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New Exhibitions
Upcoming Exhibitions
New Galleries
Continuing Exhibitions
New & Continuing Installations
Traveling Exhibitions
OF SPECIAL NOTE:
* For the first time in nearly 30 years, the Museum has published a new edition of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (distributed by Yale University Press). Entirely reconceived and rewritten by the Met’s experts, this book provides an essential introduction to the collection by highlighting about 600 masterpieces from around the world that range in date from ancient to modern. In 2013, translations of the new Guide will be published in Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese.
* The Arms and Armor Department, established in October 1912, will mark its centennial with an exhibition devoted to Bashford Dean, its founding curator; gallery upgrades; a display of recent acquisitions; and educational programs. Today Met has one of the largest and most encyclopedic collections of arms and armor in the world. See exhibition description here.
NEW EXHIBITIONS
Dürer and Beyond: Central European Drawings in
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1400-1700
April 3–September 3, 2012
This exhibition will be the first to offer an extensive overview of the Museum’s holdings of early Central European drawings, many of which were acquired in the last two decades. An emphasis on works by later 16th- and 17th-century artists will be balanced by a selection of German drawings from the 15th and earlier 16th century, of which some of the most exceptional ones—including works by Albrecht Dürer—entered the Museum with The Robert Lehman Collection in 1975.
Accompanied by a catalogue.
Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations
May 10–August 19, 2012
The exhibition, organized by The Costume Institute, will explore the striking affinities between Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada, Italian designers from different eras. Inspired by Miguel Covarrubias’s “Impossible Interviews” for Vanity Fair in the 1930s, curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton will originate fictive conversations between these iconic women to suggest new readings of their most innovative work. Approximately 80 signature objects by Schiaparelli (1890–1973) from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, and Prada from the late 1980s to the present, will be compared and contrasted to explore the extraordinary impact of their aesthetics and sensibilities on contemporary notions of fashionability. Experimental video technologies in the galleries will juxtapose masterworks from the designers in an unexpected series of conversations on the relationship between fashion and culture.
The exhibition is made possible by Amazon.
Additional support is provided by Condé Nast.
Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City
May 15–November 4, 2012
Argentinean artist Tomás Saraceno (born in 1973) will create a monumental constellation of interconnected, room-sized modules, specifically for the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Habitat-like, the work will be accessible for visitors to experience its interior realms. The interdisciplinary project is rooted in the artist’s inventive exploration of new ways of inhabiting our environment, drawing on principles of architecture and engineering, physics and chemistry, aeronautics, and the natural world, and is inspired by eco-utopian visions for future sustainable communities. Merging art and architecture, Saraceno (originally trained as an architect) uses his art to envision floating or flying cities. Set against Central Park, its urban backdrop, and the airspace above and beyond, the installation suggests a model for futuristic urban planning.
The exhibition is made possible by Bloomberg.
Additional support is provided by Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky.
The exhibition is also made possible in part by The Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky Foundation and Eugenio Lopez.
Bellini, Titian, and Lotto: North Italian Paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo
May 15–September 3, 2012
The Accademia Carrara in Bergamo (northeast of Milan) is one of the jewels of Italian museums and a haven for art lovers. Founded at the end of the 18th century by Count Giacomo Carrara and housed in a beautiful neo-classical building, it contains a range of masterpieces dating from the 14th to the 19th century, with an outstanding collection of Renaissance Venetian, Lombard, and Florentine painting. Because it is currently closed for restoration, the Accademia Carrara will lend the Metropolitan Museum 15 masterpieces by Venetian and north Italian painters of the 15th and 16th centuries, including works by Bellini, Titian, and Lorenzo Lotto. The exhibition will focus on the areas and specific works that make the Accademia Carrara collection so distinctive, including three predella panels painted by Lorenzo Lotto in 1516 that are masterpieces of devotional narrative; Giovanni Bellini’s hauntingly beautiful Pietà with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist (1465-1470); and Orpheus and Eurydice (ca. 1512), a poetic early work by Titian.
The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with the Accademia Carrara of Bergamo.
Designing Nature: The Rinpa Aesthetic in Japanese Art
May 26, 2012– January 13, 2013
Rinpa—literally meaning “school of Ogata Korin”—is a modern term referring to a distinctive style of Japanese pictorial and applied arts that arose in the early 17th century and has continued into modern times. It embraces art marked by a bold, graphic abbreviation of natural motifs, frequent reference to traditional court literature and poetry, lavish use of expensive mineral and metallic pigments, incorporation of calligraphy into painting compositions, and innovative experimentation with new brush techniques. Featuring some 75 brilliantly executed works created in Japan by the Rinpa-school artists, the exhibition traces the development of the Rinpa aesthetic and demonstrates how its style continued to influence artists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Comprising some 50 works from the Museum’s own holdings, supplemented by some 25 loans from public and private collections on the East Coast, it includes many masters’ renowned works in a variety of media—painting, textiles, lacquerware, and ceramics. It will be held in two rotations.
Accompanied by a catalogue.
Ellsworth Kelly Plant Drawings
June 5–September 3, 2012
One of the foremost artists of our day, Ellsworth Kelly (American, b. 1923) may be best known for his rigorous abstract painting, but he has made figurative drawings throughout his career, creating an extraordinary body of work that now spans six decades. There has never been a major museum exhibition dedicated exclusively to the plant drawings. The selection of approximately 80 drawings begins in 1948 during Kelly’s early sojourn in Paris and continues throughout his travels to his most recent work made in upstate New York.
Accompanied by a publication.
The exhibition is made possible by the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund and the Jane and Robert Carroll Fund.
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
Chinese Gardens: Pavilions, Studios, Retreats
August 18, 2012– January 6, 2013
This exhibition, which encircles the Astor Chinese Garden Court, explores the pictorial imagery of gardens as an abiding source of artistic invention. Enclosed gardens have long been an integral part of residential and palace architecture in urban centers of China. With more than 70 paintings and contemporary photographs as well as ceramics, carved bamboo, lacquerware, metalwork, textiles, and other applied arts from the Museum’s collection, the exhibition examines the rich interactions between pictorial and garden arts in China across more than 1,000 years.
Press Preview: Friday, August 17, 10:00 a.m.–noon
Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years
September 18—December 31, 2012
Commentators on contemporary art have often claimed that Warhol is the most influential artist of the last half-century. No exhibition, however, has truly examined that assertion in depth. The exhibition is built around five broad themes ranging from vernacular subject matter to celebrity portraiture to issues of sexual identity. The presentation will include approximately 150 works of art in a broad range of media across five decades. A quarter of the selected works are by Warhol, and they will be juxtaposed with key examples by some 50 leading contemporary artists. The
show will be arranged as a series of thematic vignettes, not simply to demonstrate Warhol’s overt
influence, but to suggest how artists both worked in parallel modes and developed his model in dynamic new directions.
Accompanied by a catalogue.
Press Preview: Monday, September 10, 10:00 a.m.–noon
Bashford Dean and the Creation of the Arms and Armor Department
October 2, 2012 - September 29, 2013
To mark the centennial of the Arms and Armor Department, this exhibition will survey the career of Dr. Bashford Dean (1867-1928), the department's founding curator. A zoologist by training, Dean was for a time simultaneously a full professor at Columbia University, Curator of Fossil Fishes at the American Museum of Natural History, and Curator of Arms and Armor at the Metropolitan Museum. At the Met, he worked initially as a guest curator in 1904, when he was invited to install and catalogue the Museum's first significant acquisitions of arms and armor. He continued on as honorary curator until joining the staff full-time in 1912 as head of the newly created Arms and Armor Department, rapidly building the collection into one of international importance. In the process he fostered an influential group of private collectors, established American scholarship on the subject, and laid the foundations for the growth of the collection as it exists today.
Accompanied by a Bulletin.
Press preview: Monday, October 1, 2012, 10:00 a.m.–noon
Bernini: Sculpting in Clay
October 3, 2012—January 6, 2013
To visualize life-size or colossal marbles, the great Roman Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) began by making small, spirited clay models. Fired as terracotta, these studies and related drawings preserve the first traces of the thought process that evolved into some of the most famous statuary in the city, including the fountains in the Piazza Navonna and the angels on the Ponte San Angelo. This exhibition assembles for the first time approximately 40 of these bozzetti and modelli as well as 30 chalk or pen sketches alongside several bronze and marble statues. Through connoisseurship and a comprehensive campaign of scientific examination, the selection of models addresses the issue of what separates the hand of the master from the production of his large workshop.
The exhibition and catalogue are made possible by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation.
The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.
Accompanied by a catalogue.
Press preview: Monday, October 1, 2012, 10:00 a.m.–noon
Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop
October 11, 2012—January 27, 2013
This is the first major exhibition devoted to the history of doctored photographs, from hand-painted daguerreotypes and altered prints of the 1840s to the pre-digital dreamscapes of the late 20th century. While Photoshop and other digital editing programs have brought about an increased awareness of the degree to which photographs can be manipulated, photographers—including such major artists as Gustave Le Gray, Henry Peach Robinson, Edward Steichen, and John Baldessari—have been fabricating, modifying, and otherwise manipulating camera images since the medium was first invented. Featuring some 160 visually captivating photographs created in the service of art, politics, news, entertainment, and commerce, this international loan exhibition will significantly revise our understanding of photographic history as it traces the medium’s complex and changing relationship to visual truth.
The exhibition is made possible in part by Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Accompanied by a catalogue.
Press Preview: Tuesday, October 9, 10:00 a.m.–noon
Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens
October 30, 2012—January 27, 2013
The meteoric rise of the workshop of Abraham Roentgen (1711-1793) and his son David (1743-1807) blazed across 18th-century Continental Europe. This landmark exhibition will be the first comprehensive survey of the cabinetmaking firm from around 1740 to its closing in about 1795. Its innovative designs combined with intriguing mechanical devices to revolutionize traditional French and English furniture types. From its base in Germany the workshop employed novel marketing and production techniques to serve an international clientele. Some 60-65 pieces of furniture and several clocks will be complemented by paintings and prints that depict these unrivaled masterpieces in contemporary interiors. The most complicated mechanical devices will be illustrated through virtual animations. Working drawings, portraits of the cabinetmakers, their family, and important patrons, as well as a series of documents owned by the Metropolitan Museum and originating from the Roentgen estate, will underline the long-overlooked significance and legacy of the Roentgens as Europe’s principal cabinetmakers of the ancien régime.
The exhibition and catalogue are made possible by the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.
Accompanied by a catalogue.
Press preview: Monday, October 29, 2012, 10:00 a.m.–noon
George Bellows
November 15, 2012—February 18, 2013
Highlighting Bellows’s achievements in all media, the exhibition will include approximately 80 paintings, 30 drawings, and 25 lithographs. Although the entire span of his career will be covered, the emphasis—at least with the oils—will be on the period from 1907 to 1915, when he painted many of his masterpieces.
The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Accompanied by a catalogue.
Press preview: Tuesday, November 13, 10:00 a.m.–noon
African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde
November 27, 2012–April 14, 2013
The celebrated 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the Armory Show, was a major turning point for the art world in America. Inextricably tied to the introduction of the European avant-garde and the development of a more specific American modernity, this event played a major role in awakening an appreciation for African sculptures as fine art. As an extension of the centennial celebration of the Armory Show taking place in New York City in 2013, the exhibition will highlight the specific African artifacts acquired by the New York avant-garde and its most influential collectors and patrons during the years that directly followed the Armory Show, and will bring together African works from the collections of influential figures such as Robert J. Coady, Alfred Stieglitz, Marius de Zayas, Max Weber, John Quinn, Louise and Walter Arensberg, Alain Locke, and Eugene and Agnes Meyer. Featuring loans from public and private collections as well as works from the Met’s collection, the exhibition will include some 40 wood sculptures from West and Central Africa that will be presented alongside photographs, sculptures, and drawings by Stieglitz, Picasso, Picabia and Brancusi.
Press Preview: Monday, November 26, 10:00 a.m.–noon
Matisse: In Search of True Painting
December 4, 2012—March 17, 2013
At the end of 1905, French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was proclaimed the leader of a new school of painting. From that point until just before the outbreak of World War I, Matisse pushed the boundaries of his art by painting in pairs. These groups of large canvases—Young Sailor I and II (1906; private collection and The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Le Luxe I and II (1907; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and The Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), and Nasturtiums with the Painting “Dance” I and II (1912; the Metropolitan Museum and The State Pushkin Museum, Moscow)—each feature identical motifs painted on identically sized canvases in markedly different styles and palettes. Over the ensuing decades, Matisse continued his aesthetic explorations, sometimes painting strictly in pairs, and other times in trios or series: light-filled hotel rooms in Nice, pebble-strewn beaches in Normandy, still lifes composed of fruit and patterned fabrics. “My idea,” he explained, “is to push further and deeper into true painting.” In 1940 Matisse hired a photographer to document the way in which his compositions often changed dramatically from one day to the next. Five years later, Aimé Maeght inaugurated his Paris gallery with an exhibition conceived by Matisse. Colorful canvases such as The Dream (1940; Private collection) and Still Life with Magnolia (1940; Centre Pompidou, Paris) were juxtaposed with black-and-white photographs of earlier states of the paintings. Matisse’s search for the essence of his subject was on display, and the exhibition confirmed that the journey was as rewarding as the final result.
Matisse: In Search of True Painting will include approximately 40 paintings by Matisse, as well as photographs of the installation of the December 1945 Galerie Maeght exhibition. New technical studies have been carried out on the early pairs and will be presented in the context of the exhibition and in the accompanying catalogue.
The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Accompanied by a catalogue.
Press Preview: Monday, November 26, 10:00 a.m.–noon
NEW GALLERIES
New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts
Opened January 16, 2012
This third and final phase of the American Wing renovation project comprises 26 renovated and enlarged galleries for the Museum’s collection of American art, one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world. The suite of elegant new galleries will provide visitors with a rich and captivating experience of the history of American art from the 18th to the early 20th century. The centerpiece of the new installation is Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s monumental and iconic painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. Twenty-one galleries will feature the extraordinary collection of American paintings—including such masters as Gilbert Stuart, Frederic Edwin Church, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and John Singer Sargent. Interspersed among the pictures will be American sculptures, notably the work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Three other galleries, together with a grand pre-revolutionary New York interior, will display 18th-century American decorative arts, principally treasures of colonial furniture and silver. In The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, a concurrent renovation includes additional casework, touch-screen case labels, and upgraded computer access.
Part 1 of the American Wing renovation project opened in January 2007 with galleries dedicated to the classical arts of America, 1810-1845. Part 2, inaugurated in May 2009, included the renovated Charles Engelhard Court and the Period Rooms. After Part 3 is completed, nearly all of the American Wing’s 17,000 works will be on view, constituting an encyclopedic survey of fine art in the United States.
New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia
Opened November 1, 2011
More than 1,000 works from the preeminent collection of the Museum’s Department of Islamic Art—one of the most comprehensive gatherings of this material in the world—are on view in a completely renovated, expanded, and reinstalled suite of 15 galleries. The organization of the galleries by geographical area emphasizes the rich diversity of the Islamic world, over a span of 1300 years, by underscoring the many distinct cultures within its fold.
The André Mertens Galleries for Musical Instruments
Opened March 2, 2010
The gallery devoted to Western musical instruments reopened in March 2010, showcasing more than 230 works drawn primarily from the Metropolitan’s extensive holdings of musical instruments, among the most important in the world. The new installation focuses attention on individual masterworks by exploring each within its musical and cultural context, by offering exciting comparisons of how individual makers realized the same concept, and by introducing examples of the various instruments’ developments. Among the wide range of objects on view—keyboard, string, percussion, woodwind, and brass instruments—a highlight is the famed “Batta” cello made in Cremona, Italy, by Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737), on loan from a private collection. The reinstallation also includes new acquisitions and objects from the permanent collection that have rarely been seen by the public.
Renovation of the Late Gothic Hall, The Cloisters
Opened December 8, 2009
The Late Gothic Hall at The Cloisters museum and gardens reopened following an extensive renovation. The four large, 15th-century, French limestone windows from the Dominican monastery in Sens, Burgundy, were conserved, and new leaded glass was installed on the interior with protective glazing on the exterior. The new installation features a monumental tapestry from Burgos Cathedral representing the Salvation of Man, which returned to public view for the first time in a generation following a thorough campaign of conservation. The Late Gothic Hall, distinguished by its high timber ceiling, also exhibits many of the finest 15th-century works in The
Cloisters’ collection, including sculptures by Tilman Riemenschneider and richly painted and gilded altarpieces from Spain.
The renovation was funded by The Alice Tully Foundation.
CONTINUING EXHIBITIONS
The Coe Collection of American Indian Art
Through October 14, 2012
Drawn from works given and bequeathed to the Metropolitan during the past decade by Ralph T. Coe of Santa Fe, New Mexico, the exhibition is comprised of some 30 objects made in natural materials from stone to animal hide. It features a wide range of Native American works that come from different times, from far-flung places, and from numerous distinct peoples. The oldest pieces in the Coe Collection date to some thousands of years BCE. The major part of the collection dates from the 19th to early 20th century, a period of great contact between Native Americans and outsiders of all sorts, from traders to missionaries to the U.S. army. The peoples of the Great Plains are prominent during this time, and objects such as the impressive, personalized hide shirts of important Indian men have come to identify American Indians in the public mind; there is such a shirt in the exhibition. Representing contemporary work, which is also found in the Coe Collection, is a mask dated to the year 2001—an imposing wood sculpture of a Noble Woman by the Northwest Coast Haida artist Robert Davidson is a product of a long, deeply felt tradition for the carving of wood.
The exhibition is made possible by the Friends of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.
Historic Images of the Greek Bronze Age: The Reproductions of E. Gilliéron & Son
Through January 6, 2013
This exhibition features a selection of early 20th-century reproductions of now-famous works of art from Sir Arthur Evans’s historic excavations of Minoan Crete and Heinrich Schliemann’s Mycenaean Greece. Emile Gilliéron and later his son were the senior draftsmen for Evans, responsible for reconstructing the fresco paintings in the palace at Knossos. The Gilliérons formed a thriving business selling original watercolors after the frescoes and other reproductions of three-dimensional artworks, which they made directly from the originals. Their work influenced the study of Aegean art and was integral to its widespread introduction throughout Europe and America. The installation draws from the Metropolitan Museum’s own collection of Gilliéron reproductions, which is the largest in existence.
The exhibition is made possible by The Vlachos Family Fund.
NEW & CONTINUING INSTALLATIONS
After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age
September 25, 2012—May 27, 2013
This installation will explore various ways in which artists, including Nancy Burson, Andreas Gursky, Jason Salavon, Kota Ezawa, and others?have used digital technology to alter the photographic image over the past 20 years. Featuring approximately 25 works drawn from the Museum’s collection, as well as loans from local collections, it will serve as an addendum to the exhibition Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop.
Paintings on Parchment: Italian Renaissance Illuminations from the Robert Lehman Collection
Through September 30, 2012
This installation of Italian illuminations from the Robert Lehman Collection, featuring examples by leading masters from the early 14th to the early 16th century, highlights the sophistication of this art form and its close ties to painting during the Italian Renaissance. The majority of these parchment leaves and cuttings, decorated in jewel-toned palettes and gold, are initials that have been excised from choir books. Approaching the scale of small panel paintings, the Florentine and Sienese initials reflect the colossal size of these books, which enabled a large group of clergy to read the text and music at a distance. Two Northern Italian leaves, not created as part of a manuscript but as independent paintings on parchment, also blur the boundaries between the two art forms. In fact, nearly all of the illuminators represented in the installation worked in both media; paintings by three of them (Lorenzo Monaco, Sano di Pietro, and the Osservanza Master) are displayed nearby in the Lehman galleries, highlighting Robert Lehman’s view of his miniatures as an extension of his paintings collection.
Colors of the Universe: Chinese Hardstone Carvings
Through January 6, 2013
This remarkable selection of carvings, drawn from the Museum’s extensive permanent collection, presents the lapidary art of later China, including not only jade, the most esteemed of East Asian gems, but also agate, malachite, turquoise, quartz, lapis lazuli, coral, amber and a variety of soapstones. The exhibition explores the diverse subjects and styles of Qing dynasty (1644-1911) decorative arts, illustrating those artists’ extraordinary imagination and technical virtuosity.
Buddhism along the Silk Road: 5th–8th Century
Through December 9, 2012
Drawing together objects from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the western reaches of Central Asia?regions connected in the sixth century A.D. through trade, military conquest, and the diffusion of Buddhism? the exhibition illuminates a remarkable moment of artistic exchange. At the roots of this transnational connection is the empire established the end of the fifth century by the Huns (Hunas or Hephthalites) that extended from Afghanistan to the northern plains of India. Although this political system soon disintegrated into chaos, over the next century trade routes connecting India to the western reaches of the Central Asian Silk Road continued to link these distant communities, facilitating ideological exchange and financing the production of Buddhist imagery of great artistic sophistication.
British Silver: The Wealth of a Nation
Through January 20, 2013
Drawn from the Metropolitan Museum’s outstanding collection of silver, this installation explores some of the key ingredients that made the English silver trade such a vigorous success over two centuries. Since sterling silver was the “coinage of the realm,” a dinner service was, most literally, worth its weight. But the display and use of silver meant more than riches. Silver was an expression of a patron’s taste and education, designed to celebrate his achievements and complement the architecture of his house. Parliament recognized the importance of the silversmiths’ trade to the economy, and worked to encourage an environment conducive to vigorous commerce. Innovation—stylistic, technical, and commercial—was highly valued, too, and the silversmiths who succeeded in business had to be responsive to fashion and opportunity.
This installation focuses mainly on silver from London and includes approximately 80 objects, ranging in date from the mid-16th to the mid-18th century, many of which have not been on display for decades.
Naked Before the Camera
Through September 9, 2012
For artists working in every medium, depicting the human body has always been among the greatest challenges and supreme achievements. Tapping into mythology, carnal desire, hero worship, and aesthetic pleasure, depictions of the nude have also triggered impassioned discussions
about sin and sexuality, cultural identity, and canons of beauty—especially when the artist’s
chosen medium is photography, with its inherent accuracy and specificity. This exhibition of approximately 45 photographs, all drawn from the Museum’s collection, surveys the history of this motif and explores some of the motivations and meanings that underlie its varied manifestations.
The Rylands Haggadah: Medieval Jewish Art in Context
Through September 30, 2012
From the calling of Moses to the crossing of the Red Sea, the drama of the ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt is presented in The Rylands Haggadah. This is the third in a series of installations, each of which focuses on one masterwork of Hebrew manuscript illumination from a national or international collection. This spring, the featured work comes from the John Rylands University Library in Manchester, England. Each month, the Haggadah will be open to a different page, affording visitors the exceptional opportunity to follow the artist’s telling of the Exodus story. Works of art from the Museum’s own collection, made for Christian use, but depicting the saga of the Hebrew people, will suggest the larger, medieval context of biblical storytelling in which the Haggadah was created.
Previous installations featured the Washington Haggadah and Lisbon’s Hebrew Bible.
This series is made possible by The David Berg Foundation.
Contemporary Iranian Art in the Permanent Collection
Through September 3, 2012
This exhibition features seven works by three generations of Iranian artists—Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (b. 1924), Parviz Tanavoli (b. 1937), Y.Z. Kami (b. 1956), Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), Afruz Amighi (b. 1974), and Ali Banisadr (b. 1976)—four of whom live and work in the United States, and two of whom continue to work in Iran. Despite their diverse modes of expression, these artworks reflect an intrinsic connection with Iran and address issues of identity, political and social concerns, gender, nostalgia, and cultural pride.
The exhibition is made possible by The Hagop Kevorkian Fund.
Spies in the House of Art: Photography, Film, and Video
Through August 26, 2012
Since the 1980s, a number of contemporary artists working in photography, film, and video have taken as their subject the art museum and how specific works from the canon of art history are viewed. This installation in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, drawn largely from the Metropolitan’s collection, looks at artists from the last three decades who explore the secret lives of museums and their collections. Highlights include Francesca Woodman’s Blueprint for a Temple, a 14-by-10-foot blueprint photocollage—not exhibited since 1980—and the 16mm film Flash in the Metropolitan (2006) by Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer, which was shot after hours in the Metropolitan Museum's darkened galleries. Also featured are photographs and videos by contemporary artists Lutz Bacher, Lothar Baumgarten, Sophie Calle, Tim Davis, Andrea Fraser, Candida Höfer, Laura Larson, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, and Thomas Struth, as well as earlier works from mid-century by Diane Arbus and Joseph Cornell.
Fabergé from the Matilda Geddings Gray Foundation Collection
Opened November 22, 2011
When Matilda Geddings Gray acquired her first piece of Fabergé for her niece, in 1933, she was already a wealthy and sophisticated collector, and the name of the Russian artist-jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé (1846-1920) was almost unknown in the United States. Since then, Fabergé’s art has become widely known and his exquisite objects are now internationally sought after.This long-term loan features a selection from her collection, one of the finest in the world, and includes objects created for the Russian Imperial family, such as the Lilies-of-the-Valley Basket— the most important Fabergé creation in the United States—and three Imperial Easter Eggs.
TRAVELING EXHIBITIONS
Earth, Sea, and Sky: Nature in Western Art—Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The breadth and quality of the collections of the Metropolitan Museum afford an opportunity to explore the grand theme of nature as it has been depicted by painters, sculptors, and decorative artists in Europe, America, and the Near East, from antiquity to the present day. The exhibition features masterful representations of landscape, flora, and fauna rendered in a wide range of media, including painting, ceramics, tapestry, silver, stone, and bronze, and dating from the third millennium BC to the twentieth century.
Drawn exclusively from the permanent collection of the Metropolitan, the exhibition highlights more than 130 works by major artists, including Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Poussin, Constable, Delacroix, Barye, Monet, Turner, Palissy, Tiffany, Hopper, and Atget, as well as anonymous masters from the ancient and medieval worlds. The installation is organized thematically to bring out engaging and informative juxtapositions.
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum October 6, 2012—January 4, 2013
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August 14, 2012
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