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Two hundred nineteen works by leading 19th-century American, British, and French artists from the legendary collection formed by Grenville L. Winthop (1864-1943) will go on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 23, 2003. The exhibition, which marks the first time the collection has traveled since its bequest to Harvard in 1943, features paintings, drawings, and sculptures by more than 50 artists, including William Blake, Edward Burne-Jones, Jacques-Louis David, Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, Winslow Homer, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Gustave Moreau, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Auguste Rodin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Singer Sargent, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. A Private Passion: 19th-Century Paintings and Drawings from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, Harvard University will remain on view at the Metropolitan through January 25, 2004.
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Some 175 of the best surviving examples of a medium that changed the history of art and visual representation forever will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 23, 2003, through January 4, 2004. The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839-1855 is the first survey of key monuments from photography's first moments, when its pioneers used the invention for artistic, scientific, ethnographic, documentary, and other purposes. The exhibition will employ state-of-the-art display and lighting techniques to reveal the incomparable detail and sculptural quality that distinguishes this process and which led one of its earliest champions, Jules Janin, to describe the daguerreotype as "divine magic."
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Some 200 American Indian objects assembled over almost half a century by the renowned Santa Fe authority and collector Ralph T. Coe will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, beginning September 9. Featuring objects dating from 3000 B.C. to the present, The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe and the Collecting of American Indian Art will display a wide-ranging selection of works representative of most of the diverse Native American regions and periods. Objects on view will range from authoritative masks and headdress frontlets of painted wood made by peoples of the Pacific Northwest, to splendidly ornamented deerskin shirts and smoking pipes of the high Plains, to delicate and carefully wrought works of the Northeast region made with a clear understanding of European taste and acquisitiveness.
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An exhibition focusing on the 17th-century landscape painting of China's Nanjing School will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, beginning September 13. Comprising nearly 60 works, Dreams of Yellow Mountain: Landscapes of Survival in Seventeenth-Century China will highlight works created by "leftover subjects" of the Ming dynasty, who lived in and around Nanjing during the early years of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1911). For these loyalist artists, images of landscape – often inspired by Yellow Mountain – symbolized survival, resistance, and reclusion in response to alien rule. Including works from the Museum's permanent holdings as well as loans from East Coast collections, the exhibition will be the most comprehensive presentation of such landscapes ever mounted in the United States.
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The first-ever public presentation of 101 works from the impressive group of Italian illuminated manuscripts assembled by Robert Lehman (1891-1969), one of the foremost American collectors of his day, opens at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 30, 2003. Treasures of a Lost Art: Italian Manuscript Painting of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, on view through February 1, 2004, features some of the finest examples of the illuminator's art—many of them previously unknown even to scholars—produced in Italy from the 13th through the 16th century. Among the many important new discoveries presented in the exhibition is the only known illumination by the great Sienese master Duccio di Buoninsegna.
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The evolution of the widely anticipated outdoor work of art for New York City initiated in 1979 by the husband-and-wife collaborators Christo and Jeanne-Claude will be the subject of the exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates, Central Park, New York, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 6 through July 25, 2004. Some 45 preparatory drawings and collages by Christo, 40 photographs, and 10 maps and technical diagrams will document the soon-to-be-realized work of art, which when completed will consist of 7,500 saffron-colored gates placed at 10- to 15-foot intervals throughout 23 miles of pedestrian walkways lacing Central Park from 59th Street to 110th Street and from Central Park West to Fifth Avenue.
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More than 75 exceptional examples of sculpture from some of the finest public and private collections of African art in the United States will be shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture, opening to the public on November 19. The works relate to traditions that interweave elements of myth, history, religion, and contemporary experience to address universal questions: How did the world begin? What is our ancestry? What is the source of agriculture, kingship, and other societal institutions? The exhibition represents the first time that 17 distinct sculptural traditions that take their inspiration from myths of origin will be considered together. Examined in particular depth will be that of the Bamana (Bambara) people of Mali. Forty stunning ci wara (Chi Wara) antelope headdresses – a classical sculptural form from the Bamana – will constitute the largest assemblage of such works and will allow viewers an appreciation of this tradition in its fullest expression. These works will be introduced by 35 rarely seen masterpieces from 16 distinct cultural traditions from sub-Saharan Africa.
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The first major exhibition ever to examine the impact of 17th-century Spanish painting
on 19th-century French artists will feature nearly 240 paintings and works on paper spanning several centuries of European art at the most astounding levels of achievement. On view will be some 130 paintings by Velázquez, Murillo, Ribera, El Greco, Zurbarán, and other masters of Spain's Golden Age as well as masterpieces by the 19th-century French artists they influenced, among them Delacroix, Courbet, Millet, Degas, and, most notably, Manet. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 4 through June 8, 2003, Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting will also include works by American artists such as Sargent, Chase, Eakins, Whistler, and Cassatt, who studied in France but learned to paint like Spaniards.
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The first major retrospective devoted to the virtuoso Netherlandish mannerist Hendrick Goltzius – one of the most versatile and accomplished figures in the history of art – will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 26, 2003. Hendrick Goltzius, Dutch Master (1558-1617): Drawings, Prints, and Paintings, an international loan exhibition of more than 160 works, spans the artist's entire career and demonstrates his legendary mastery of a remarkably wide range of media, subject matter, and styles – from extravagantly complex mythological scenes in prints, to sensitively observed studies from nature, to sumptuously colored oil paintings on canvas and copper. The exhibition remains on view at the Metropolitan through September 7, 2003.
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The remarkable flowering of the world's earliest civilizations some 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia—present-day Iraq—will be the focus of a landmark exhibition opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 8. The culmination of years of planning and research, Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus will survey the evolution of art and culture in the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates and their impact on the emerging cities of the ancient world—from the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean across Central Asia and along the Gulf to the Indus Valley—during one of the most seminal and creative periods in history. Some 50 museums from more than a dozen countries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East will participate in this ambitious exhibition, lending national treasures that have rarely, if ever, been sent outside the walls of their art institutions.
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An exhibition examining the successive waves of artistic influence that flowed from China eastward to the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago over the past 1,000 years will take place at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, beginning in March 2003. Great Waves: Chinese Themes in the Arts of Korea and Japan, drawn from the Museum's unparalleled collection of East Asian painting, will explore how Chinese pictorial themes – Buddhist iconography, landscape imagery, flower and bird subjects, and figural narratives – were adopted selectively and reinterpreted by native artists in Korea and Japan. Organized thematically, the exhibition will focus on landscapes and images from nature in the Douglas Dillon Galleries for Chinese Painting and Calligraphy (opening March 1), and on the figural arts, including religious and narrative themes, in The Sackler Wing Galleries for the Arts of Japan (opening March 15). Works from China, Japan, and Korea will be shown in both gallery areas.
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The first major retrospective devoted to the virtuoso Netherlandish mannerist Hendrick Goltzius will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 26, 2003. Hendrick Goltzius, Dutch Master (1558-1617): Drawings, Prints, and Paintings—a selection of some 80 prints, 69 drawings, and 13 paintings, including loans from collections throughout Europe and the United States—spans the artist's entire career and demonstrates his legendary mastery of a remarkably wide range of media, subject matter and styles.
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In June of 1864, an important episode in the American Civil War took place in international waters off the coast of Cherbourg, France. The duel between the U.S.S. Kearsarge and the C.S.S. Alabama created a sensation in Europe and America alike, and caught the imagination of the French artist Édouard Manet (1832-83), who made a painting of the battle before rushing to Boulogne to see the victorious Kearsarge. The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently acquired Manet's portrait of the Kearsarge and to celebrate the acquisition will present a small exhibition devoted to the battle, Manet's response, and the effect of Manet's paintings on his immediate friends. Manet and the American Civil War: The Battle of the "Kearsarge" and the "Alabama" is a dossier exhibition that opens on June 3.
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The remarkable flowering of the world's earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia some 5,000 years ago will be the focus of a landmark exhibition opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 8. Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus will survey the evolution of Mesopotamian art and culture and its impact on the cities of the ancient world – stretching from the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean across Central Asia to the Indus Valley – during one of the most seminal and creative periods in history.
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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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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.