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One of the 20th century's greatest and most influential American sculptors, David Smith (1906-1965), will be the subject of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's year 2000 installation on The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. David Smith on the Roof , on view beginning May 16, will be devoted entirely to the welded and burnished stainless steel sculptures the artist created between 1959 and 1965 at the height of his career. The installation, drawn from public and private collections, marks the third consecutive single-artist annual installation on the Roof Garden, a 10,000-square-foot open-air space that offers a spectacular view of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline.
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An unprecedented exhibition devoted solely to ancient Peruvian silver dating from the early part of the first millennium to the 16th century will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on November 3. Bringing together more than 100 works from public and private collections, Silver in Ancient Peru will explore the two-thousand-year-old tradition of sophisticated silver-working in Precolumbian Peru.
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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 Collection of Karen B. Cohen 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.
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In celebration of the new millennium, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present an unprecedented exhibition — drawn almost entirely from its own collections — of nearly 150 works of art that were produced some 2,000 years ago in the period just before and after the Year One. On view October 3, 2000 through January 14, 2001, The Year One: Art of the Ancient World East and West will feature magnificent and distinctive works of art from Western Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Southeast Asia, and the Americas.
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This fall, some 150 works from the Myers Museum — one of the world's finest collections of ancient Egyptian decorative arts — will travel outside Eton College (England) for the first time to form a landmark exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Named for Major William Joseph Myers (1858-1899), an alumnus who bequeathed his extensive and highly regarded collection of Egyptian antiquities to the college, the Myers Museum represents a rare example of a private 19th-century art collection that has remained substantially intact to our day.
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Some 90 works from a remarkable series of photographic portraits documenting the public life and private fantasies of a legendary 19th-century beauty go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 19, 2000, in the exhibition "La Divine Comtesse," Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione. Commissioned by the countess herself and created under her supervision, the images — more than 400 in all — were the result of a 40-year collaboration, from 1856 to 1895, with French court photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson.
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The most important and comprehensive exhibition of its kind ever assembled in the West, The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection — opening September 15 — will bring together some 120 works of art from the two principal collections of Chinese calligraphy that were formed in the United States. More than 55 masterworks from the John B. Elliott Collection of The Art Museum, Princeton University — perhaps the finest such collection outside Asia — will be integrated with a similar number of masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, most notably from the John M. Crawford Jr. Collection, and loans from six private collections. Spanning the period from the fourth century to the modern era, the exhibition will explore the stylistic range and individuality of many of the leading artists of the last 1,000 years.
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Parks and Promenades: Maurice Prendergast in The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924) as painter, watercolorist, draftsman, and book illustrator. Gathered from the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, Department of Drawings and Prints, and Robert Lehman Collection, the exhibition will be the first to present the Museum's entire collection of Prendergast's work. Cursory pencil drawings of incidental Parisian life; luminous, large-scale watercolors from the Large Boston Public Garden Sketchbook (1895-97); and oil paintings of recreational activities on the Massachusetts shore and in New York's Central Park will chronicle a lifetime of plein-air observation. On view July 25 through October 22, 2000, the exhibition will feature some 70 works, including many of Prendergast's most acclaimed watercolors, which, because of their sensitivity to light, have not been shown together for more than a decade.
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In celebration of the new millennium, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Fireworks! Four Centuries of Pyrotechnics in Prints and Drawings, on view June 6 through September 17, 2000. Drawn primarily from the Museum's collection, the exhibition will feature more than 100 prints and drawings depicting fireworks displays from the 16th to the early 20th century. Artists represented will include Antonio Tempesta, Jacques Callot, Claude Lorrain, Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, Jean-Louis Desprez, Francesco Piranesi, Winslow Homer, Edgar Degas, and the lithographers Currier and Ives, among others.
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Photographs by anonymous amateurs whose "happy accidents" and "successful failures" resulted in surprising and tantalizing works of art are the subject of Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 6, 2000. Dating from the 1910s through the 1960s — a period that saw the camera's emergence as a nearly ubiquitous and easy-to-use accessory of modern life — these photographs reflect the spirit of their time in refreshingly honest and often unexpected ways. Although never intended for public display — most of the approximately 90 photographs on view were discovered at flea markets, in shoeboxes, or in family albums — these found images often bring to mind the work of such master photographers as Walker Evans, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus.