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The Wall of Light series by celebrated artist Sean Scully (born 1945) will be the focus of an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 26, 2006, through January 14, 2007. Sean Scully: Wall of Light will showcase the artist's most important series to date and highlight his mastery of color, light, gesture, and range of emotional and narrative themes. Scully works and exhibits throughout the world, yet this is his first major solo museum exhibition in New York. Featured are more than 50 works in the Wall of Light series — some 20 of which are large-scale oil paintings — that Scully has created in recent years, first inspired by his travels to Mexico.
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In the late 19th century, American artists by the hundreds – including such luminaries as James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer – were drawn irresistibly to Paris, the world's new art capital, to learn to paint and to establish their reputations. By studying with leading masters and showing their work in Paris, these artists aimed to attract patronage from American collectors who had begun to buy contemporary French art in earnest soon after the end of the Civil War. Paris inspired decisive changes in American painters' styles and subjects, and stimulated the creation of more sophisticated art schools and higher professional standards back in the United States.
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More than 80 medieval sculpted heads – half from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and half selected loans from American and European collections – are the focus of the upcoming exhibition Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture, opening on September 26. The exhibition, which includes heads from the third century A.D. through the early 1500s, will consider such artistic and thematic issues as: iconoclasm and the legacy of violence, sculpting identity and the evolving notions of the "portrait," sculpture without context and the search for provenance, head reliquaries as power objects, and Gothic Italy and the antique. Created from materials as diverse as marble, limestone, polychromed wood, and silver gilt, the works represent mostly French, but also German, Italian, Spanish, Byzantine, English, and other sculptural traditions. By examining the works in different ways, the exhibition will draw together science and connoisseurship, archaeology and history. On view will be a recently acquired 13th-century limestone Head of an Angel, related to the sculpture from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.
The exhibition is made possible by The Florence Gould Foundation.
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EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: Information provided below is subject to change.
To confirm scheduling and dates, call the Communications Department at (212) 570-3951.
CONTACT NUMBER FOR USE IN TEXT IS (212) 535-7710.
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Raphael at the Metropolitan: The Colonna Altarpiece will highlight the Colonna Altarpiece, the only one by Raphael in America and, since 1916, a treasure of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. This exhibition will reunite the altarpiece's two main panels with the scenes from its predella, which were separated from the altarpiece in 1663. A select group of drawings and paintings by Raphael produced close in time to the Colonna Altarpiece, including a preparatory study for the Metropolitan's predella panel, will also be included. The exhibition will be on view at the Metropolitan from June 20 through September 3, 2006.
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A major force in New York intellectual life for more than 40 years, the novelist, essayist, and critic Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was renowned for her brilliant and impassioned writing on photography. From June 6 through September 3, 2006, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present an exhibition of some 40 photographs that celebrate Sontag's contribution to the history of the medium, featuring works from the Metropolitan's collection by a wide range of artists, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Steichen, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Robert Frank, Andy Warhol, and Peter Hujar.
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Between 1902 and 1905, on more than 600 acres overlooking Long Island Sound, the noted American artist and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) built his dream home, an extraordinary country estate called Laurelton Hall. Every aspect of the project was designed by Tiffany himself, from the exotic 84-room, eight-level house surrounded by fountains, pools, and terraced gardens to the stables, tennis courts, greenhouses, chapel, studio, and art gallery also located on the property. Often cited as Tiffany's most important work, Laurelton Hall was destroyed by fire in 1957. Surviving architectural elements and windows salvaged by Hugh F. and Jeannette G. McKean are now part of the collections of the museum Mrs. McKean founded, The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida. The monumental four-column loggia with its colorful glass and pottery floral capitals was saved from Laurelton Hall and has graced the American Wing's Charles Engelhard Court since 1980, a gift of Mr. and Mrs. McKean.
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In the late 19th century, American artists by the hundreds – including such luminaries as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer – were drawn irresistibly to Paris to learn to paint and to establish their reputations. The world's artistic epicenter, Paris inspired decisive changes in American painters' styles and subjects, and stimulated the creation of newly sophisticated art schools and professional standards back in the United States.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrates the 400th birthday of Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn with the display of a selection of 58 drawings and prints from its extensive collection of works by the great 17th-century Dutch master and artists of his school. Forty-four of the works on view are by Rembrandt himself. The exhibition has been drawn primarily from the holdings of the Museum's Department of Drawings and Prints and the Robert Lehman Collection. One sheet, a charcoal sketch of a lioness, has been borrowed from a New York private collection.
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The first comprehensive exhibition devoted to Ambroise Vollard (1867-1939) – the pioneer dealer, patron, and publisher who played a key role in promoting and shaping the careers of many of the leading artists during the late 19th and early 20th centuries – will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 14. One hundred paintings as well as dozens of ceramics, sculpture, prints, and livres d'artistes commissioned and published by Vollard, from his appearance on the Paris art scene in the mid-1890s to his accidental death in 1939, will comprise the exhibition Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, which will feature works by Bonnard, Cézanne, Degas, Derain, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Maillol, Matisse, Picasso, Redon, Renoir, Rouault, Rousseau, Vlaminck, Vuillard, and others. Highlights will include seven paintings from Vollard's landmark 1895 Cézanne exhibition; a never-before-reassembled triptych from his 1896 Van Gogh retrospective; the masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? from his 1898 Gauguin exhibition; paintings from Picasso's first French exhibition (1901) and Matisse's first solo exhibition (1904); and three pictures from Derain's London series, painted in 1906-1907 at Vollard's
suggestion. Also on view will be numerous portraits of Vollard by leading artists, among them Cézanne, Renoir, Bonnard, and Picasso.
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More than 80 medieval sculpted heads – half from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and half selected loans from American and European collections – are the focus of the upcoming exhibition Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture, opening this fall. The exhibition, which includes heads from the third century A.D. through the early 1500s, will consider such artistic and thematic issues as: iconoclasm and the legacy of furor, sculpting identity and the evolving notions of the "portrait," sculpture without context and the search for provenance, head reliquaries as power objects, and Gothic Italy and the antique. Created from materials as diverse as polychromed wood, silver, silver gilt, marble, and limestone, the works represent mostly French, but also German, Italian, Byzantine, and English sculptural traditions. By examining the works in different ways, the exhibition will draw together science and connoisseurship, archaeology and history. On view will be a recently acquired 13th-century limestone Head of an Angel, newly identified as having come from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.
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Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings – opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 13, 2006 – will explore the growth of the concept of divine kingship among ancient Maya peoples. Featuring some 150 objects – from large-scale relief sculpture in stone to small precious pieces of worked jade – the exhibition will display the grandiose ambitions of earthly rulers when they transformed themselves into gods. Dating principally from 200 B.C. to 600 A.D., the works in the exhibition are lent primarily from public collections in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, as well as from collections in Europe and the United States. Emphasis will be placed on recently excavated objects that will be on view for the first time in the United States. Notable among them are pieces from the renowned Maya sites of Calakmul in Mexico, Tikal in Guatemala, and Copan in Honduras. Maya jade objects discovered in tombs in the famous Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan – the contemporary but distant central Mexican city – will also be included.
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AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion, opening on May 3, 2006, will present a wide range of works by British designers in The Metropolitan Museum's English Period Rooms – The Annie Laurie Aitken Galleries. A pendant to the acclaimed 2004 Costume Institute exhibition Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century, AngloMania will examine ideals, stereotypes, and representations of Englishness by juxtaposing historical costume with late 20th- and early 21st-century fashions.
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Cai Guo-Qiang, the acclaimed Chinese-born artist known internationally for his elaborate sculpture installations and gunpowder projects, has been invited to create a site-specific exhibition for the 2006 season of The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The four works comprising Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument were inspired by the dramatic setting of the Roof Garden, an open-air space atop the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing that offers spectacular views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline, and by the artist's reactions to issues of present-day concern.
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In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, contemporary American artist Kara Walker (b. 1969) – widely recognized for her explorations of issues of race, gender, and sexuality through the 18th-century medium of cut-paper silhouettes – has selected a variety of objects from the Museum's collection and from her own work in order to explore, in her words, "the banality of everyday life, water, and its impact." The exhibition, entitled Kara Walker at the Met: After the Deluge, will be on view from March 21 through July 30.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art is now presenting Sight Unseen: Photographs from the Gilman Collection as part of its continuing series of installations of works from its recent landmark acquisition of 8,500 photographs spanning the first hundred years of the medium. The photographs in the exhibition have never been shown publicly at the Metropolitan and will remain on view through May 21, 2006.
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A Taste for Opulence: Sèvres Porcelain from the Collection presents a selection of objects such as vases, dinner and tea services, furniture decorated with porcelain plaques, and other luxurious wares produced in the 18th century by the Sèvres porcelain factory. Established in the Château of Vincennes just outside Paris in 1740, the factory quickly became the preeminent producer of porcelain in Europe. Supported in its early years by the patronage of Louis XV, the factory was named the manufacture du roi in 1753 and was purchased by the king in 1759. Catering in large part to the tastes of the court, the factory strove for constant innovation and originality throughout the 18th century, frequently employing the leading artists and designers of the day to provide models and inspiration for the factory's artisans. A Taste for Opulence, which focuses on the diversity of the factory's production, will include approximately 90 objects drawn entirely from the Museum's superb holdings of Sèvres porcelain and from its unparalleled collection of 18th-century French furniture decorated with Sèvres plaques. The exhibition will be on view from February 21 through August 13, 2006.
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Girodet: Romantic Rebel is the first retrospective in the United States devoted to this celebrated French artist, Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, a favored but rebellious student of Jacques-Louis David. Girodet's idiosyncratic style fuses David's Neoclassical ideal with his own prescient Romantic vision. The exhibition brings together approximately 110 paintings and works on paper that reflect the artist's originality and the diversity of his works, from mythological subjects to portraits and representations of Napoleon's military triumphs.Girodet will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 24 through August 27, 2006.
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The first exhibition to examine ikat textile traditions across the breadth of Indonesia will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on February 28, 2006. Featuring more than 25 outstanding ikat textiles, most never before exhibited, The Fabric of Life: Ikat Textiles of Indonesia explores the imagery, forms, and roles of what is perhaps the single most important, widespread, and technically sophisticated of all Indonesian textile traditions. They are drawn primarily from the Metropolitan's extensive collection of Indonesian textiles.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the first U.S. retrospective of the work of noted artist Betty Woodman (American, b. 1930) from April 25 through July 30, 2006. The Art of Betty Woodman will span the artist's career, from her early works of the 1950s and 1960s through her most recent mixed-media pieces of 2005-2006, and will assess her contributions to contemporary ceramic art and her importance among post-World War II artists.
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Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet is the first comprehensive study of armor, weapons, and equestrian equipment from Tibet, a subject that has remained virtually unexplored until now. Many rare or previously unknown objects will be exhibited and published for the first time. Presenting more than 130 works, the exhibition will examine various types of unique arms and armor used in Tibet, the world's highest plateau, between the 13th and the 20th century. The objects are drawn mostly from the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and include many key loans from the Royal Armouries Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Museum of Scotland, the National Museums Liverpool, Pitt Rivers Museum, British Museum, University of Aberdeen, Smithsonian Institution, Yale University, and Newark Museum. The accompanying catalogue will include the first Tibetan-English arms and armor glossary of terms and a selection of excerpts from some of the few surviving Tibetan texts relating to the subject.
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Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudí to Dalí — the first comprehensive exhibition of its type ever mounted in America — explores the diverse and innovative work of Barcelona's artists, architects, and designers in the years between the Barcelona Universal Exposition of 1888 and the imposition of the Fascist regime of Francisco Franco in 1939. Barcelona and Modernity offers new insights into the art movements that advanced the city's quest for modernity and confirmed it as the primary center of radical intellectual, political, and cultural activities in Spain. Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and Antoni Gaudí are among the internationally renowned artists who contributed to the creative vitality of Barcelona and the flourishing of Catalan culture. On view at the Metropolitan Museum from March 7 through June 3, 2007, the exhibition will feature some 300 remarkable works in a range of media: painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, posters, decorative objects, furniture, architectural models, and design. La Vie and Blindman's Meal, two of the greatest paintings from Picasso's Blue Period; portraits by Ramon Casas; Isidre Nonell's depictions of gypsies; Miró's The Farm; Dalí's surrealist paintings, as well as furniture designed by Gaudí and an original BKF ("butterfly") chair are among the masterworks gathered from museums and private collections around the world for this major exhibition.
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In India in the late 16th century, the Mughal emperor Akbar – a great patron of the arts – amassed an extensive library of some 20,000 beautifully illustrated and illuminated manuscripts. One of them, a lavishly ornamented copy of the Khamsa (Quintet of Tales) by Amir Khusrau Dihlavi (1253-1325), will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum beginning October 14, 2005, in the exhibition Pearls of the Parrot of India: The Emperor Akbar's Illustrated "Khamsa," 1597-98.
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Hatshepsut, often considered the first important female head of state known to history, ruled Egypt for two decades (ca. 1479-1458 B.C.) during Egypt's 18th Dynasty. Although less familiar to modern audiences than her much later successor, the notorious Cleopatra (51-30 B.C.), Hatshepsut's achievements were comparable to those of England's Elizabeth I. Ruling first as regent for, then as co-ruler with her nephew Thutmose III (who ruled for another 33 years after her death), Hatshepsut enjoyed a relatively peaceful reign, at the beginning of the New Kingdom. She stabilized the country and restored monuments destroyed during the disruptive Second Intermediate Period, when northern Egypt was controlled by a dynasty of Asian princes and southern Egypt by a dynasty of Egyptians based in Thebes. She renewed trade with western Asia to the east, the far-off land of Punt to the south, and the Aegean Islands in the north. The resulting economic prosperity was reflected in the art of the time, which is characterized by remarkable innovations in sculpture and decorative arts and produced such architectural marvels as Hatshepsut's mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri.
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EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: Information provided below is subject to change.
To confirm scheduling and dates, call the Communications Department at (212) 570-3951.
CONTACT NUMBER FOR USE IN TEXT IS (212) 535-7710.
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A long-neglected area of Egyptian art – works associated with protection and healing – will be explored in the exhibition The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt, opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in fall 2005. By focusing on this fundamen-tal, yet little-known aspect of Egyptian art, the exhibition will provide a new perspective on some 65 of the most beautiful and intriguing works from the Museum's renowned collection. The centerpiece will be the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus – the sole bor-rowed work in the exhibition – which is on loan from the New York Academy of Medicine. This manuscript, dating from the Second Intermediate Period (ca. 1650-1550 B.C.), is one of only two complete medical texts from ancient Egypt. Rarely seen even by Egyptologists, the manuscript's presentation at the Metropolitan represents its first public display in more than half a century.
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Some of the most daring and influential works by one of America's great modern artists – Robert Rauschenberg – will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on December 20. Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, takes a rare and comprehensive look at the objects that Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) terms Combines. The exhibition, which will include 67 works created between 1954 and 1964, is the first to focus exclusively on this significant material. Robert Rauschenberg: Combines remains on view through April 2, 2006, before continuing on an international tour through 2007.
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AngloMania, opening on May 4, 2006, will present an unprecedented selection of works by British designers in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's English Period Rooms – The Annie Laurie Aitken Galleries. A pendant to the acclaimed 2004 Costume Institute exhibition Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century, AngloMania will focus on British fashion from 1976 to 2006, a period of astounding creativity and experimentation.
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Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings – opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 13, 2006 – will explore the growth of the concept of divine kingship among ancient Maya peoples. Featuring some 150 objects – from large-scale relief sculpture in stone to small precious pieces of worked jade – the exhibition will display the grandiose ambitions of earthly rulers when they transformed themselves into gods. Dating from 900 B.C. to 550 A.D., the works in the exhibition are lent primarily from public collections in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, as well as from collections in Europe and the United States. Emphasis will be placed on recently excavated objects that will be on view for the first time in the United States. Notable among them are pieces from the renowned Maya sites of Calakmul in Mexico and Copan in Honduras. Maya jade objects discovered in tombs in the famous Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan – the contemporary but distant central Mexican city – will also be included.
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Girodet: Romantic Rebel is the first retrospective in the United States devoted to this celebrated French artist, Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, a favored but rebellious student of Jacques-Louis David. Girodet's idiosyncratic style fuses David's Neoclassical ideal with his own prescient Romantic vision. The exhibition brings together approximately 110 paintings and works on paper that reflect the artist's originality and the diversity of his works, from mythological subjects to portraits and representations of Napoleon's military triumphs. Girodet will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 24 through August 27, 2006.
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Samuel Palmer ranks among the most important British landscape painters of the Romantic era. Marking the 200th anniversary of the artist's birth, Samuel Palmer (1805–1881): Vision and Landscape is the first major retrospective of his work in nearly 80 years, uniting some 100 of his finest watercolors, drawings, etchings, and oils from public and private collections in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States. The exhibition highlights the artist's celebrated early work, executed in a visionary style inspired by William Blake, and re-examines Palmer's vibrant middle-period Italian studies and masterful late watercolors and etchings. It also includes a selection of works by artists in Palmer's circle. Samuel Palmer will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 7 through May 29.
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Three masterpieces by Sicily's greatest Renaissance painter, Antonello da Messina, will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from December 13, 2005, through March 5, 2006, in the exhibition Antonello da Messina: Sicily's Renaissance Master. This will be the first time any of these works will be on public view in the United States.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents the exhibition In Line with Van Gogh in conjunction with the landmark exhibition Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings. The ancillary exhibition, also curated by Colta Ives and Susan Stein, demonstrates that Van Gogh's achievement, neither solely intuitive nor accidental, was remarkably well informed. The 59 drawings and prints selected from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum will include works by Rembrandt, Daumier, Millet, Degas, Hokusai, Hiroshige, and other artists whose work influenced Van Gogh, as well as works by his contemporaries and followers such as Gauguin, Signac, Seurat, Matisse, and Munch. In Line with Van Gogh will be on view from October 4, 2005 to January 8, 2006.
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Santiago Calatrava, the world-renowned architect who has designed some of the most beautiful structures of our epoch, is the subject of a new exhibition, Santiago Calatrava: Sculpture into Architecture, opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 18, 2005. This exhibition, on view through March 5, 2006, will demonstrate that many of the forms of his celebrated buildings originated in his independent works of art.
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The first American retrospective devoted to the work of the great Italian Renaissance artist known as Fra Angelico (1390/5-1455) – and the first comprehensive presentation of his work assembled anywhere in the world in half a century – will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 26. More than 50 public institutions and private collections in Europe and America will participate in the landmark exhibition, which commemorates the 550th anniversary of the artist's death. Fra Angelico will feature nearly 75 paintings, drawings, and manuscript illuminations from throughout his career, supplemented by 45 additional works by his assistants and closest followers. Highlights of the exhibition include recently discovered paintings and new attributions, paintings never before displayed publicly, and reconstructed groupings of works, some of them reunited for the first time.
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The Costume Institute will celebrate one of America's quintessential stylemakers this fall with an exhibition of accessories and fashion from Iris Apfel. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 13, 2005, to January 22, 2006, Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Barrel Apfel Collection will spotlight 60 objects, exploring the affinity between fashion and accessory designs and examining the power of dress and accessories to assert style above fashion, the individual above the collective.
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David Milne Watercolors: "Painting Toward the Light," on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from November 8, 2005 to January 29, 2006, will reintroduce the work of one of Canada's finest painters to American audiences. Milne (1882-1953), whose career spanned the first half of the 20th century, lived and worked in the United States (1903-29) during the heyday of American modernism before returning to Ontario (1929-53), where he had a quiet career out of the spotlight. This exhibition of 45 works from Canadian and American collections follows Milne's experimentation with modernism in New York City, his years as a Canadian War Memorials artist in Europe after World War I, his subsequent retreat into the landscape of upstate New York, and his final years in Canada, which inspired a dramatic departure from his depictions of the natural world to the realm of the spiritual.
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The first major exhibition in the United States ever to focus on Vincent van Gogh's extraordinary drawings will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 18. Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings — comprising 113 works selected from public and private collections worldwide, including an exceptional number of loans from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam — will reveal the range and brilliance of the artist's draftsmanship as it evolved over the course of his decade-long career. Generally over-shadowed by the fame and familiarity of his paintings, Van Gogh's more than 1,100 drawings remain comparatively unknown although they are among his most ingenious and striking creations. Van Gogh engaged drawing and painting in a rich dialogue, which enabled him to fully realize the creative potential of both means of expression. A group of paintings will be exhibited alongside the related drawings. The exhibition will remain on view through December 31.
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Four centuries of French draftsmanship will be on view in Clouet to Seurat: French Drawings from The British Museum, opening November 8, 2005, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition features nearly 100 masterpieces, ranging from rare Renaissance portraits by Jean and François Clouet to selections from The British Museum's incomparable holdings of Claude Lorrain and Antoine Watteau, through stellar works of the 19th century, from Ingres and Delacroix to Degas, Cézanne, and Seurat. A majority of these works have never before been exhibited in the United States. Clouet to Seurat will remain on view at the Metropolitan through January 29, 2006.
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Crowned King of Bohemia in 1347, Charles IV (1316-1378) sought to make his capital city – Prague – the cultural rival of Paris and Rome. The remarkable flowering of art that transformed the city into Bohemia's Gothic jewel will be celebrated at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, beginning September 20, in the exhibition Prague, The Crown of Bohemia, 1347-1437 – a landmark presentation of some 160 stunning examples of panel paintings, goldsmiths' work, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, silk embroideries, stained glass, and more. These little-known masterpieces attest to the wide-ranging achievements of the hundreds of artists affiliated with Prague and the Bohemian crown during the reign of Charles IV and his two sons, Wenceslas IV (1361-1419) and Sigismund (1368-1437). The exhibition draws on numerous collections in the Czech Republic as well as other European and American collections, and will include many works that have never been publicly shown.
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Some of the most daring and influential works by one of America's great modern artists – Robert Rauschenberg – will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on December 20. Robert Rauschenberg: Combines takes a rare and comprehensive look at the three-dimensional works that Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) terms combines. The exhibition, which will include approximately 65 objects created between 1954 and 1964, is the first to focus exclusively on this significant body of work. Robert Rauschenberg: Combines remains on view through April 2, 2006, before continuing on an international tour through 2007.
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EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: Information provided below is subject to change.
To confirm scheduling and dates, call the Communications Department at (212) 570-3951.
CONTACT NUMBER FOR USE IN TEXT IS (212) 535-7710.
-
The first major exhibition in the United States ever to focus on Vincent van Gogh's extraordinary drawings will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 18. Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings — comprising 113 works selected from public and private collections worldwide, including an exceptional number of loans from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam — will reveal the range and brilliance of the artist's draftsmanship as it evolved over the course of his decade-long career. Generally over-shadowed by the fame and familiarity of his paintings, Van Gogh's more than 1,100 drawings remain comparatively unknown although they are among his most ingenious and striking creations. Van Gogh engaged drawing and painting in a rich dialogue, which enabled him to fully realize the creative potential of both means of expression. A group of paintings will be exhibited alongside the related drawings. The exhibition will remain on view through December 31.
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The first American retrospective devoted to the work of the great Italian Renaissance artist known as Fra Angelico (1390/5-1455) – and the first comprehensive presentation of his work assembled anywhere in the world in half a century – will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 26. More than 50 public institutions and private collections in Europe and America will participate in the landmark exhibition, which commemorates the 550th anniversary of the artist's death. Fra Angelico will feature nearly 80 drawings, paintings, and manuscript illuminations from throughout his career, supplemented by 45 additional works by his assistants and closest followers. Highlights of the exhibition include recently discovered paintings and new attributions, paintings never before displayed publicly, and reconstructed groupings of works, some of them reunited for the first time.
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Ghosts, spirit séances, levitation, auras, ectoplasm … extraordinary photographs of these and other paranormal phenomena will be on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, an exhibition devoted to the historical intersections between photography and the once wildly popular interest in spiritualism, on view from September 27 to December 31, 2005.
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A long-neglected area of Egyptian art – works associated with protection and healing – will be explored in the exhibition The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt, opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in fall 2005. By focusing on this fundamental, yet little-known aspect of Egyptian art, the exhibition will provide a new perspective on some 65 of the most beautiful and intriguing works from the Museum's renowned collection. The centerpiece will be the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus – the sole borrowed work in the exhibition – which is on loan from the New York Academy of Medicine. This manuscript, dating from the Second Intermediate Period (ca. 1650-1550 B.C.), is one of only two complete medical texts from ancient Egypt. Rarely seen even by Egyptologists, the manuscript's presentation at the Metropolitan represents its first public display in more than half a century.
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In India in the late 16th century, the Mughal emperor Akbar – a great patron of the arts – amassed an extensive library of some 20,000 beautifully illustrated and illuminated manuscripts. One of them, a lavishly ornamented copy of the Khamsa (Quintet of Tales) by Amir Khusrau Dihlavi (1253-1325), will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum beginning October 14, 2005, in the exhibition Pearls of the Parrot of India: The Emperor Akbar's Illustrated Khamsa, 1597-98.
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Santiago Calatrava, the world-renowned architect who has designed some of the most beautiful structures of our epoch, is the subject of a new exhibition, Santiago Calatrava: Sculpture into Architecture, opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 18, 2005. This exhibition, on view through January 22, 2006, will demonstrate that many of the forms of his celebrated buildings originated in his independent works of art.
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The Costume Institute will celebrate one of America's quintessential stylemakers this fall with an exhibition of accessories and fashion from Iris Apfel. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 13, 2005, to January 22, 2006, Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection will spotlight 40 objects, exploring the affinity between fashion and accessory designs and examining the power of dress and accessories to assert style above fashion, the individual above the collective.