Paul Cézanne’s portraits of Hortense Fiquet rank among his most powerful and iconic works. Yet posterity has not been kind to Madame Cézanne. She was called a distraction, blamed for her husband’s “lackluster” landscapes, and disdained for her impenetrable expression in his paintings—if she was acknowledged at all. The reality is much more complex, for while Fiquet and Cézanne shared a difficult relationship, she was a willing collaborator as the artist’s model, wife, mother of his only son, and unwavering partner. Madame Cézanne examines for the first time this unconventional relationship in the context of Cézanne as a painter, draftsman, and portraitist while shedding light on the most personal dialogue of all, that of artist and muse. Biographical essays are supplemented by groundbreaking interpretations of Cézanne’s portraits and captivating discussions of the artist’s working methods. Featuring all twenty-nine of Cézanne’s oil portraits of Fiquet and most of the known drawings and watercolors, Madame Cézanne both reconsiders, with insight and compassion, the long-held misconceptions about the Cézannes’ marriage, and shows how Cézanne’s portraits of his wife provide a lens through which to understand his masterly technique at the advent of modernism.

Rachel High explores the enigmatic Hortense Fiquet with Madame Cézanne curator and catalogue co-author Dita Amory.

Emily Sutter, producer and editor of #MetKids, responds to Paula, age 6, who sent a painting of a still life with apples.

Join scholar Charles W. Haxthausen as he explores the variety of artist Paul Klee’s practice and reflects on its art-historical implications.

Costume designer Paul Tazewell reflects on Anthony van Dyck's portraits in this episode of The Artist Project.

Watch artist Suzanne Bocanegra present _Honor_, a stage work that masquerades as an artist lecture about one of The Met's most important 16th-century tapestries.

High School Intern Desiree explores Paul Cézanne's paintings of his wife, Hortense Fiquet, and asks what the works say about the pair's relationship and Cézanne's artistic practices.

Paul Klee was unrivaled among his contemporaries in his wide-ranging experimentation with materials and unconventional techniques. Join scholar Charles W. Haxthausen as he explores the variety of Klee’s practice and reflects on its art-historical implications.

Paul Strand (1890–1976) was one of the most important and influential photographers of this century. The dramatic achievements of his early career, which have not until now been studied apart from his entire oeuvre, are the focus of this book, which accompanies an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Spurred by the example of Cézanne, Picasso, and Nietzsche, Strand pushed the medium into artistic terrain considered too difficult, cerebral, or brutal to describe with a camera. His undeniable success brought photography to its maturity. For concentrated power, formal coherence, and human sensitivity, the extraordinary pictures he made in and around New York City in 1916 have never been bettered. After studying photography with the social reformer Lewis Hine, Strand began to absorb the ideas of the European avant-garde, gradually abandoning the painterly effects of pictorialism in favor of a candid and psychologically potent realism on the one hand and a masterfully wrought abstraction on the other. Fellow photographer and art entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz recognized Strand's astonishing pictures as bold strides into a new world and heralded them as the first images in an incisive modern vision—a direct and flexible idiom expressive of 20th-century experience. Strand's large, beautiful platinum prints are reproduced here in superb tritone plates. The text by Maria Morris Hambourg traces the early development of Strand's ideas, the complex cultural context of his experiments, and the emergence of such masterpieces as Wall Street, White Fence, and Blind.