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El Greco
Thursday, June 26, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
The first major retrospective in more than 20 years devoted to the great 16th-century painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614) – known to posterity as El Greco – will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 7, 2003. One of the most original artists of his age, El Greco was celebrated for his highly expressive and visionary religious paintings. The international loan exhibition's approximately 80 works include an unsurpassed selection of his psychologically compelling portraits, as well as his rare incursions into landscape, genre, mythology, and sculpture. Particular emphasis will be placed on his late works, in which mystical content, expressive distortions, and monumental scale are taken to ever greater extremes, culminating in the Adoration of Shepherds, the spectacular nine-foot-tall painting created to decorate his own tomb.
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First Survey of French Daguerreotypes—Many Among the Earliest Photographs Ever Taken—Opens at Metropolitan Museum on September 23
Thursday, June 26, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
Some 175 of the best surviving examples of a medium that changed the history of art and visual representation forever will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 23, 2003, through January 4, 2004. The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839-1855 is the first survey of key monuments from photography's first moments, when its pioneers used the invention for artistic, scientific, ethnographic, documentary, and other purposes. The exhibition will employ state-of-the-art display and lighting techniques to reveal the incomparable detail and sculptural quality that distinguishes this process and which led one of its earliest champions, Jules Janin, to describe the daguerreotype as "divine magic."
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The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe and the Collecting of American Indian Art
Wednesday, June 25, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
Some 200 American Indian objects assembled over almost half a century by the renowned Santa Fe authority and collector Ralph T. Coe will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, beginning September 9. Featuring objects dating from 3000 B.C. to the present, The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe and the Collecting of American Indian Art will display a wide-ranging selection of works representative of most of the diverse Native American regions and periods. Objects on view will range from authoritative masks and headdress frontlets of painted wood made by peoples of the Pacific Northwest, to splendidly ornamented deerskin shirts and smoking pipes of the high Plains, to delicate and carefully wrought works of the Northeast region made with a clear understanding of European taste and acquisitiveness.
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Dreams of Yellow Mountain: Landscapes of Survival in Seventeenth-Century China
Wednesday, June 25, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
An exhibition focusing on the 17th-century landscape painting of China's Nanjing School will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, beginning September 13. Comprising nearly 60 works, Dreams of Yellow Mountain: Landscapes of Survival in Seventeenth-Century China will highlight works created by "leftover subjects" of the Ming dynasty, who lived in and around Nanjing during the early years of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1911). For these loyalist artists, images of landscape – often inspired by Yellow Mountain – symbolized survival, resistance, and reclusion in response to alien rule. Including works from the Museum's permanent holdings as well as loans from East Coast collections, the exhibition will be the most comprehensive presentation of such landscapes ever mounted in the United States.
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Treasures of a Lost Art: Italian Manuscript Painting of the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Wednesday, June 25, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
The first-ever public presentation of 101 works from the impressive group of Italian illuminated manuscripts assembled by Robert Lehman (1891-1969), one of the foremost American collectors of his day, opens at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 30, 2003. Treasures of a Lost Art: Italian Manuscript Painting of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, on view through February 1, 2004, features some of the finest examples of the illuminator's art—many of them previously unknown even to scholars—produced in Italy from the 13th through the 16th century. Among the many important new discoveries presented in the exhibition is the only known illumination by the great Sienese master Duccio di Buoninsegna.
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Urban Art by Christo and Jeanne-Claude The Gates Project for Central Park, 1979-2005 Previews at Metropolitan Museum in April 2004
Wednesday, June 25, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
The evolution of the widely anticipated outdoor work of art for New York City initiated in 1979 by the husband-and-wife collaborators Christo and Jeanne-Claude will be the subject of the exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates, Central Park, New York, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 6 through July 25, 2004. Some 45 preparatory drawings and collages by Christo, 40 photographs, and 10 maps and technical diagrams will document the soon-to-be-realized work of art, which when completed will consist of 7,500 saffron-colored gates placed at 10- to 15-foot intervals throughout 23 miles of pedestrian walkways lacing Central Park from 59th Street to 110th Street and from Central Park West to Fifth Avenue.
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Philip Guston
Wednesday, June 25, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
The American painter Philip Guston (American, b. Canada, 1913-1980) will be the subject of a major retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 27, 2003, through January 4, 2004. The exhibition will include more than 75 paintings and drawings dating from 1930, when he was 17, to 1980, the year of his death. Beginning with his childhood fascination with popular American comic strips, through mural painting laden with political imagery, to easel painting and a burgeoning interest in, advancement of, and ultimate disenchantment with abstraction and Abstract Expressionism, through his invention of a highly controversial figurative mode of painting and drawing that influenced younger artists, Guston courageously changed styles according to his beliefs and in response to social and political issues of the day.
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$220 MILLION ECONOMIC IMPACT ON NEW YORK CITY AND NEW YORK STATE GENERATED BY METROPOLITAN MUSEUM'S RECENT SPECIAL EXHIBITION LEONARDO DA VINCI, MASTER DRAFTSMAN
Wednesday, June 25, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
(New York, June 18, 2003) – National, regional, and foreign tourists spent a combined $220 million in New York City during their visits to see The Metropolitan Museum of Art's acclaimed winter exhibition Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman, according to a Museum audience survey released today. The visitor spending generated an estimated $12 million in direct tax revenues for the City and State.
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Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture
Thursday, June 12, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
More than 75 exceptional examples of sculpture from some of the finest public and private collections of African art in the United States will be shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture, opening to the public on November 19. The works relate to traditions that interweave elements of myth, history, religion, and contemporary experience to address universal questions: How did the world begin? What is our ancestry? What is the source of agriculture, kingship, and other societal institutions? The exhibition represents the first time that 17 distinct sculptural traditions that take their inspiration from myths of origin will be considered together. Examined in particular depth will be that of the Bamana (Bambara) people of Mali. Forty stunning ci wara (Chi Wara) antelope headdresses – a classical sculptural form from the Bamana – will constitute the largest assemblage of such works and will allow viewers an appreciation of this tradition in its fullest expression. These works will be introduced by 35 rarely seen masterpieces from 16 distinct cultural traditions from sub-Saharan Africa.
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African-American Artists, 1929-1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Thursday, June 12, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
More than 70 works—drawn extensively from 204 prints donated to the Museum by Reba and Dave Williams in 1999—will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from January 15 through May 4, 2003.
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Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting to Open at Metropolitan Museum March 4
Thursday, June 12, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
The first major exhibition ever to examine the impact of 17th-century Spanish painting
on 19th-century French artists will feature nearly 240 paintings and works on paper spanning several centuries of European art at the most astounding levels of achievement. On view will be some 130 paintings by Velázquez, Murillo, Ribera, El Greco, Zurbarán, and other masters of Spain's Golden Age as well as masterpieces by the 19th-century French artists they influenced, among them Delacroix, Courbet, Millet, Degas, and, most notably, Manet. On view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 4 through June 8, 2003, Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting will also include works by American artists such as Sargent, Chase, Eakins, Whistler, and Cassatt, who studied in France but learned to paint like Spaniards.
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Metropolitan Museum of Art Creates Spacious Public Cafeteria, Centerpiece of New, Expanded Museum Restaurant Program
Tuesday, June 10, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
New York, June 4, 2003 – A spacious, attractively informal new public cafeteria for visitors to The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open on Tuesday, June 17. Located at the very center of the Museum, on the ground floor beneath the Medieval Sculpture Hall, this handsome cafeteria—which comfortably seats 440—replaces the long-time first-floor restaurant adjacent to the Mary and Michael Jaharis Gallery for Greek and Roman art. At the same time, the existing Petrie Court Café—located along the glass wall facing west into Central Park from the Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court—will reopen concurrently as a full-service restaurant for Museum visitors, featuring café cuisine accompanied by breathtaking views of the park.
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Celebrating Saint Petersburg
Thursday, May 29, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
The 300th anniversary of the founding of Saint Petersburg will be celebrated at The Metropolitan Museum of Art with a display of the Museum's important holdings of sculpture and decorative works of art, either made in the imperial Russian capital or formerly included in Saint Petersburg collections.
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Metropolitan Museum Extends Popular Landmark Exhibition Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting through June 29
Thursday, May 29, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
(New York, June 2, 2003)—Due to the exceptionally strong public response to The Metropolitan Museum of Art's acclaimed international loan exhibition Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting, the Museum announced today that it will extend the run of the show through June 29. It was originally scheduled to close on June 8.
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First Major Retrospective of Dutch Master Hendrick Goltzius To Open at Metropolitan Museum June 26
Wednesday, May 21, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
The first major retrospective devoted to the virtuoso Netherlandish mannerist Hendrick Goltzius – one of the most versatile and accomplished figures in the history of art – will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 26, 2003. Hendrick Goltzius, Dutch Master (1558-1617): Drawings, Prints, and Paintings, an international loan exhibition of more than 160 works, spans the artist's entire career and demonstrates his legendary mastery of a remarkably wide range of media, subject matter, and styles – from extravagantly complex mythological scenes in prints, to sensitively observed studies from nature, to sumptuously colored oil paintings on canvas and copper. The exhibition remains on view at the Metropolitan through September 7, 2003.
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Charles Sheeler's Contemporaries
Monday, May 12, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
Some 40 vintage photographs from the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Gilman Paper Company will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from June 3 through August 17, 2003, complementing The Photography of Charles Sheeler. Ranging from Frederick H. Evans's rich platinum prints of the interior of William Morris's home (1896), to Ralph Steiner's Power Lines and Insulators (1929), Charles Sheeler's Contemporaries will feature works by early 20th-century photographers who drew inspiration from the American city, the machine, and the radical innovations of European modernists.
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Goddess to be Theme of Costume Institute's Spring 2003 Exhibition and Gala at Metropolitan Museum
Monday, May 5, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
From the clothing of ancient Greece to such modern evocations as Madame Grès's emblematic creations and Versace's Neoclassical loincloths, classical dress has profoundly inspired and influenced art and fashion through the millennia. Goddess – a major exhibition opening in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute on May 1, 2003 – will present clothing, prints, photographs, and decorative works of art from the 18th century onward, to reveal the many ways in which classical dress has become a truly timeless style.
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Civilizations of Ancient Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Pakistan Featured in Landmark Metropolitan Museum Show
Sunday, May 4, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
The remarkable flowering of the world's earliest civilizations some 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia—present-day Iraq—will be the focus of a landmark exhibition opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 8. The culmination of years of planning and research, Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus will survey the evolution of art and culture in the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates and their impact on the emerging cities of the ancient world—from the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean across Central Asia and along the Gulf to the Indus Valley—during one of the most seminal and creative periods in history. Some 50 museums from more than a dozen countries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East will participate in this ambitious exhibition, lending national treasures that have rarely, if ever, been sent outside the walls of their art institutions.
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Statement by Philippe de Montebello, Director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, On the Looting of the Baghdad Museum
Sunday, April 20, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
Even as the Metropolitan Museum continues working to open on May 8 its long-scheduled, and now providential international loan exhibition "Art of the First Cities," featuring so many masterpieces of art from ancient Iraq, we join the greater museum community in mourning the horrifying plunder of the Baghdad Museum. And we stand prepared to join our fellow institutions to begin restoring the Baghdad Museum at the earliest possible opportunity.
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The Photography of Charles Sheeler
Saturday, April 12, 2003, 4:00 a.m.
Nearly 100 works, including 90 photographs, by Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), one of the most important American artists of the first half of the 20th century and a pioneer of American modernism, will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from June 3 through August 17, 2003. The Photography of Charles Sheeler, is the first major exhibition to concentrate on each of Sheeler's landmark photographic series made between 1915 and 1939, and will consist of rare vintage prints. The exhibition will reveal the full significance of Sheeler's photographs as the foundation from which his better-known works in other mediums were derived.