Installation dates: February 8 – May 21, 2006
Location: The Howard Gilman Gallery, second floor
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is now presenting Sight Unseen: Photographs from the Gilman Collection as part of its continuing series of installations of works from its recent landmark acquisition of 8,500 photographs spanning the first hundred years of the medium. The photographs in the exhibition have never been shown publicly at the Metropolitan and will remain on view through May 21, 2006.
The installation offers a treasury of masterpieces ranging from an album of cyanotype botanical specimens from the 1840s by the British artist Anna Atkins to Robert Frank's elegiac street scene from 1955 of somber passengers riding a trolley car in New Orleans. Sight Unseen also features: an exceedingly rare motion study by the Italian futurist Anton Giulio Bragaglia; a unique 1848 daguerreotype by Southworth & Hawes of Hiram Powers's controversial nude marble, Greek Slave; and a stunning architectural study by the French traveler Désiré Charnay, whose 1860 view of a palace building emerging from the jungle in the ancient Mayan city of Chichén-Itzá retains all the mysteries and enchantments of a lost paradise.
Sight Unseen also includes important photographs by, among others: William Henry Fox Talbot, Charles Nègre, Giacomo Caneva, Maxime Du Camp, Mathew Brady, Charles Sheeler, Eugène Atget, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Until its acquisition by the Metropolitan in March 2005, the Gilman Paper Company Collection was widely regarded as the world's finest collection of photographs in private hands. With exceptional examples of 19th-century French, British, and American photographs, as well as superb examples from the turn-of-the-century and modernist periods, the Gilman Collection has played a central role in establishing photography's historical canon and has long set the standard for connoisseurship in the field. The Metropolitan acquired the collection through purchase, complemented by a generous gift from The Howard Gilman Foundation.
Sight Unseen: Photographs from the Gilman Collection was organized by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Associate Curator of Photographs at the Metropolitan.
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