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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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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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One hundred fifteen exceptional 19th-century paintings, drawings, and oil sketches – many never before publicly exhibited – will be featured in this exhibition of selected works from the holdings of noted New York collector Karen B. Cohen. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 17, 2000 through January 21, 2001, Romanticism and the School of Nature: 19th-Century Drawings and Paintings from the Karen B. Cohen Collection will include landscapes, portraits, figure compositions, and still lifes by the great artists of the Romantic period, the School of Barbizon, the Realist movement, and their followers, from Prud'hon to Seurat. At the center of the exhibition will be a selection of 20 images by Eugène Delacroix, ranging from pencil sketches to oil paintings and fully worked watercolors.
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This press kit for Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861 includes a general release about the exhibition, immediately following, as well as these four releases, to which you can link directly by clicking on their titles:
Statement from Fleet
Curatorial Biographies
Student Pass Program
Exhibition Catalogue
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Between 1986 and 1990, hundreds of astonishing objects — ornately carved and decorated in a unique style and covered in gold — were excavated from an archaeological site outside the village of Filippovka, located in Bashkortostan on southern Russia's open steppes. Representing one of the most important caches of early nomadic Eurasian art, these treasures date from the first millennium B.C. and are characterized by the extensive use of animal imagery — most notably that of a deer. This fall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present nearly 100 of these dazzling works — none of which has ever been shown anywhere — in a dramatic display, The Golden Deer of Eurasia: Scythian and Sarmatian Treasures from the Russian Steppes, opening on October 12.
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A Century of Design, Part III: 1950-1975
November 28, 2000 – May 27, 2001
Lila Acheson Wallace Wing
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 May 27, 2001. The fourth and final exhibition in the series, surveying design from 1975 to 2000, will be on view June 26, 2001 through January 6, 2002.
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One hundred fifteen exceptional 19th-century paintings, drawings, and oil sketches — many never before publicly exhibited — will be featured in this exhibition of selected works from the holdings of noted New York collector Karen B. Cohen. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 17, 2000, through January 21, 2001, Romanticism and the School of Nature: 19th-Century Drawings and Paintings from the Collection of Karen B. Cohen will include landscapes, portraits, figure compositions, and still lifes by the great artists of the Romantic period, the School of Barbizon, the Realist movement, and their followers, from Prud'hon to Seurat. At the center of the exhibition will be a selection of 20 images by Eugène Delacroix, ranging from pencil sketches to oil paintings and fully worked watercolors.
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In celebration of the new millennium, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present an unprecedented exhibition — drawn almost entirely from its own collections — of nearly 150 works of art that were produced some 2,000 years ago in the period just before and after the Year One. On view October 3, 2000 through January 14, 2001, The Year One: Art of the Ancient World East and West will feature magnificent and distinctive works of art from Western Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Southeast Asia, and the Americas.
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The most important and comprehensive exhibition of its kind ever assembled in the West, The Embodied Image: Chinese Calligraphy from the John B. Elliott Collection — opening September 15 — will bring together some 120 works of art from the two principal collections of Chinese calligraphy that were formed in the United States. More than 55 masterworks from the John B. Elliott Collection of The Art Museum, Princeton University — perhaps the finest such collection outside Asia — will be integrated with a similar number of masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, most notably from the John M. Crawford Jr. Collection, and loans from six private collections. Spanning the period from the fourth century to the modern era, the exhibition will explore the stylistic range and individuality of many of the leading artists of the last 1,000 years.
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Parks and Promenades: Maurice Prendergast in The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924) as painter, watercolorist, draftsman, and book illustrator. Gathered from the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, Department of Drawings and Prints, and Robert Lehman Collection, the exhibition will be the first to present the Museum's entire collection of Prendergast's work. Cursory pencil drawings of incidental Parisian life; luminous, large-scale watercolors from the Large Boston Public Garden Sketchbook (1895-97); and oil paintings of recreational activities on the Massachusetts shore and in New York's Central Park will chronicle a lifetime of plein-air observation. On view July 25 through October 22, 2000, the exhibition will feature some 70 works, including many of Prendergast's most acclaimed watercolors, which, because of their sensitivity to light, have not been shown together for more than a decade.
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Photographs by anonymous amateurs whose "happy accidents" and "successful failures" resulted in surprising and tantalizing works of art are the subject of Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 6, 2000. Dating from the 1910s through the 1960s — a period that saw the camera's emergence as a nearly ubiquitous and easy-to-use accessory of modern life — these photographs reflect the spirit of their time in refreshingly honest and often unexpected ways. Although never intended for public display — most of the approximately 90 photographs on view were discovered at flea markets, in shoeboxes, or in family albums — these found images often bring to mind the work of such master photographers as Walker Evans, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus.
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A series of 14 recent etchings by London painter Leon Kossoff (b. 1926) will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning March 28. Based on paintings by the 17th-century French artist Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), the etchings are the result of a period of intense, first-hand study of the Baroque master's canvases during the 1995 Poussin exhibition at London's Royal Academy. After Nicolas Poussin: New Etchings by Leon Kossoff, which will be installed in the North Mezzanine Gallery of the Museum's Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, runs through August 13.
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A Century of Design, Part II: 1925-1950 — the second in a four-part series of exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art surveying design in the 20th century — will display more than 50 objects from the Museum's collection to demonstrate the dynamic rise of Modernism and its influence on public perception of everyday objects, such as furniture, housewares, and decorative objects. On view in the Museum's Gallery for Modern Design and Architecture from May 9 through October 29, 2000, the exhibition will follow the advancement of design in Europe during the second quarter of the 20th century — from Art Deco through the influences of the Bauhaus school, Functionalism, Russian Constructivism, and organic Scandinavian design.
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American Modern, 1925 — 1940: Design for a New Age, an exhibition tracing the rise of a distinctively American modern design aesthetic through the efforts of approximately 50 of its creative pioneers, will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 16, 2000 through January 7, 2001. Drawn exclusively from the Museum's collection and from the John C. Waddell Collection, a major promised gift to the Metropolitan, this landmark exhibition features more than 150 objects — including furniture, clocks, appliances, posters, textiles, radios, tableware, and even a bathroom sink — by such leading designers as Norman Bel Geddes, Donald Deskey, Paul Frankl, Raymond Loewy, Isamu Noguchi, Eliel Saarinen, Walter Dorwin Teague, Walter von Nessen, and Russel Wright.
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This press kit for Masterpieces of Japnaese Art from the Mary Griggs Burke Collection includes a general release about the exhibition, immediately following, as well as these four releases, to which you can link by clicking on their titles:
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A figure sculpted in central Africa's rainforest to determine guilt or innocence, a maternity image made by an Igbo potter to enable a woman to conceive children, and a set of dice carved to decide the destiny of a Shona chief will be among the works featured in Art and Oracle: Spirit Voices of Africa, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 26 through July 30, 2000. Throughout history and around the world, peoples have sought the intervention of divine powers to understand their fate, and this exhibition will demonstrate the dynamic relationship between ritual practice and creative expression through some 200 artifacts from more than 50 African cultures.
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The Mongolian horse — a small, tireless, and agile animal that was instrumental to the movement of the Mongol armies across Central Asia — has also come to symbolize the introduction of new cultures and traditions to the eastern Islamic world. The depiction of horses in Islamic art — both realistic and symbolic — will be examined in the exhibition Riding across Central Asia: Images of the Mongolian Horse in Islamic Art, which will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 26.
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This press kit for Painters in Paris: 1895-1950 includes a general release about the exhibition, immediately following, as well as a statement from Aetna, the exhibition's sponsor.
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This press kit for Tilman Riemenschneider: Master Sculptor of the Late Middle Ages includes a general release about the exhibition, immediately following, as well as a statement from Bayerische Landesbank, the exhibition's sponsor.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a group of distinctive and relatively unknown works by the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), beginning February 1, 2000. Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935 will examine in detail the history of Evans's African art photographs through 50 vintage images from the portfolio that Evans created in conjunction with a landmark exhibition of African art. Complementing Perfect Documents will be a selection of sculptures that Evans photographed in 1935, many of which will be on loan from public and private collections.
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This press kit for Rock Style includes a general press release about the exhibition, immediately following, as well as statements from the exhibition's sponsors:
Tommy Hilfiger USA, Inc.;
Condé Nast;
The Estée Lauder Companies Inc.
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A Century of Design, Part I: 1900-1925 — the first in a four-part series of exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art surveying design in the 20th century — will present some of the Museum's finest examples of furniture, metalwork, glass, ceramics, textiles, jewelry, and drawings from the first quarter of the 1900s. Highlighting the Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco movements, the exhibition will be on view in the Metropolitan Museum's Gallery for Modern Design and Architecture from December 14, 1999, through March 26, 2000.
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The Metropolitan Museum will present European Helmets, 1450-1650: Treasures from the Reserve Collection, the third in a series of thematic installations drawn from the Museum's extraordinary collection of European headpieces, beginning January 25, 2000. Featuring some 70 helmets, many of them to go on display for the first time, the exhibition will explore the evolution, technology, form, and fashion of European head defense over two centuries. The majority of the helmets have rarely been exhibited or published in the last 50 years and, therefore, constitute a collection virtually unknown to Museum visitors, scholars, and collectors.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present for more than six months beginning in February an exhibition of some 90 Chinese paintings, featuring images of ornamental rocks or landscapes inspired by the fantastic forms of such stones, complemented by more than 30 actual scholars' rocks. Drawn primarily from the Museum's holdings, and supplemented by a select number of loans from private collections, The World of Scholars' Rocks: Gardens, Studios, and Paintings – opening at the Metropolitan Museum on February 1, 2000 – will examine the Chinese taste for strangely shaped rocks during the last 1000 years, tracing through pictorial images as well as actual examples the evolution and transformation of the genre from the 11th to the 20th century.
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A figure sculpted in central Africa's rainforest to determine guilt or innocence, a maternity image made by an Igbo potter to enable a woman to conceive children, and a set of dice carved to decide the destiny of a Shona chief will be among the works featured in Art and Oracle: Spirit Voices of Africa, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 26 through July 30, 2000. Throughout history and around the world, peoples have sought the intervention of divine powers to understand their fate, and this exhibition will demonstrate the dynamic relationship between ritual practice and creative expression through some 200 artifacts from more than 50 African cultures.
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American Modern: 1925-1940 — Design for a New Age, an exhibition tracing the rise of a distinctively American modern design aesthetic through the efforts of 40 of its creative pioneers, will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 16, 2000 through January 9, 2001. More than 100 objects, including furniture, clocks, appliances, lamps, textiles, posters, and more, from the Museum's collection and from the John C. Waddell Collection — a major promised gift to the Metropolitan — will reveal the aesthetic, cultural, and economic forces that ultimately shaped the modern design movement in America.
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In America in the second quarter of the 19th century — between 1825, when the Erie Canal was built, and 1861, when the Civil War began — the visual arts proliferated. On September 19, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a landmark exhibition, Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861, which will explore in unprecedented depth the history of American art of this period, as epitomized in New York City.
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An exhibition of 98 images by Carleton Watkins (1829-1916), America's greatest landscape photographer, will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception. The first large-scale examination of an often under-recognized artist, the exhibition includes more than 85 mammoth prints, including work from his famous series of the pristine and then virtually unknown Yosemite Valley, as well as many other lyrical views of the American West.
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Widely regarded as the greatest portrait painter of the 19th century and one of the most brilliant draftsmen of all time, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) dominated French painting for more than half a century and left an enduring legacy, inspiring artists such as Cézanne, Degas, Matisse, and Picasso. On view October 5, 1999, through January 2, 2000, Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch brings together 40 paintings and 92 drawings from every period of the artist's prodigious career, providing visitors with a unique opportunity to appreciate the refinement, originality, and beauty of Ingres's portraiture. Spanning six decades, from the last years of the Revolution to the Second Empire, the portraits in the exhibition constitute a "Who's Who" of the ruling elite in France — the aristocracy of birth, beauty, politics, wealth, and intellect.
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The exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum will be organized in five sections that will address the synergy between rock music and fashion: Poets and Dreamers; Icons; Brilliant Disguise; Rebels; High Style.
The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland will spotlight classic rock-'n'-roll performers and their pervasive influence on style in the exhibition titled Rock Style, to be launched at the Metropolitan Museum from December 9, 1999, through March 19, 2000. A selection of more than 40 major rock artists who have influenced style from the 1950s to the present will be represented by fashions from the collections of The Costume Institute and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, as well as by loans from the private collections of several of the rock stars themselves. Artists represented will include Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Tina Turner, Elton John, Mama Cass, Stevie Nicks, Bruce Springsteen, Bono, David Byrne, Grace Jones, Madonna, and Björk.
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For the first time in its history, The Costume Institute will present an exhibition ancillary to one of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's major loan exhibitions of paintings. Costume and Character in the Age of Ingres will be on view in The Costume Institute from September 9 through November 21, 1999 — coinciding with the exhibition Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch in the second-floor Special Exhibitions Galleries.
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Nearly 100 works of Chinese painting collected by the renowned artist/collector C. C. Wang — who has amassed one of the two most important private collections of Chinese old master paintings of the 20th century — will be on view in The Artist as Collector: Masterpieces of Chinese Painting from the C. C. Wang Family Collection. The exhibition features the recent promised gift by the Oscar Tang family of 12 major works acquired from the C. C. Wang Family in 1997, along with some 50 additional paintings and calligraphies acquired from Mr. Wang by the Museum over the last 26 years. These works are augmented by important loans from The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Art Museum, Princeton University, The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the British Museum, and The C. C. Wang Family.
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Sculptures by Adam Henein and paintings by Farouk Hosny — both prominent artists working in contemporary Egypt — are the featured works in Farouk Hosny/Adam Henein: Contemporary Egyptian Artists and Heirs to an Ancient Tradition, an exhibition opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 14, 1999. The exhibition, which features more than 50 sculptures by Henein (of which 44 constitute a single installation) and approximately 34 paintings by Hosny, will remain on view in the Museum's first-floor galleries of Egyptian Art through January 23, 2000.
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Daido Moriyama: Hunter, a series of 40 vintage prints of postwar Japan by one of its foremost photographers, Daido Moriyama (b.1938), is on view in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's North Mezzanine Gallery, in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing.
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Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Monument Drawings, a series of 23 original works by the American artist, novelist, and poet, will be on view in the North Mezzanine Gallery of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Lila Acheson Wallace Wing.
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To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of French artist Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), The Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting a major exhibition — the largest retrospective of Moreau's work ever shown in the United States — featuring masterpieces from every phase of his distinguished career. Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream includes nearly 175 works — some 40 paintings and 60 watercolors in addition to drawings and preparatory studies, lent primarily from the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris, with other works drawn from public and private collections in Europe and America.
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Some of the earliest extant northern European prints and books — all from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exceptional collection of this material — will be presented in Devotions and Diversions: Prints and Books from the Late Middle Ages in Northern Europe , from May 11 through August 29, 1999, in the Museum's Karen B. Cohen Gallery and Charles Z. Offin Gallery. Forty-one German, Netherlandish, and French woodcuts and metalcuts (many of them unique impressions), several Netherlandish woodcut blockbook pages, and about twenty illustrated books, including a number of printed French Books of Hours, will be on view.
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More than 170 rarely exhibited unique ceramic works by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), created by the artist in the South of France primarily from 1947 to 1962, will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay, from March 3 through June 6, 1999. Although Picasso is acknowledged as one of the most revolutionary artists of this century, with an unquestioned reputation as a painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker, this exhibition is the first large-scale examination of his ceramic oeuvre, which he commenced at the age of 66. Intimately related in theme and subject matter to Picasso's art in other media, the subjects of these works range from still lifes to bullfights and include a lively cast of characters: a mistress and a wife, lovers and clowns, dancers and musicians, centaurs and fauns, as well as birds and fish. These join many sculpted and painted ceramics that celebrate the female form — nude and clothed, standing and seated.
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The third in a four-part series on Islamic ornament dating from the 9th to the 18th century, The Nature of Islamic Ornament, Part III: Geometric Patterns will open on March 17, 1999. Some 25 objects that feature predominantly geometric decoration, drawn from the Metropolitan Museum's own collection — including illuminated manuscripts, rugs, carved and inlaid woodwork, and pottery — reflect the variety of production of Islamic art and the wide range of application of geometric patterns.
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The first American exhibition devoted exclusively to the Kenyah-Kayan art of central Borneo will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 13, 1999. With loans from museums and private collectors nationwide, Guardians of the Longhouse: Art in Borneo will feature more than 60 works exploring the theme of the supernatural and physical defense of the longhouse community in Kenyah-Kayan art. Dating from the classic period of Borneo art, from the late 19th to the early 20th century, works in the exhibition — many of which have never been displayed before — range from robust wooden figures and architectural sculpture to delicately carved items of personal adornment.