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.

The legendary, pioneering French artist who famously left his family and a career in finance to paint and live like a native in the South Seas, Paul Gauguin in fact began sailing to far-off lands during childhood. As a boy he lived for a time with relatives in Peru, and in his teens, in the merchant marine and the military, he visited South America, India, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the North Sea. He believed firmly in his difference, often referring to himself as a "savage," and once he discovered his passion for art he had to create forms that were original and unique. "What does it matter that I set myself apart from other people? For most I shall be an enigma, but for a few I shall be a poet ...," he wrote. Thus Gauguin traveled widely, seeking inspiration for a radical new artistic vision. He tried Brittany, where he worked together with a group of followers. There Gauguin discovered a wellspring of his art: an intense desire to capture the soul of a naive culture. In France he also went to Provence, painting briefly in the company of Van Gogh. He moved farther and farther afield, to Panama and Martinique, settling at last in Tahiti. Finally he found his resting place in the distant Marquesas Islands. In these exotic ports if call Gauguin liberated his art from the here and now, creating a subjective reality of imagination and dreams in vividly colored, highly abstract paintings depicting native life an din rough ceramic sculptures and carved reliefs. "He's in another world," remarked the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. This volume accompanies a major exhibition of Gauguin's work in New York collections held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Surprisingly, the first major show devoted to Gauguin in New York since the Metropolitan Museum presented a retrospective of his work in 1959, it anticipates the centennial of the artist's death in 1903 and signals the ninetieth anniversary of his debut in New York collections. Four authors from the Metropolitan Museum illuminate aspects of the subject in their texts. Colta Ives, curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints, explores the development of Gauguin's art in the context of his travels. Susan Alyson Stein, associate curator, Department of European Paintings, discusses the history of the collecting and exhibiting of the artist's work in New York. Conservator Charlotte Hale treats the technical examination of his paintings and the light it sheds on issues of authenticity. And conservator Marjorie Shelley writes about the materials and techniques Gauguin employed in his works on paper. In addition, many revealing excerpts from Gauguin's letters and other writings—he was a prose stylist of distinction—are included. All works in the exhibition, as well as rich comparative material, are reproduced. Notes, a bibliography, a checklist of works in the exhibition, and an index are supplied.

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.

Emily Sutter, editor and producer for Digital Learning in the Digital Department, responds to Hudson's letter to The Met about Paul Klee.

Website Editor Michael Cirigliano II examines some of the parallels between composer Paul Hindemith and artist Max Beckmann—two prolific artists who both fled Nazi Germany in 1937.

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.

In this interview, Rachel High speaks with Paul Booth about the design of Monumental Journey, the first monograph in English on Girault de Prangey's groundbreaking photographs.

A magnificent selection of drawings by one of the greatest artists of the seventeenth century, for the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), drawing was a fundamental activity. Ranging from delightful renderings of children and elegant portraits of noblemen and women to vigorous animal studies and beautiful landscapes, Rubens's drawings are renowned for their superb quality and variety. This exquisite book presents—in beautiful full-color reproductions—more than one hundred of the finest and most representative of Rubens's drawings, from private and public collections around the world. Essays by Anne-Marie Logan and Michiel C. Plomp provide overviews of Rubens's career as a draftsman and of the dispersal of his drawings among collectors after his death. The authors discuss the various functions of Rubens's drawings as preparatory studies for paintings, sculpture, architecture, prints, and book illustrations. The volume also includes a sampling of the artists early anatomical studies and copies after antique sculpture as well as several sheets by other artists that Rubens retouched, restored, or reworked. This publication accompanies an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (January 14 to April 3, 2005)—the most comprehensive exhibition of Rubens's drawings ever held in the United States.