Exhibitions

Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman Opens at Metropolitan Museum January 22

The first comprehensive exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's (1453-1519) drawings ever presented in America, Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman, a landmark international loan exhibition, will bring together nearly 120 works by one of the most renowned masters of all time—the very embodiment of the Renaissance ideal of the universal genius.

Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence

The first major tapestry survey in the United States in 25 years comes to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in spring 2002. This landmark international loan exhibition will feature 45 tapestries woven between 1420 and 1560 in the Netherlands, Italy, and France, from designs by the leading artists of the day – Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Bronzino, among others. The exhibition will also include about 20 preparatory drawings, designs, and cartoon fragments. On view from March 12 through June 19, 2002, Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence will highlight the great tapestry cycles of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as among the unsung glories of Renaissance art.

Surrealism: Desire Unbound, First Major Exhibition of International Surrealism in More Than Twenty Years, Documents Revolutionary Movement That Openly Addressed Sexuality in Art

One of the most extraordinary artistic and intellectual movements of the 20th century will be explored in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art February 6 through May 12, 2002. More than 300 works including paintings, sculpture, photographs, films, poems, manuscripts, and books will explore the first major artistic movement to address openly the topics of love, desire, and various aspects of sexuality.

Metropolitan Museum Presents First Major Exhibition of Irving Penn Nudes

One of the world's preeminent photographers, Irving Penn is famous for portraiture, still life, and fashion work – but is less well known as a superb photographer of the female nude. Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949-50, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from January 15 through April 21, 2002, features 60 exquisitely wrought silver and platinum prints in the first exhibition of this work organized by a major museum.

Photographs by Benjamin Brecknell Turner Present Rural England Through a Victorian Lens at Metropolitan Museum

Approximately 40 exquisite photographs of a bygone era, taken by one of photography's great early artists, will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from January 15 through April 21, 2002. Benjamin Brecknell Turner: Rural England Through a Victorian Lens presents an impressive series of large-format scenes depicting quintessentially English subjects: ruined castles and abbeys; thatched barns, crumbling cottages and half-timbered houses; woodland paths and ancient oaks. Turner's picturesque and poetic images reveal a rough-hewn beauty in rustic subjects and express a moral value found in tradition, nature, and rural life and labor.

Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy

Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy will be the first full-scale exhibition devoted to Caravaggio's most gifted follower, Orazio Gentileschi, and to Orazio's celebrated daughter, Artemisia. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from February 14 through May 12, 2002, the exhibition will feature approximately 50 works by Orazio and 35 by Artemisia, and will be the first exhibition to treat these two remarkable artists in depth.

Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings from the Ordrupgaard Collection

Approximately 80 paintings – including landmark works of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as well as masterpieces from the Golden Age of Danish painting – all from the Ordrupgaard Collection in Copenhagen, Denmark, will be featured in this exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. On view June 18 through September 8, 2002, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings from the Ordrupgaard Collection will offer a dazzling survey of this remarkable collection, including works by Cézanne, Corot, Courbet, Degas, Delacroix, Eckersberg, Gauguin, Købke, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley, among others. Assembled by the Danish insurance magnate Wilhelm Hansen (1868-1936) in the early decades of the 20th century, both the collection and the country house from which it derives its name were bequeathed to the Danish State upon the death of his wife, Henny, in 1951.

Treasures from a Lost Civilization: Ancient Chinese Art from Sichuan

A major traveling exhibition of ancient Chinese art from Sichuan will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 6, 2002. Featuring a spectacular selection of works of art, Treasures from a Lost Civilization: Ancient Chinese Art from Sichuan explores the fascinating world of the art, material culture, and spiritual life of ancient Sichuan, and illustrates the fundamental changes that archaeology has brought to our understanding of the history of Chinese art.

Along the Nile Features Earliest Photographs of Egypt

Sphinx and crocodile, magnificent colossi, and delicate hieroglyphs are but a few of the treasures to be found in Along the Nile: Early Photographs of Egypt, an exhibition of 43 exquisitely preserved 19th-century photographs of one of the world's oldest and most mysterious civilizations. On view from September 11 through December 30 in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Howard Gilman Gallery, these early camera images of Egypt's landscapes, inhabitants, and dramatically imposing monuments—from Cairo to sand-swept Nubia—are drawn from the renowned Gilman Paper Company Collection as well as from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.

Settlement Reached on Monet’s Garden at Argenteuil