June 6 through September 17, 2000
Galleries for Drawings, Prints, & Photographs
In celebration of the new millennium, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Fireworks! Four Centuries of Pyrotechnics in Prints and Drawings, on view June 6 through September 17, 2000. Drawn primarily from the Museum's collection, the exhibition will feature more than 100 prints and drawings depicting fireworks displays from the 16th to the early 20th century. Artists represented will include Antonio Tempesta, Jacques Callot, Claude Lorrain, Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, Jean-Louis Desprez, Francesco Piranesi, Winslow Homer, Edgar Degas, and the lithographers Currier and Ives, among others.
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 festive 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.
Among the multitude of occasions celebrated in the works on view are a ducal wedding in Florence in 1579, another in Stuttgart in 1609, and the marriage of Louise Elizabeth of France to Philip of Spain in 1739; the entry of Louis XIII into Lyons in 1622, and the coronations of James II in London in 1685, and Czar Alexander I in Moscow in 1801. Other events include tournaments in the Vatican and on the River Arno in Florence; the annual Girandola above the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome; festivities at Versailles, Vienna, and St. Petersburg; dancing on the fallen Bastille in Paris after the Revolution; and the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883.
Philippe de Montebello, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, commented on the exhibition: "This lively exhibition will quite literally illuminate for Museum visitors many of Western history's most festive occasions. As part of the Metropolitan's celebration of this millennial year — which was, itself, inaugurated with massive displays of fireworks — we are delighted to present such a rich selection of these wonderfully expressive chronicles of earlier grand celebrations. It is an indication of the importance ascribed to these events that artists of the first rank — Lorrain, Piranesi, Daumier — attempted to create lasting images of the evanescent visual effects of the fireworks and captured the pervasive mood of merriment at these events."
Organized chronologically, the exhibition will not only highlight some 500 years of joyous occasions, but will also demonstrate the wide variety of methods that artists have employed to capture the appearance of fireworks in action. From monochromatic woodcuts to the elaborately colored prints of Currier and Ives, artists over the centuries have been amazingly successful at depicting the fleeting but awesome effects of fireworks. Many of the prints in the exhibition were published in official accounts known as festival or fête books, a practice that flourished until the books themselves rivaled the festivities they documented in elaboration and scale, reaffirming the wealth and power of the commissioning entity.
While most fireworks today are viewed against a night sky and admired for their brilliant colors, dramatic effects, and technical innovation, early displays were more like stage presentations, often depicting an allegorical narrative or symbolic tableau. When two Holy Roman Emperors were welcomed into cities of the realm — Charles V into Munich in 1530 and Maximillian II into Nuremberg in 1570 — both cities staged displays representing military victories over the Ottoman Turks, who, during most of the 16th century, were menacing western Europe. Among the earliest works in the exhibition will be the five-block woodcut commemorating the entry of Charles V, which depicts cannons firing on a stage set of Turkish-looking buildings, to set them ablaze.
Such displays quickly became more sophisticated, as is illustrated in a print from a century later, when Louis XIV made manifest the power and magnificence of a strong, centralized monarchy with lavish entertainments at Versailles. The fête of 1664 was titled "The Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle," with the palace, set amid lush gardens, making a seemingly magical enclave for the king and his court. In 1814, London staged an extravaganza in the city's three major parks to celebrate — prematurely, as it turned out — the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The ambition and complexity of this festival were a measure of the fear engendered by the "tyrant of France."
The focus of the prints also evolved over the centuries. In early prints fireworks were always depicted at their most dramatic point — even if the actual displays misfired or failed to ignite altogether, as sometimes happened — and it was taken for granted that the audiences would admire them. By the mid-19th century, however, both Honoré Daumier and Winslow Homer made images in which the spectators are the principal subject. By the beginning of the 20th century the function of documentary prints had largely been overtaken by photography, which could increasingly capture the dazzling split-second effects of fireworks in ever shorter exposures.
Fireworks! is organized by Suzanne Boorsch, Associate Curator, of the Museum's Department of Drawings and Prints. Conservation of many of the works on view was undertaken by Akiko Yamazaki-Kleps, Assistant Conservator, Department of Paper Conservation. Exhibition design is by Dan Kershaw, Exhibition Designer, with graphics by Sue Koch, Senior Graphic Designer, and lighting by Zack Zanolli, Lighting Designer, all of the Museum's Design Department.
Publication
The exhibition will be accompanied by the Summer 2000 edition of the Metropolitan Museum Bulletin, written by exhibition curator Suzanne Boorsch and available in the Museum bookshops for $8.95.
Educational Programs
The Metropolitan will present a number of educational and related events in conjunction with this exhibition, including a special lecture by New York fireworks commissioner George Plimpton, titled "Fireworks: The Eighth Lively Art," on Friday, June 16, at 6:00 p.m. Tickets are $20 and may be purchased in advance by mail or by calling (212) 570-3949. Other events will include two more lectures, as well as regularly
scheduled gallery talks and a film series. In addition, the Museum's Web site (www.metmuseum.org) will feature the exhibition.
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May 8, 2000
Press resources