intimate studies from nature. Although best known for his graphic work, during the last seventeen years of his life Goltzius also created a group of bold paintings in oils, several masterful examples of which will be on view.
The exhibition is made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Additional support has been provided by The Schiff Foundation.
The exhibition has also been supported by the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund.
The exhibition has been organized by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Toledo Museum of Art.
An indemnity has been granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
Comprehensive in scope, the exhibition includes a remarkable number of Goltzius's most celebrated images, among them his dashing Self-Portrait in colored chalks (1591-92; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm); the preparatory drawings as well as the final print version of Hercules Farnese from the Back, one of his many studies from the antique made during his trip to Italy in 1590-91; a chalk study of hands, believed to be different views of the artist's own left hand (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt); the magnificent Head of Mercury (1587; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) one of his famous large-scale, calligraphic pen drawings designed to imitate engraving; and the oil painting of Danaë (1603, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), notable for its jewel-like colors and unabashed observation of the female nude.
The exhibition is organized by Jan Piet Filedt Kok, Head of the Department of Paintings, Huigen Leeflang, Print Curator, and Ger Luijten, Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Nadine M. Orenstein and Michiel Plomp, Associate Curators, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Lawrence W. Nichols, Curator of European Painting and Sculpture before 1900, Toledo Museum of Art.
A variety of educational programs will be offered in conjunction with the exhibition, including lectures and gallery talks.
Prior to the Metropolitan Museum's presentation, the exhibition will be on view at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After New York, it will travel to the Toledo Museum of Art.
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