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RICHARD L. CHILTON, JR. ELECTED TRUSTEE AT METROPOLITAN MUSEUM
Saturday, June 3, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
The election of Richard L. Chilton, Jr. to the Board of Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art was announced today by James R. Houghton, the Museum's Chairman. Mr. Chilton's election took place at the May 9 meeting of the Board.
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Raphael at the Metropolitan: The Colonna Altarpiece
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
Raphael at the Metropolitan: The Colonna Altarpiece will highlight the Colonna Altarpiece, the only one by Raphael in America and, since 1916, a treasure of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. This exhibition will reunite the altarpiece's two main panels with the scenes from its predella, which were separated from the altarpiece in 1663. A select group of drawings and paintings by Raphael produced close in time to the Colonna Altarpiece, including a preparatory study for the Metropolitan's predella panel, will also be included. The exhibition will be on view at the Metropolitan from June 20 through September 3, 2006.
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On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
A major force in New York intellectual life for more than 40 years, the novelist, essayist, and critic Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was renowned for her brilliant and impassioned writing on photography. From June 6 through September 3, 2006, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present an exhibition of some 40 photographs that celebrate Sontag's contribution to the history of the medium, featuring works from the Metropolitan's collection by a wide range of artists, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Steichen, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Robert Frank, Andy Warhol, and Peter Hujar.
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Laurelton Hall, Country Estate of Louis Comfort Tiffany, to be Featured in Major Fall 2006 Metropolitan Museum Exhibition
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
Between 1902 and 1905, on more than 600 acres overlooking Long Island Sound, the noted American artist and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) built his dream home, an extraordinary country estate called Laurelton Hall. Every aspect of the project was designed by Tiffany himself, from the exotic 84-room, eight-level house surrounded by fountains, pools, and terraced gardens to the stables, tennis courts, greenhouses, chapel, studio, and art gallery also located on the property. Often cited as Tiffany's most important work, Laurelton Hall was destroyed by fire in 1957. Surviving architectural elements and windows salvaged by Hugh F. and Jeannette G. McKean are now part of the collections of the museum Mrs. McKean founded, The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida. The monumental four-column loggia with its colorful glass and pottery floral capitals was saved from Laurelton Hall and has graced the American Wing's Charles Engelhard Court since 1980, a gift of Mr. and Mrs. McKean.
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Americans in Paris, 1860–1900
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
In the late 19th century, American artists by the hundreds – including such luminaries as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer – were drawn irresistibly to Paris to learn to paint and to establish their reputations. The world's artistic epicenter, Paris inspired decisive changes in American painters' styles and subjects, and stimulated the creation of newly sophisticated art schools and professional standards back in the United States.
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Rembrandt Drawings and Prints, A Selection in Honor of the Artist's 400th Birthday
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrates the 400th birthday of Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn with the display of a selection of 58 drawings and prints from its extensive collection of works by the great 17th-century Dutch master and artists of his school. Forty-four of the works on view are by Rembrandt himself. The exhibition has been drawn primarily from the holdings of the Museum's Department of Drawings and Prints and the Robert Lehman Collection. One sheet, a charcoal sketch of a lioness, has been borrowed from a New York private collection.
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Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
The first comprehensive exhibition devoted to Ambroise Vollard (1867-1939) – the pioneer dealer, patron, and publisher who played a key role in promoting and shaping the careers of many of the leading artists during the late 19th and early 20th centuries – will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 14. One hundred paintings as well as dozens of ceramics, sculpture, prints, and livres d'artistes commissioned and published by Vollard, from his appearance on the Paris art scene in the mid-1890s to his accidental death in 1939, will comprise the exhibition Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, which will feature works by Bonnard, Cézanne, Degas, Derain, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Maillol, Matisse, Picasso, Redon, Renoir, Rouault, Rousseau, Vlaminck, Vuillard, and others. Highlights will include seven paintings from Vollard's landmark 1895 Cézanne exhibition; a never-before-reassembled triptych from his 1896 Van Gogh retrospective; the masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? from his 1898 Gauguin exhibition; paintings from Picasso's first French exhibition (1901) and Matisse's first solo exhibition (1904); and three pictures from Derain's London series, painted in 1906-1907 at Vollard's
suggestion. Also on view will be numerous portraits of Vollard by leading artists, among them Cézanne, Renoir, Bonnard, and Picasso.
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Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
More than 80 medieval sculpted heads – half from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and half selected loans from American and European collections – are the focus of the upcoming exhibition Set in Stone: The Face in Medieval Sculpture, opening this fall. The exhibition, which includes heads from the third century A.D. through the early 1500s, will consider such artistic and thematic issues as: iconoclasm and the legacy of furor, sculpting identity and the evolving notions of the "portrait," sculpture without context and the search for provenance, head reliquaries as power objects, and Gothic Italy and the antique. Created from materials as diverse as polychromed wood, silver, silver gilt, marble, and limestone, the works represent mostly French, but also German, Italian, Byzantine, and English sculptural traditions. By examining the works in different ways, the exhibition will draw together science and connoisseurship, archaeology and history. On view will be a recently acquired 13th-century limestone Head of an Angel, newly identified as having come from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.
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Major Maya Exhibition at Metropolitan in June Explores Fascinating Ancient American Civilization
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings – opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 13, 2006 – will explore the growth of the concept of divine kingship among ancient Maya peoples. Featuring some 150 objects – from large-scale relief sculpture in stone to small precious pieces of worked jade – the exhibition will display the grandiose ambitions of earthly rulers when they transformed themselves into gods. Dating principally from 200 B.C. to 600 A.D., the works in the exhibition are lent primarily from public collections in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, as well as from collections in Europe and the United States. Emphasis will be placed on recently excavated objects that will be on view for the first time in the United States. Notable among them are pieces from the renowned Maya sites of Calakmul in Mexico, Tikal in Guatemala, and Copan in Honduras. Maya jade objects discovered in tombs in the famous Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan – the contemporary but distant central Mexican city – will also be included.
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Café and Audio Guides Available at The Cloisters
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
An Audio Guide and a café are among the visitor amenities now available at The Cloisters, the branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art located in northern Manhattan and dedicated to the art and architecture of the Middle Ages.
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Metropolitan Museum Announces Appointment of Christina Alphonso as Associate Manager for Administration at The Cloisters
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has appointed Christina Alphonso to the position of Associate Manager for Administration at The Cloisters, effective December 19. (A branch of the Metropolitan, The Cloisters is America's only museum dedicated exclusively to the art of the Middle Ages.)
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The Cloisters: A History
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
The Cloisters, a branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is America's only museum dedicated exclusively to the art of the Middle Ages. Picturesquely overlooking the Hudson River in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan, the Museum derives its name from the portions of five medieval cloisters incorporated into a modern museum structure. Not replicating any one particular medieval building type or setting, but rather designed to evoke the architecture of the later Middle Ages, The Cloisters creates an integrated and harmonious context in which visitors can experience the rich tradition of medieval artistic production, including metalwork, painting, sculpture, and textiles. By definition, a cloister consists of a covered walkway surrounding a large open courtyard providing access to other monastic buildings. Similarly, the museum's cloisters act as passageways to galleries; and they provide as inviting a place for rest and contemplation for visitors as they often did in their original monastic settings.
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The Gardens of The Cloisters
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
In formal terms a cloister is a quadrangle enclosed by a roofed or vaulted passageway. It is the heart of the monastery, usually placed in the sunniest location and providing the connection, physical and psychological, between the church and the more domestic areas such as the refectory and chapter house.
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Metropolitan Museum Publishes New Guidebook to its Holdings of Medieval Art at The Cloisters
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
A new, lavishly illustrated guidebook called The Cloisters: Medieval Art and Architecture – co-authored by the head of the department of medieval art and a museum educator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art – provides in-depth information on highlights of the collection of The Cloisters, which is the only museum in North America devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe. (The Cloisters is a branch museum of the Metropolitan Museum.)
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Metropolitan Museum Announces New Schedule of "Met Holiday Mondays"
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
(New York, May 15, 2006) – The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced the new schedule of "Met Holiday Mondays" for the one-year period beginning Memorial Day 2006. This popular program, which opens the Museum to the public on selected Monday holidays throughout the year, began in fall 2003; prior to that, the Museum had been closed to the public on Mondays for some 30 years.
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Gallery of Early Gothic Art and Architecture
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
The Early Gothic Hall at The Cloisters will reopen this summer after a five-year renovation. Completely refurbished 13th-century limestone windows and two dozen panels of newly conserved and reinstalled stained glass, primarily from the 13th and 14th centuries, are among the objects on view. Four recently acquired and exceptional examples of German stained glass from the late-13th-century glazing program for the convent church in Altenberg-an-der-Lahn will be reunited in this new installation. The renovation of the Early Gothic Hall also features construction of two new limestone apertures in an interior wall (for the display of grisaille glass windows) and new lighting.
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AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion
Tuesday, April 25, 2006, 4:00 a.m.
AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion, opening on May 3, 2006, will present a wide range of works by British designers in The Metropolitan Museum's English Period Rooms – The Annie Laurie Aitken Galleries. A pendant to the acclaimed 2004 Costume Institute exhibition Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century, AngloMania will examine ideals, stereotypes, and representations of Englishness by juxtaposing historical costume with late 20th- and early 21st-century fashions.
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Rehabilitating Historic Cairo to be Theme of April 23 Lecture at Metropolitan Museum
Sunday, March 26, 2006, 5:00 a.m.
The historic development of Cairo and its growing, shifting, and transforming urban fabric will be the focus of a lecture by Swiss architect/urban designer Dr. Stefano Bianca at 2:00 p.m. on April 23 in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is free with Museum admission.
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Renowned Chinese-born Artist Cai Guo-Qiang to Create 2006 Installation for Metropolitan Museum's Roof Garden
Thursday, March 23, 2006, 5:00 a.m.
Cai Guo-Qiang, the acclaimed Chinese-born artist known internationally for his elaborate sculpture installations and gunpowder projects, has been invited to create a site-specific exhibition for the 2006 season of The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The four works comprising Cai Guo-Qiang on the Roof: Transparent Monument were inspired by the dramatic setting of the Roof Garden, an open-air space atop the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing that offers spectacular views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline, and by the artist's reactions to issues of present-day concern.
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Metropolitan Museum Establishes International Office in Geneva
Tuesday, March 21, 2006, 5:00 a.m.
(New York, March 22, 2006)—The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today the establishment of its first full-time representative office overseas, located in Geneva, Switzerland. The Metropolitan further announced that Mahrukh Tarapor, who has served for 11 years as the Museum's Associate Director for Exhibitions, has been named to the additional post of Director for International Affairs, Geneva Office.