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Opening February 8, 2000, the second rotation of Northern drawings from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Robert Lehman Wing will feature 15th- and 16th-century German, Netherlandish, and French drawings and manuscripts that have not been exhibited in nearly a decade. Selected from the trove of treasured master drawings and illuminations assembled by Robert Lehman, the works on view in Northern Drawings of the 15th and 16th Centuries in the Robert Lehman Collection will be complemented by several loans from the Museum's Department of Medieval Art. Four autograph sheets by Albrecht Dürer will be among the highlights of the presentation. Works by Martin Schongauer, Hans Baldung Grien, and Maerten van Heemskerck will also be featured, in addition to drawings from the Circle of Jan van Eyck and the Circle of Rogier van der Weyden.
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More than 200 works of Japanese art from the renowned collection of Mary Griggs Burke — a selection of ceramics, sculptures, paintings, and lacquers dating from the earliest cultures of around 3000 B.C. to the Edo period (1615-1867) — will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 30 through June 25, 2000. Organized chronologically, the exhibition will provide an overview of the development of Japanese art and will also explore the use of divergent artistic traditions, including those adapted from other cultures and those that reflect native tastes, within Japan.
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Nineteenth-century American artists regarded "ideal themes" — those inspired by mythology, history, and literature — as the most challenging and venerable in the hierarchy of genres. Such subjects provided an opportunity for sculptors to demonstrate their familiarity with allegorical, historical, and literary topics, their skill at incorporating identifying attributes into their compositions, and frequently also their expertise in rendering the nude.
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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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A selection of works in burnished stainless steel by David Smith (1906-1965) — considered one of the most original and influential American sculptors of his generation — will be on view beginning May 15, on the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. David Smith on the Roof will mark the third consecutive single-artist installation on the Roof Garden, a 10,000 square-foot open-air space that offers a panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline and Central Park.
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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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Fifty-three paintings, watercolors, and drawings by 18 of the greatest artists who worked in France in the 19th and early 20th century comprise the Annenberg collection, which will return to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for six months beginning in May 2000. This annual event, now in its sixth year, provides an exceptional opportunity for visitors to experience this renowned private collection. The works are shown in the Museum's Nineteenth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries, hung together in three central rooms, surrounded by the Met's own collection of 19th-century European paintings.
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No form of entertainment involves so much ingenuity at so great a cost for such a dazzling — but woefully ephemeral — effect as fireworks. Many attempts have been made over the centuries to create for posterity a visual record of fireworks displays, especially those mounted in connection with official occasions, such as a noble marriage, the entry of a ruler into a city, military victories, and coronations. Before photography became prevalent, these records were most often made as prints — woodcuts, engravings, etchings, and lithographs — since these could be made in multiple impressions and could thus be distributed to a wide audience as a document or souvenir of the occasion. In celebration of the new millennium, the exhibition Fireworks will feature more than 100 prints and drawings depicting firework displays from the 16th to the early 20th century.
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Chardin — a major loan exhibition of more than 65 works that will survey the great 18th-century artist's distinguished career as a still-life and genre painter — will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from June 27 through September 3, 2000.
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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.