October 22, 2002 – January 5, 2003
Special Exhibition Galleries, Second floor
Monday, October 21, 10:00 a.m.-noon
The first retrospective exhibition in the United States of works by the lyrical 19th-century French painter Théodore Chassériau will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 22, 2002, through January 5, 2003. Théodore Chassériau (1819--1856): The Unknown Romantic will feature 54 paintings and 82 works on paper – many never before exhibited in the United States – culled from international collections. Although he ranks among the most important and influential artists of the first half of the 19th century, Chassériau has remained one of the least known to modern audiences.
Chassériau, a precocious pupil of Ingres, developed a unique style that fused Ingres's linear precision with Delacroix's painterly Romanticism. In addition to the history paintings and portraits that he exhibited in the Salons from 1836 until his early death in 1856, he executed a large number of highly finished portrait drawings as well as large-scale decorative paintings commissioned for Parisian public buildings. The exhibition will include many of his finest canvases and an extraordinary range of drawings representing every aspect of his varied career.
The exhibition is supported by The Isaacson-Draper Foundation.
The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, the Louvre Museum, Paris, and the Museums of Strasbourg.
An indemnity has been granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Philippe de Montebello, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, commented on the exhibition: "The Met is delighted to offer American audiences what will likely be their first glimpse of Chassériau's distinguished and distinctive artistic vision. A highly adept student during one of the most fertile epochs of French painting, Chassériau absorbed the tremendous gifts of his teachers and fellow artists – from the stylized linearity of Ingres to the painterly colorism of Delacroix – and suavely forged from these often opposing stylistic traditions his own characteristic style and subject matter."
The exhibition will be arranged chronologically and will also reflect the thematic range of Chassériau's art, highlighting his accomplishments as both a painter and draftsman. Beginning with his earliest portraits and Salon submissions, the exhibition will continue with key examples of the artist's public commissions, including a large altarpiece from the Church of Notre-Dame in Saint-Etienne and a group of studies for the decoration of the Church of Saint-Roch in Paris. Another highlight will be the artist's exotic and appealing Orientalist works, such as the famous canvas The Tepidarium (1853, Musée d'Orsay). Produced in the decade following his 1846 trip to Algiers, this erotically-charged composition of bathers is among Chassériau's most accomplished works. The exhibition will conclude with a selection of Chassériau's works of the mid-1850s, produced before his premature death at the age of thirty-seven.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue to be published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.
The exhibition catalogue is made possible by the Drue E. Heinz Fund and
the Doris Duke Fund for Publications.
Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856): The Unknown Romantic is organized by Vincent Pomarède, Director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon; Louis-Antoine Prat, Curator in the Department of Graphic Arts at the Musée du Louvre; and Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, assisted in New York by Kathryn Calley Galitz, Research Associate in the Metropolitan's Department of European Paintings.
A variety of educational programs will be offered in conjunction with the exhibition, including lectures, gallery talks, films, a poetry reading, and a November 16 teacher workshop on Orientalism.
Prior to the Metropolitan Museum's presentation the exhibition will be on view at the Grand Palais, Paris and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg.
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