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The recent gift of more than 100 works from the Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Foundation—one of the largest donations made to The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Modern Art—will be celebrated in a major exhibition opening on May 18, 2004. Collected by New York art dealer Pierre Matisse (1900-1989), the younger son of French painter Henri Matisse, the selection includes paintings, sculpture, and drawings by such icons of 20th-century art as Matisse, Balthus, Chagall, Derain, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Magritte, Miró, and Tanguy. The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, on view through June 26, 2005, will feature highlights from the Foundation's gifts together with works previously donated by Mr. and Mrs. Matisse.
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Playing with Fire: European Terracotta Models, 1740-1840, the first major museum exhibition devoted to Neoclassical terracotta sculptures, will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on January 28, 2004. Unprecedented in scale and range, the exhibition unites approximately 135 works from collections throughout Europe and the U.S. Ranging from quick preliminary sketches to completely finished models, the sculptures demonstrate the dash and erudition of modelers across Europe during the Neoclassical age. The international character of the exhibition reflects the broad scope of this rich tradition and includes works by such great modelers as Antonio Canova, Augustin Pajou, Johann Heinrich Dannecker, Philippe-Laurent Roland, and Johan Tobias Sergel. The exhibition also examines the work of sculptors little-known outside their home countries, such as the Russian Mikhail Ivanovich Kozlovsky and the Swiss Valentin Sonnenschein, as well as several anonymous modelers.
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The highest achievements of French Art Deco, the style that epitomizes the glamour and sophistication of 1920s Paris, will be explored in two related exhibitions, concurrently on view at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art from June 8 through September 5, 2004.
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The introduction of chocolate, coffee, and tea into 17th-century Europe resulted from the sustained contacts of seagoing nations — primarily Portugal, Spain, England, and Holland — and direct trade with formerly inaccessible parts of the world, such as Mexico, Arabia, and China. A large variety of furniture and utensils was developed to serve the new drinks, first for the great households and quickly thereafter for the popular market. A new exhibition, Chocolate, Coffee, Tea, will show the amazing response in Europe by the luxury trades — silver, porcelain, glass, and pottery — in providing a new range of utensils for these new beverages. Drawn from the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition will be on view from February 3 through July 11, 2004.
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The first comprehensive survey of American artist Chuck Close's (b. 1940) groundbreaking innovations in the field of printmaking will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from January 13 through April 18, 2004. Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration will feature approximately 100 prints, working proofs, and objects. Together they will document the creative and often highly experimental ways in which Close has re-interpreted the signature subject of his paintings and photographs – monumentally scaled images of the human head – into the artistic language of various print mediums.
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Couples in African art and how that theme has been expressed in 30 cultures across the continent are explored in an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, beginning February 10, 2004. Featuring some 60 works in wood, bronze, terracotta, and beadwork that were created between the 12th and the 20th centuries, Echoing Images: Couples in African Sculpture will provide for the first time a dynamic range of artistic commentaries on human duality. The works on exhibition draw primarily from important public and private collections in the New York area, including the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the High Museum in Atlanta.
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A major loan exhibition exploring the rich tradition of naturalism in painting of the North Italian region of Lombardy — most famously expressed in the works of Caravaggio — will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 27, 2004. Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, will feature some 80 paintings and 40 drawings that document the region's distinctive emphasis on observation of the natural world, beginning in the 15th century, with Leonardo da Vinci's stay in Milan, through the 18th century. A central figure in the exhibition is Caravaggio, through whom this naturalist approach came to Rome and became of key importance to Baroque art there and throughout Europe. On view through August 15, 2004, the exhibition will also feature works by such notable exemplars of the Lombard school as Lorenzo Lotto, Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Giacomo Ceruti, and the important women artists Sofonisba Anguissola and Fede Galizia. This will be the first time that this great school of Italian painting will be presented in the U.S.A in such depth.
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Printmaking revolutionized artistic production in the 15th century by allowing artists to create numerous impressions from a single matrix and distribute their work to a wider audience then ever before. Italian artists from Mantegna to Canova embraced the medium, focusing their efforts largely on depictions of scenes from Greek and Roman mythology. A new exhibition exploring the Italian passion for mythological prints that started in the Renaissance and lasted into the early decades of the 19th century opens on February 3, 2004, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Drawn from the Metropolitan Museum's collections, Poets, Lovers, and Heroes in Italian Mythological Prints showcases more than 100 woodcuts, engravings, and etchings, as well as illustrated books, by such artists as Jacopo de' Barbari, Marcantonio Raimondi, Ugo da Carpi, Agostino and Annibale Carracci, Salvator Rosa, and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, among others.
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Approximately 150 images by the pioneering German photographer August Sander (1876-1964) will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning May 25, 2004. The photographs are drawn from the artist's most famous project, People of the Twentieth Century (Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts), which was envisioned as a comprehensive visual record of the German populace.