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For a period of two-and-one-half years beginning this fall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will display seven superb examples of medieval art from the Morgan Library, while that facility undergoes a major expansion project. The long-term loans include some of the favorite works of the noted financier and collector J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), a past President of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. After Morgan's death, nearly 7,000 paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts from his astonishing collection were given to the Metropolitan, while his private library – and the illuminated, literary, and historical manuscripts, early printed books, and Old Master drawings and prints it contained – became The Pierpont Morgan Library. Most of the works that are being lent to the Metropolitan had been kept in Mr. Morgan's study during his lifetime and, since his death, have been displayed in the room with other personal belongings.
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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 80 stunning examples of his windows, lamps, furniture, mosaics, blown Favrile glass vases, pottery, enamelwork, jewelry, and paintings. Works from the early 1870s 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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An elaborately decorated 18th-century menorah – one of the oldest symbols of the Jewish faith – will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, beginning November 26. This is the second consecutive year that the piece will be shown during the Hanukkah season. Dating to about 1771, the candelabrum is large in size (H. 60" W.41" D.19") and rich in ornament, indicating that it was intended for use in a synagogue. An inscription suggests that the synagogue was located in Eastern Europe, probably in Poland.
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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 November 26. 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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An exhibition of secular and religious arts created in Latin America during the period of Spanish rule will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, beginning October 11. Featuring nearly 70 works of art, Arts of the Spanish Americas, 1550-1850: Works from the Museum's CollectionI will highlight the creativity of artists working in the regions colonized by Spain, from the Rio Grande to the Andes, from the period of evangelization through Independence. The exhibition will include a selection of Mexican glazed ceramic ware know as Talavera de Puebla, Mexican and Andean textiles and silver, paintings and polychrome sculpture from all over the Spanish-speaking Americas and the Philippines, and a group of wooden kero cups, the traditional ceremonial drinking vessels of the Andes.
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A new installation focusing on the art of Central Asia is on view on the Great Hall Balcony of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, illustrating the vibrancy and diversity found in objects created in the vast realm that stretched between Iran and China in ancient times. The 37 works of art in Glimpses of the Silk Road: Central Asia in the First Millennium are drawn primarily from the Metropolitan's collections of Asian and Ancient Near Eastern art, and include important loans as well as recent Museum acquisitions.
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One hundred eighty portraits by acclaimed photographer Richard Avedon—a vast collective portrait of America in the second half of the 20th century—will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 26. Richard Avedon: Portraits will feature his most classic and penetrating images, documenting as never before this artist's dazzling reinvention of the genre of photographic portraiture. The exhibition, which will remain on view through January 5, 2003, will span Avedon's entire career, from his earliest portraits made in the late 1940s through his most recent work.
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A major exhibition tracing the evolution of Chinese landscape painting over the last 1,000 years will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 10. Featuring more than 75 works drawn largely from the Museum's permanent collection, Cultivated Landscapes: Reflections of Nature in Chinese Painting with Selections from the Collection of Marie-Hélène and Guy Weill will explore the manifold uses of natural imagery in Chinese painting as reflections of human beliefs and emotions. Encompassing landscapes and garden scenes dating from the Five Dynasties period (907-960) to the late 20th century, the exhibition will present examples in all pictorial formats: hanging scrolls, handscrolls, album leaves, and fans. A dozen important works by leading masters of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties from the Weill Collection – given or promised to the Museum – will be highlighted in the Frances Young Tang Gallery.
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New Exhibitions
Upcoming Exhibitions
Continuing Exhibitions
New and Recently Opened Installations
Traveling Exhibitions
Visitor Information
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The first retrospective exhibition in the United States of works by the lyrical 19th-century French painter Théodore Chassériau will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 22, 2002, through January 5, 2003. Théodore Chassériau (1819--1856): The Unknown Romantic will feature 54 paintings and 82 works on paper – many never before exhibited in the United States – culled from international collections. Although he ranks among the most important and influential artists of the first half of the 19th century, Chassériau has remained one of the least known to modern audiences.
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The collection of some 35 Impressionist pictures that graced the walls of Janice H. Levin's Fifth Avenue apartment will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from November 19, 2002, through February 9, 2003. The intimately scaled exhibition, A Very Private Collection: Janice H. Levin's Impressionist Pictures will include exceptional works by many of the great masters of 19th-century French painting – Bonnard, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Vuillard, among others.
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A remarkable collection of Japanese calligraphy and painting assembled by two American collectors over the past 40 years is the subject of the special exhibition The Written Image: Japanese Calligraphy and Painting from the Sylvan Barnet and William Burto Collection, opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 1. Featuring 60 works, the exhibition traces the evolution of Japanese calligraphy from the Nara (710-784) through the Edo (1615-1868) period, including examples of both Chinese script (kanji) and Japanese kana script. These expressive calligraphic masterworks, including Buddhist holy texts, Zen aphorisms, secular poems, and intimate personal letters, embody diverse expressive goals as well as convey something of the writers' cultivation and character. The works from the Barnet and Burto Collection—among which are notable gifts and promised gifts to the Metropolitan Museum—will be complemented by a selection of Japanese paintings and calligraphy from the museum's holdings.
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A major exhibition tracing the evolution of Chinese landscape painting over the last 1,000 years will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 10. Featuring more than 75 works drawn largely from the Museum's permanent collection, Cultivated Landscapes: Reflections of Nature in Chinese Painting with Selections from the Collection of Marie-Hélène and Guy Weill will explore the manifold uses of natural imagery in Chinese painting as reflections of human beliefs and emotions. Encompassing landscapes and garden scenes dating from the Five Dynasties period (907-960) to the late 20th century, the exhibition will present examples in all pictorial formats: hanging scrolls, handscrolls, album leaves, and fans. A dozen important works by leading masters of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties from the Weill Collection – given or promised to the Museum – will be highlighted in the Frances Young Tang Gallery.
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More than 100 works in pencil, pen and ink, chalk, pastel, and watercolor by some of this country's most renowned early artists will be featured in American Drawings and Watercolors in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Highlights from the Collection, 1710-1890, opening to the public on September 3, 2002. On view will be examples of portraiture by academic and folk artists, figure drawing, historical and literary narrative, landscape – including several early views of New York City – and scientific illustration. Drawn entirely from the Museum's exceptional holdings of this material, the exhibition celebrates the publication of Volume I of American Drawings and Watercolors in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which includes works by artists born before 1835.
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Some three dozen works from the archives of Ernst Emile Herzfeld (1879-1948), one of the most prominent archaeologists and scholars of ancient Near Eastern and Islamic art of the first half of the 20th century, will go on view this summer at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Herzfeld in Samarra. The notebooks, sketchbooks, travel journals, artistically accomplished watercolors and ink drawings, site maps, architectural plans, and photographs were all acquired by the Metropolitan in 1943.
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For the first time in more than 40 years, 19th–century French artist Paul Gauguin is the subject of a major monographic show in New York City. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from June 18 through October 20, 2002, Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic features approximately 120 works drawn from museums and private collections in New York City and State, many of which are rarely exhibited publicly. The exhibition also marks the first time that the Metropolitan will display its own extensive holdings of the artist's work, numbering some 60 objects.
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In a lifetime characterized by war and conquest, Genghis Khan (1167?–1227) forged the largest contiguous land empire in human history. His legacy was a unified Mongol confederacy that his sons and grandsons ruled for more than a century. During this peaceful era, people, objects, and ideas moved with unprecedented freedom over a vast territory that reached from the Pacific Ocean to the Black Sea. The confluence of previously distant cultures yielded a bold new visual aesthetic that would resonate in Islamic art for centuries to come.
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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.
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The first comprehensive exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's (1453-1519) 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—the very embodiment of the Renaissance ideal of the universal genius.
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The first major tapestry survey in the United States in 25 years comes to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in spring 2002. This landmark international loan exhibition will feature 45 tapestries woven between 1420 and 1560 in the Netherlands, Italy, and France, from designs by the leading artists of the day – Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Bronzino, among others. The exhibition will also include about 20 preparatory drawings, designs, and cartoon fragments. On view from March 12 through June 19, 2002, Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence will highlight the great tapestry cycles of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as among the unsung glories of Renaissance art.
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One of the most extraordinary artistic and intellectual movements of the 20th century will be explored in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art February 6 through May 12, 2002. More than 300 works including paintings, sculpture, photographs, films, poems, manuscripts, and books will explore the first major artistic movement to address openly the topics of love, desire, and various aspects of sexuality.
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One of the world's preeminent photographers, Irving Penn is famous for portraiture, still life, and fashion work – but is less well known as a superb photographer of the female nude. Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949-50, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from January 15 through April 21, 2002, features 60 exquisitely wrought silver and platinum prints in the first exhibition of this work organized by a major museum.
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Approximately 40 exquisite photographs of a bygone era, taken by one of photography's great early artists, will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from January 15 through April 21, 2002. Benjamin Brecknell Turner: Rural England Through a Victorian Lens presents an impressive series of large-format scenes depicting quintessentially English subjects: ruined castles and abbeys; thatched barns, crumbling cottages and half-timbered houses; woodland paths and ancient oaks. Turner's picturesque and poetic images reveal a rough-hewn beauty in rustic subjects and express a moral value found in tradition, nature, and rural life and labor.
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Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy will be the first full-scale exhibition devoted to Caravaggio's most gifted follower, Orazio Gentileschi, and to Orazio's celebrated daughter, Artemisia. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from February 14 through May 12, 2002, the exhibition will feature approximately 50 works by Orazio and 35 by Artemisia, and will be the first exhibition to treat these two remarkable artists in depth.
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Approximately 80 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, will be featured in this exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. On view June 18 through September 8, 2002, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings from the Ordrupgaard Collection will offer 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) in the early decades of the 20th century, both the collection and the country house from which it derives its name were bequeathed to the Danish State upon the death of his wife, Henny, in 1951.
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A major traveling exhibition of ancient Chinese art from Sichuan will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 6, 2002. Featuring a spectacular selection of works of art, Treasures from a Lost Civilization: Ancient Chinese Art from Sichuan explores the fascinating world of the art, material culture, and spiritual life of ancient Sichuan, and illustrates the fundamental changes that archaeology has brought to our understanding of the history of Chinese art.
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Sphinx and crocodile, magnificent colossi, and delicate hieroglyphs are but a few of the treasures to be found in Along the Nile: Early Photographs of Egypt, an exhibition of 43 exquisitely preserved 19th-century photographs of one of the world's oldest and most mysterious civilizations. On view from September 11 through December 30 in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Howard Gilman Gallery, these early camera images of Egypt's landscapes, inhabitants, and dramatically imposing monuments—from Cairo to sand-swept Nubia—are drawn from the renowned Gilman Paper Company Collection as well as from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.
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Drawing inspiration from their rich local heritage of craftsmanship as well as from that of the larger Islamic world, metalworkers in India during the Mughal period (from the 16th through the 19th century) gave splendid form to many functional and decorative objects.
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The grand imperial vision, refinement, and opulence for which the Mughal rulers of India (1526-1858) were renowned found ultimate expression in their jeweled arts. In a dazzling display opening to the public on October 18, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present "Treasury of the World": Jeweled Arts of India in the Age of the Mughals, a landmark exhibition of more than 300 spectacular examples of Mughal and other related jeweled objects from The al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait National Museum. The presentation at the Metropolitan is a pioneering effort to show Mughal-period jeweled arts, for which The al-Sabah Collection is unrivaled in scope and scale.
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When Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon opened the tomb of the ancient Egyptian king Tutankhamun in 1922, the spectacular find was captured in stunning and evocative detail by Harry Burton (1879-1940), the outstanding archaeological photographer of his day. This fall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present some 60 photographs—primarily by Burton—made between 1906 and 1939, documenting the excavation of King Tutankhamun's tomb and some of the other major archaeological finds in Egypt. The gelatin silver prints, which come from the photographic archives of the Department of Egyptian Art, have never been shown publicly.
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Over time and across cultures, extraordinary manipulations of the body have occurred as concepts of beauty have continued to evolve. Extreme Beauty:
The Body Transformed – an exhibition opening December 6 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art – will offer a unique opportunity to see fashion as the practice of some of the most extreme methods to conform to shifting concepts of the physical ideal. Various zones of the body – neck, shoulders, bust, waist, hips, and feet – have been constricted, padded, truncated, or extended through a variety of techniques. The more than 100 costumes and accessories in the exhibition – ranging from a 16th-century iron corset to Thierry Mugler's notorious "Motorcycle" bustier – will be augmented by anthropological and ethnographic examples and by paintings, prints, and drawings, including caricatures by Gilray, Cruikshank, Daumier and Vernet.
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To complement the major exhibition Signac 1863-1935: Master Neo-Impressionist, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present paintings, drawings, and watercolors – selected entirely from the Museum's own collections – by Charles Angrand, Henri-Edmond Cross, Maximilien Luce, Hippolyte Petitjean and other artists who, like Paul Signac, exuberantly followed the groundbreaking techniques of optical painting introduced in the 1880s by Georges Seurat. On view at the Metropolitan from October 2 through December 30, 2001, Neo-Impressionism: The Circle of Paul Signac will feature some 60 works by these artists as well as by the better-known Signac and Seurat.
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Dress Rehearsal: Origins of The Costume Institute – opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on August 1 – is the second of the two-part installation (the pendent to Curios and Treasures) surveying one of the world's largest and most renowned costume collections. Costume collecting at the Metropolitan began in 1946 with the transfer of the collection of the former Museum of Costume Art, which had been founded in 1937 by a theater-oriented group of civic leaders under the direction of the New York philanthropist and savant Irene Lewisohn. That collection formed the core of The Costume Institute's now-comprehensive current holdings of more than 80,000 costumes and accessories.
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On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 9 through December 30, 2001,Signac 1863-1935: Master Neo-Impressionist, will be the first major retrospective of the artist's work in nearly 40 years. Best known for his luminous Mediterranean seascapes rendered in a myriad of "dots" – and later mosaic-like squares – of color, Signac adapted the "pointillist" technique of Georges Seurat with stunning visual impact. The exhibition will feature 121 works, including some 70 oils and a rich selection of Signac's watercolors, drawings, and prints, providing an unprecedented overview of the artist's 50-year career.
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A retrospective exhibition of prints by the American artist Terry Winters will open June 12, 2001, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ninety works created between 1983 and the present, all from the Museum's collection, will be on view through September 30 in the Helen and Michael A. Kimmelman Gallery of the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for modern art.
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Masterpieces of early French photography and groundbreaking modern photographs created since 1960 – both the earliest and most recent chapters in the history of the 160-year-old medium – will be on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition celebrating the first decade of collecting by the Museum's Department of Photographs. Photographs: A Decade of Collecting will open on June 5, 2001.
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The first New York exhibition to focus on photography and the Bauhaus experience will be on view in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Howard Gilman Gallery from June 5 through August 26, 2001. Dancing on the Roof: Photography and the Bauhaus (1923-1929) will explore the period of freewheeling innovation –- which began when master instructor László Moholy-Nagy arrived at the progressive German art school and ended when photography became an official part of the school's curriculum – through some 60 photographs by a dozen artists. Many of the prints are unique and have never been exhibited; most are from New York area collections.
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Candace Wheeler (1827-1923)—the national expert in her time on decorative textiles and interiors, one of the first women to work in the male-dominated design world of the 19th century, and a woman who devoted her life to educating young women and encouraging their careers in the field of applied arts—will be the focus of an exhibition opening October 10 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900, the first major retrospective to address the accomplishments of this remarkable woman, will feature some 105 works including textiles, wallpapers, drawings, paintings, photographs of interiors, and furniture. Much of the exhibition will demonstrate the uniquely American style of design created by Wheeler and her associates. Candace Wheeler will be on view through January 6, 2002.
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On October 2, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the landmark exhibition Glass of the Sultans, the first-ever museum survey of rare Islamic glass and the first scholarly reassessment of this material anywhere in more than 70 years. Some 160 spectacular and precious examples from the world's preeminent collections will be shown, including Islamic glass found in archaeological sites, seventh-century works influenced by Imperial Roman glassmaking traditions, Iranian relief-cut glass (sometimes in the cameo technique), ornately gilded and enameled works from the 13th and 14th centuries, and brilliant 19th-century Persian and Indian glass. Among the diverse works on display will be tiny medallions, delicate four-inch-tall cosmetic flasks, and ornate blown-glass vessels measuring some 15 inches in height and 12 inches in diameter. Also on view will be examples of 13th- to 20th-century European glass directly inspired by Islamic glass or made for the Oriental market. The exhibition will feature more than a dozen works from the Metropolitan's prestigious collection.
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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 May 24, 2001. 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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A unique exhibition Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis and Roussel, 1890-1930, will provide American audiences a rare opportunity to experience the decorative projects carried out in France between 1890 and 1930 by Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Ker Xavier Roussel. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from June 26 through September 9, 2001, the exhibition consists of approximately 80 paintings and folding screens on loan from international public and private collections.
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In celebration of the exhibition William Blake, The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Concerts & Lectures series will present three programs in June featuring, respectively, the distinguished poets Stanley Kunitz, Galway Kinnell, and Nancy Willard; poet, songwriter, and rock singer Patti Smith accompanied by guitarist Oliver Ray; and New York University professor of fine arts Robert Rosenblum.
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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 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 geographic expanse and cultural diversity covered by the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas will be highlighted this summer when a selection of works acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art over the past five years goes on view at the Museum, beginning May 22. The exhibition African, Oceanic, and Ancient American Art: Recent Acquisitions will include some 70 works from such widely diverse places as the Republic of Vanuatu in the South Pacific, the country of Ethiopia in northeastern Africa, and the central highlands of Mexico and will demonstrate the breadth of department's collecting interests. Equally varied are the functions to which the works were put, the materials from which they are made, and the eras in which they were produced. They range in date from the end of the second millennium B.C. to 1998.
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Five sculptures by renowned American artist Joel Shapiro (born 1941) are currently on view in the 2001 installation of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Drawn from public and private collections, Joel Shapiro on the Roof includes three large cast bronze and two painted cast aluminum sculptures, dating from 1989 to the present. Three have not been exhibited previously in New York, and two have been newly created. The works are exhibited in the 10,000-square-foot open-air space that offers spectacular views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline. The installation marks the fourth consecutive single-artist installation on the Roof Garden.
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The last piano owned by famed Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt (1811-86) – known as a revolutionary figure of romantic music and the one of the great virtuoso pianists – is currently on view in The André Mertens Galleries for Musical Instruments at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 23. Manufactured around 1865 by the French company Erard, the grand piano was owned by Liszt during the last 15 years of his life and was used by him primarily for composing and teaching. It was lost after Liszt's death but was rediscovered in 1991 by the Italian pianist Carlo Dominici, the current owner of the instrument, with its soundboard miraculously intact. After a period of careful restoration, this historic instrument has been returned to playing order.
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Summer 2001 will mark the inaugural season of a series of annual exhibitions drawn from the Museum's collection of works on paper created by American artists between the 1780s and 1900. This year's presentation of Summer Selections will include some three dozen drawings, watercolors, and pastels of landscape subjects, and will open to the public on May 29, 2001.
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New Exhibitions
Upcoming Exhibitions
Continuing Exhibitions
New and Recently Opened Installations
Traveling Exhibitions
Visitor Information
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Among the most innovative and influential artists of his age, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1527—1569), was a remarkable draftsman and designer of prints as well as a painter. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 25 through December 2, 2001, this landmark exhibition will include 54 of the 61 extant drawings by Bruegel – a larger number than has ever been assembled for any previous exhibition. In addition, the exhibition will also include some 60 prints designed by him, and another 20 drawings by his contemporaries.
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The first-ever American exhibition devoted to the art of Easter Island – the most remote inhabited place on the earth – will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on December 12, 2001. Featuring some 50 works, including a celebrated stone head of a moai, Splendid Isolation: Art of Easter Island will explore the island's distinctive art forms as expressions of supernatural and secular power.
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Vermeer and the Delft School, a major international loan exhibition, premieres at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 8 through May 27, 2001. Best known for quiet, carefully described images of domestic life as seen in works by Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and others, Delft masters also produced history pictures in an international style, highly refined flower paintings, princely portraits, and superb examples of the decorative arts. Featuring 85 paintings – including 15 Vermeers – by 30 artists, about 35 drawings, and smaller selections of tapestries, gilded silver, and Delftware faience, the exhibition casts the familiar "Delft School" in a new light – one that emphasizes the roles of the neighboring court at The Hague, and of sophisticated patrons in Delft.
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Sultan Ali of Mashhad (1442-1520) is the acknowledged master of nastaliq, a style of calligraphy favored in the 15th and 16th century for poetical texts written in the Persian language. Although the elegant and fluid script - which was once likened to the patterns of flying geese - originated in Iran, it soon influenced calligraphy in the Muslim courts of India and Turkey.
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A retrospective exhibition of prints by the American artist Terry Winters will open June 12, 2001, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Approximately ninety works created between 1983 and the present, all from the Museum's collections, will be on view through September 30 in the Helen and Michael Kimmelman Gallery of the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for modern art.
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The first American drawings acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art were by William Trost Richards (1833-1905), an artist associated with both the Hudson River School and the American Pre-Raphaelite movement. A number of these early acquisitions - donated to the Metropolitan in 1880 by the Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon - will be displayed at the Museum this spring, along with recent significant acquisitions and works from a loan collection of Richards's miniatures. William Trost Richards in The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open on February 13.
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Vermeer and the Delft School, a major international loan exhibition, premieres at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 8 through May 27, 2001. Best known for quiet, carefully described images of domestic life as seen in works by Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and others, Delft masters also produced history pictures in an international style, highly refined flower paintings, princely portraits, and superb examples of the decorative arts. Featuring 85 paintings – including 15 Vermeers – by 30 artists, about 35 drawings, and smaller selections of tapestries, gilded silver, and Delftware faience, the exhibition will cast the familiar "Delft School" in a new light – one that emphasizes the roles of the neighboring court at The Hague, and of sophisticated patrons in Delft.
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Picturing Media: Modern Photographs from the Permanent Collection, opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 31, 2000, is the second of an ongoing series of installations highlighting the Museum's rapidly expanding collection of contemporary photographs. This selection of 14 works, all acquired by the Metropolitan in the last decade, includes a number of very large photographs that are handsomely accommodated by the scale of the exhibition space on the first floor adjoining the Museum's Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for modern art. The exhibition remains on view through April 29, 2001.
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Summer 2001 will mark the inaugural season of Summer Selections: American Drawings and Watercolors in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a series of annual exhibitions drawn from the Museum's collection of works on paper created by American artists between the 1780s and 1900. This summer's presentation will include some three dozen drawings, watercolors, and pastels, and will open to the public on May 29, 2001.
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More than 90 Chinese paintings amassed by Robert H. Ellsworth will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, starting January 30. Drawn from the nearly 500 pieces in the Museum's collection, Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Chinese Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art will focus on Chinese painting created during the period of clashing social visions and dramatic political change that marked China's entry into the modern world. In the arts, it is a time when the tensions between tradition and innovation, native and foreign styles reached an unprecedented level of intensity.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art will feature a selection of five sculptures by renowned American artist Joel Shapiro (born 1941) in the 2001 installation of The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, opening May 1. Drawn from public and private collections, Joel Shapiro on the Roof will include five large cast bronze and painted cast aluminum sculptures, dating from 1989 to the present – three have not been previously exhibited in New York, and two have been newly created. The works will be exhibited in the 10,000-square-foot open-air space that offers spectacular views of Central Park and the New York City skyline. The installation will mark the fourth consecutive single-artist installation on the Roof Garden.
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The medieval treasury of Basel Cathedral miraculously survived a devastating earthquake, the plague, and numerous wars, as well as iconoclasm, the Protestant Reformation, and secularization, only to fall victim to politics in the early 19th century, when it was dispersed. Period inventories identifying objects from the treasury have made it possible to locate numerous works. More than 75 of these splendid ecclesiastical and secular objects will be reunited for the first time in The Treasury of Basel Cathedral, an exhibition that will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on February 28. Almost none of the works have traveled before to the United States.
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William Blake, the first American exhibition of works in all media – drawings, paintings, and prints – by the legendary British Romantic, will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 29, 2001. More than 175 works, including all of the illuminated books, for which he is most widely known, will be on view in this first-ever exhibition to explore the artist's work within the context of the social, economic, and political upheavals of his times.
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Correggio and Parmigianino were two of the greatest masters of the Emilian school of early 16th-century Italy, renowned for their painterly effects and exquisite draftsmanship. A major exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Correggio and Parmigianino: Master Draftsmen of the Renaissance, will mark the first time that a major selection of drawings by these two artists has been shown together. On view from February 6 through May 6, 2001, the exhibition will feature more than 130 drawings – many exhibited for the first time – from British and North American public and private collections.
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(New York, November 17, 2000)—One hundred fifteen portraits by Richard Avedon, the celebrated photographer, have been given by Mr. Avedon to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was announced today by Philippe de Montebello, the Museum's Director.
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A unique 2001 exhibition Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis and Roussel, 1890-1930, will provide American audiences a rare opportunity to experience the decorative projects carried out in France between 1890 and 1930 by Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Ker Xavier Roussel. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from June 26 through September 9, 2001, the exhibition will consist of approximately 80 paintings and folding screens on loan from international public and private collections.
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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 Saturday, November 25. 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., beginning Friday, December 1.
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Masterpieces of early French photography and American photographs since 1960 – two high points in the history of the 160-year-old medium – will be on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition saluting the first decade of collecting by the Museum's Department of Photographs. Photographs: A Decade of Collecting will open on June 5, 2001.
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An exploration of the technical history of photographic processes and of related conservation, preservation, and connoisseurship issues will be presented in an exhibition opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on January 30, 2001. Photography: Processes, Preservation, and Conservation, on view through May 6 in the Museum's Howard Gilman Gallery, will include approximately 35 works by some of the most revered names in photography, ranging from the superbly preserved to the unfortunately time-worn, with before-and-after treatment documentation, microscopic views, and examples of current methods for examination, analysis, preservation, and treatment. The exhibition celebrates the January 2001 opening of the Museum's new, state-of-the-art Sherman Fairchild Center for Works on Paper and Photograph Conservation.
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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 April 1, 2001. The fourth and final exhibition in the series, surveying design from 1975 to 2000, will be on view May 1 through October 1, 2001.
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This press kit for Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years--Selections from the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum includes a general release about the exhibition, immediately following, as well as these five releases, to which you can link directly by clicking on their titles:
Statement from L'Oréal
Statement from Condé Nast
Hamish Bowles
Book Accompanying the Exhibition
Related Programs
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Evaristo Baschenis (1617-1677), the preeminent still life painter of 17th-century Italy, is best known for his hauntingly poetic paintings of musical instruments. Although largely unfamiliar to American audiences, these lyrical masterpieces of composition and color harmony combine baroque splendor with a masterful, restrained geometry. Their quality of time arrested has led to comparisons with the paintings of Chardin and Vermeer. Now, 18 paintings from public and private collections in the artist's native Bergamo and throughout northern Italy are featured in The Still Lifes of Evaristo Baschenis: The Music of Silence, on view at the Metropolitan Museum from November 17, 2000 through March 4, 2001. The exhibition also includes books on perspective and important examples of period musical instruments from the Metropolitan's own collections.
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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 in June 2001. 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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(October 25, 2000) The Metropolitan Museum of Art today announced the opening of the Onassis Library for Hellenic and Roman Art in the Museum's Department of Greek and Roman. Scholars utilizing the Onassis Library will for the first time have access to the Met's rich and diverse collection of publications and its extensive historical archive of Greek and Roman art. In addition, because the library's resources are now available online, this extraordinary collection can be accessed by scholars, libraries, and databases worldwide.
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(October 3, 2000) The Metropolitan Museum of Art will today debut a new Timeline of Art History on the Museum's Web site (www.metmuseum.org). The Timeline features works of art from the Metropolitan's encyclopedic collections, presented in a new chronological format giving browsers and scholars alike instant access to the art created at any given time in different cultures across the globe.
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Philippe de Montebello, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be joined by the distinguished actor Fritz Weaver in a program of dramatic readings, presented in conjunction with the special exhibition The Year One: Art of the Ancient World East and West. The program, The Year One: A Reading, will feature selections from works by Virgil and Horace and poems in the fu form from the Han Dynasty. It will take place on Sunday, October 15, at 7:00 p.m. in the recently opened Mary and Michael Jaharis Gallery, a particularly appropriate setting with its long, dramatic vista and display of monumental ancient Roman statues.
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Philippe de Montebello, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Susan Weber Soros, Founder/Director of The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, have agreed to a joint project that will allow Bard Graduate Center students to work with objects from the Metropolitan's collections and to organize exhibitions based on and around these objects. The exhibitions will be presented in the gallery of the Bard Graduate Center at 18 West 86th Street in Manhattan on a biennial basis.
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New Exhibitions
Upcoming Exhibitions
Continuing Exhibitions
New and Recently Opened Installations
Traveling Exhibitions
Visitor Information
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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.