Exhibitions

LANDMARK EXHIBITION ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY:

By the second quarter of the 19th century, New York City - already the nation's financial center - was poised to become a "world city" on a par with London and Paris. With the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, which linked the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson River, the great port of New York became the gateway to the West, assuring the city's commercial preeminence. Over the next 35 years, until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, New York grew rapidly, becoming the "Empire City" - the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, and the nation's center of domestic and foreign trade, culture, and the arts.

QUEEN VICTORIA AND THOMAS SULLY

A painting of England's 18-year-old Queen Victoria – the acknowledged masterpiece of Philadelphia artist Thomas Sully (1783-1872) and the work that catapulted him into national prominence – is the focus of an exhibition on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 19 through December 31, 2000. Queen Victoria and Thomas Sully documents the creation of this compelling portrait through some 35 works including oil sketches, paintings, drawings, manuscripts, and ephemera. The exhibition sheds new light on an image of one of history's most celebrated women, and commemorates the centennial of Victoria's death in 1901.

THOMAS SULLY IN THE METROPOLITAN

Thomas Sully in the Metropolitan, on view from September 19, 2000 through January 7, 2001, features a selection of approximately 30 paintings and drawings by this important and influential 19th-century American portraitist. Drawn exclusively from the Metropolitan's collection, the works span the most creative and productive years of the artist's career, from around 1810 through the 1840s, during which time he rose to a position of preeminence as America's leading portrait painter.

ROMANTICISM AND THE SCHOOL OF NATURE:

One hundred fifteen exceptional 19th-century paintings, drawings, and oil sketches – many never before publicly exhibited – will be featured in this exhibition of selected works from the holdings of noted New York collector Karen B. Cohen. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 17, 2000 through January 21, 2001, Romanticism and the School of Nature: 19th-Century Drawings and Paintings from the Karen B. Cohen Collection will include landscapes, portraits, figure compositions, and still lifes by the great artists of the Romantic period, the School of Barbizon, the Realist movement, and their followers, from Prud'hon to Seurat. At the center of the exhibition will be a selection of 20 images by Eugène Delacroix, ranging from pencil sketches to oil paintings and fully worked watercolors.

ART AND THE EMPIRE CITY: NEW YORK, 1825-1861

This press kit for Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861 includes a general release about the exhibition, immediately following, as well as these four releases, to which you can link directly by clicking on their titles:
Statement from Fleet
Curatorial Biographies
Student Pass Program
Exhibition Catalogue

SCHEDULE OF EXHIBITIONS

THE GOLDEN DEER OF EURASIA

Between 1986 and 1990, hundreds of astonishing objects — ornately carved and decorated in a unique style and covered in gold — were excavated from an archaeological site outside the village of Filippovka, located in Bashkortostan on southern Russia's open steppes. Representing one of the most important caches of early nomadic Eurasian art, these treasures date from the first millennium B.C. and are characterized by the extensive use of animal imagery — most notably that of a deer. This fall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present nearly 100 of these dazzling works — none of which has ever been shown anywhere — in a dramatic display, The Golden Deer of Eurasia: Scythian and Sarmatian Treasures from the Russian Steppes, opening on October 12.

THE STILL LIFES OF EVARISTO BASCHENIS AND THE MUSIC OF SILENCE

Evaristo Baschenis (Bergamo, 1617-1677), the preeminent still life painter of 17th-century Italy, is best known for his hauntingly poetic paintings of musical instruments. Although unfamiliar to American audiences, these lyrical masterpieces of composition and color harmony have been compared to Chardin's paintings, especially for their geometric structure and careful simplicity. Approximately 15 paintings from public and private collections throughout northern Italy will be featured in The Still Lifes of Evaristo Baschenis and the Music of Silence, on view at the Metropolitan Museum November 21, 2000 through March 4, 2001. Several works, which have never before left Bergamo, will be loaned from the descendents of the families that commissioned the paintings more than three centuries ago.

A CENTURY OF DESIGN, PART III: 1950-1975

A Century of Design, Part III: 1950-1975 November 28, 2000 – May 27, 2001 Lila Acheson Wallace Wing A Century of Design, Part III: 1950-1975, the third in a series of four exhibitions surveying design in the 20th century, opens November 28 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition will explore the ideas, influences, and technologies that transformed design – particularly modernism – after World War II. The mid-century period of unprecedented exchange among artists, architects, and designers yielded profound changes in the domestic landscape. More than 50 examples from the Metropolitan's modern design collection, including furniture, glassware, ceramics, textiles, and more, will be organized thematically and geographically in the exhibition, which will remain on view in the Museum's Lila Acheson Wallace Wing through May 27, 2001. The fourth and final exhibition in the series, surveying design from 1975 to 2000, will be on view June 26, 2001 through January 6, 2002.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OPENS NEW GALLERIES FOR BYZANTINE ART

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exceptional collection of Byzantine art will return to public view this fall with the inauguration of the new Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries. The installation — in dramatic Beaux Arts spaces that have been restored and redesigned to evoke the original architectural plan of 1902 — will showcase outstanding works of art from the transfer of the capital of the Roman empire to Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) in 330 through the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Also included in the new Jaharis Galleries will be art of the Bronze and Iron Age in northern Europe, the provincial Roman world of the Latin West, and the new cultures that developed in Western Europe with the transfer of the capital of the Roman empire from Rome to Constantinople. A highlight of the new Jaharis Galleries will be the opening, for the first time, of gallery space beneath the Grand Staircase.