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More than 80 works—drawn extensively from 200 prints donated to the Museum in 1999 by Reba and Dave Williams—will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from January 14 through May 4, 2003. African-American Artists, 1929-1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings from The Metropolitan Museum of Art will feature a variety of print media including intaglio, lithography, woodcut and wood engraving, and serigraph (screen printing), as well as a selection of paintings and watercolors. The exhibition focuses on aspects of daily life for African Americans during the latter period of the Harlem Renaissance, the Depression, and World War II.
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The Christmas tree and Neapolitan Baroque crèche at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a long-established yuletide tradition in New York, will be on view for the holiday season beginning in late November. The brightly lit, 20-foot blue spruce – with a collection of 18th-century Neapolitan angels and cherubs among its boughs and groups of realistic crèche figures flanking the Nativity scene at its base – will once again delight holiday visitors in the Museum's Medieval Sculpture Hall. Set in front of the 18th-century Spanish choir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid, with recorded Christmas music in the background, the installation reflects the spirit of the holiday season. There will be a spectacular lighting ceremony every Friday and Saturday evening at 7:00 p.m.
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The first comprehensive exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings ever presented in America, Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman, a landmark international loan exhibition, will bring together nearly 120 works by one of the most renowned masters of all time. Even in an era celebrated for its limitless scientific discovery, technological invention, and sublime artistic achievement, Leonardo stands as an icon in Western consciousness — the very embodiment of the universal Renaissance genius.
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Early 19th–century America will be the focus of this year's Summer Selections, the second annual installation drawn from the Metropolitan Museum's collection of works on paper created by American artists between 1710 and 1920. This summer's exhibition — which coincides with the Metropolitan's presentation of the landmark traveling exhibition Thomas Eakins — will feature the work of two artists active in Philadelphia, Eakins's hometown, in the decades preceding his birth. Some 50 watercolors — including genre scenes, landscapes, and portraits — primarily by the Russian diplomat Pavel Petrovich Svinin (1787/88–1839), along with several works recently attributed to the German émigré John Lewis Krimmel (1786–1821), will be shown. Many of the works document street life in Philadelphia, where Krimmel lived and where Svinin was headquartered for two–and–a–half years.
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Eighty–four paintings — including landmark works of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as well as masterpieces from the Golden Age of Danish painting — all from the Ordrupgaard Collection in Copenhagen, Denmark, are featured in this exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. On view June 18 through September 8, 2002,
The Age of Impressionism: European Painting from the Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen offers a dazzling survey of this remarkable collection, including works by Cézanne, Corot, Courbet, Degas, Delacroix, Eckersberg, Gauguin, Købke, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley, among others. Assembled by the Danish insurance magnate Wilhelm Hansen (1868-1936), both the collection and the country house from which it derives its name were bequeathed to the Danish State upon the death of Hansen's wife, Henny, in 1951.
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An exhibition focusing on the extraordinary art of the Eastern Eurasian steppes from the first millennium BC will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 1. Featuring more than 200 objects, Nomadic Art from the Eastern Eurasian Steppes: The Eugene V. Thaw and Other New York Collections will explore the dynamic art of the nomads who left an indelible impression on the arts of all nomadic societies in Eurasia through subsequent periods and inspired the art of the sedentary cultures that came in contact with them.
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Forty masterworks of photographic portraiture will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 10, 2002, through January 12, 2003. Drawn from the collections of the Metropolitan and the Gilman Paper Company, the installation will accompany the landmark exhibition Richard Avedon: Portraits and will highlight classic images of artists and writers, actors and composers by Nadar, Edward Steichen, and Berenice Abbott, among others.
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A rotating selection of important designs in all media, dating from the late 19th to the early 21st century will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from fall 2002 through April 2004. Significant Objects: Selections from the Modern Design and Architecture Collection will feature furniture, metalwork, ceramics, glass, textiles and jewelry, all drawn from the Metropolitan's holdings. The exhibition will highlight the diversity and depth of the Metropolitan's modern design collection, demonstrating the aesthetic value of the works on view within the Museum's collection and within the larger context of art history.
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The rapturous elegance of café society in the years immediately preceding World War II will be captured in a new exhibition opening at the Metropolitan Museum on November 1, Blithe Spirit: The Windsor Set. Dating from 1935 to 1940, this extraordinary collection of French couture—featuring works by Chanel, Lanvin, Vionnet, and Schiaparelli—was donated to the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute in 1946. The gowns were originally part of the exhibition Paris Openings: 1932-1940, which was organized by Lady Mendl and chaired by the Duchess of Windsor to benefit French War Charities in 1940. Drawn mainly from the collection of The Costume Institute, with loans from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the exhibition celebrates a period in fashion history that is unsurpassed in terms of beauty, elegance, and craftsmanship.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open a new permanent exhibition space this fall, devoted to the full range of work by Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), who was one of the most versatile and talented American artists of his time. Part of the recently named Deedee Wigmore Galleries, the installation will highlight the Museum's preeminent Tiffany collection and will feature some 70 stunning examples of his windows, lamps, furniture, mosaics, blown Favrile glass vases, pottery, enamelwork, and jewelry. Works from the early 1890s to the early 1920s will be on view. A selection of design drawings from the Museum's holdings of more than 400 works on paper by the Tiffany Studios will be shown. Because of their fragile nature and sensitivity to light, the drawings will be displayed on a rotating schedule.
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Prints of ocean surfaces, star-filled night skies, and desert floors, among other images, by the contemporary artist Vija Celmins will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 15 through December 29, 2002.
The Prints of Vija Celmins, the first-ever print retrospective by this Latvian-born American artist, will feature some 50 works including a selection of drawings and artist's books.
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Some sixty photographs of New York City from the 1850s to the 1970s—including many landmarks of American photography—will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 7 through August 25, 2002. Since September 1839, when the painter Samuel F. B. Morse put aside his brushes for a camera, photography has been integral to the life and art of New York City. This celebration of the city as muse includes 19th-century photographs by Edward Anthony, Silas Holmes, and anonymous artists, and 20th-century works by Berenice Abbott, Ralston Crawford, Walker Evans, Walter Gropius, Lewis Hine, Helen Levitt, Edward Steichen, and James VanDerZee, among others. With the exception of Chatham Square (1853), a rare daguerreotype street scene on loan from the renowned Gilman Paper Company Collection, all of the photographs in the exhibition are drawn from the collection of the Metropolitan's Department of Photographs.
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The mysteries behind making a violin sound like a violin is explored in The New Violin Family: Augmenting the String Section, now on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 30, 2003. Featuring 13 instruments, including a famous Hutchins Violin Octet, the exhibition chronicles the work of Dr. Carleen Maley Hutchins (b. Springfield, Massachusetts, 1911), a luthier and acoustical scientist who pioneered modern techniques of violin making. In order to demonstrate the scientific approach she employed to create ideal acoustics, a model depicting her process of plate tuning is on display.
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A viewing of the Florence and Herbert Irving Galleries for the Arts of South and Southeast Asia at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, followed by a reception in the Museum's celebrated Temple of Dendur in The Sackler Wing, will take place on Wednesday, May 22, 2002, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. A highlight of the evening's festivities will be a program of traditional dances and costume of India beginning at 7:30 p.m.
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Fifty-three paintings, watercolors, and drawings by 18 of the greatest artists who worked in France in the 19th and early 20th centuries comprise the Annenberg collection, which returns to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for six months beginning June 1, 2002. This annual event, now in its eighth year, provides an exceptional opportunity for visitors to view this renowned collection, which is installed in three central rooms within the Museum's Nineteenth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries.
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"I never knew of but one artist, and that's Tom Eakins, who could
resist the temptation to see what they think ought to be rather
than what is. . . . Eakins is not a painter, he is a force."
–Walt Whitman, 1888
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The photographer's ability to transform a critical moment in time into a work of art — whether an event of historical importance or a moment of ephemeral beauty — is the subject of As It Happened: Photographs from the Gilman Paper Company Collection, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 7 through August 25, 2002. Fifty superb works, ranging from a parade on the Pont Royal in Paris in 1844 to an atomic bomb test in the Pacific in 1946, bear witness to a century of events large and small.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art will mount an open-air display of outstanding large-scale sculptures by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen in the 2002 installation of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, opening May 1. Oldenburg and van Bruggen on the Roof will feature four sculptures – created since 1999 – that have never before been exhibited in New York. These works are based on stereotypical objects of daily life that the artists have transformed, giving them fresh identities and new functions. They will be installed in the 10,000-square-foot outdoor space offering spectacular views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline.
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The Costume Institute will celebrate one of America's most distinguished stylemakers from cinema's golden years with an unprecedented exhibition of works by Hollywood designer Gilbert Adrian. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 14 to August 18, 2002, Adrian: American Glamour will feature a selection of more than 100 designs. The sensational and sometimes provocative costumes worn by such legendary Hollywood actresses as Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, and Katharine Hepburn will complement the equally glamorous ensembles of his high fashion career. Drawn from the Museum's Costume Institute, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others, the exhibition will present a comprehensive look at Adrian's lifetime of work as an artist, a costume designer, and an American couturier.