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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.