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Three giants of 20th-century American photography—Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand—will be featured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from November 10, 2010, through April 10, 2011, in the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand. The diverse and groundbreaking work of these artists will be revealed through a presentation of 115 photographs, drawn entirely from the Museum's collection. On view will be many of the Metropolitan's greatest photographic treasures from the 1900s to 1920s, including Stieglitz's famous portraits of Georgia O'Keeffe, Steichen's large colored photographs of the Flatiron building, and Strand's pioneering abstractions.
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In the 18th century, privileged Europeans embarked on the Grand Tour, traveling principally to sites in Italy, where they visited cherished ruins of the ancient world and the splendid architecture of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. The influx of these travelers to destinations north and south – Venice, Rome, and Naples in particular – led to a flowering of topographical paintings, drawings, and prints by native Italians serving a foreign market eager to return home with pictures and souvenirs. Italy Observed: Views and Souvenirs, 1706-1899, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum through January 2, 2011, showcases a selection of the rich holdings of Italian vedute (views) collected by Robert Lehman. From paintings of Venetian life by Luca Carlevaris to a Neapolitan album of gouache drawings documenting the eruption of Vesuvius in 1794 to sketches and watercolors of Italian antiquities, the installation captures the artist's romantic attraction to Italy and its irresistible Roman heritage. It also includes various marketed souvenirs—exquisite fans, spoons, teapots, and pocket watches—on loan from the Museum's Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts.
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Widely renowned as a pioneer of conceptual art, American artist John Baldessari (b. 1931, National City, California) is one of the most influential contemporary artists of the last 50 years. John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, the first major U.S. exhibition in 20 years to survey Baldessari's career, will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 20, 2010, through January 9, 2011. This retrospective will feature approximately 120 works spanning the period from 1962 to 2010.
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The first major exhibition in 45 years devoted to Jan Gossart (ca. 1478-1532)— one of the most innovative artists of the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands— is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 6, 2010, through January 17, 2011. Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart's Renaissance brings together the majority of Gossart's paintings, drawings, and prints, and places them in the context of the influences on his transformation from Late Gothic Mannerism to the new Renaissance mode. Gossart was among the first northern artists to travel to Rome to make copies after antique sculpture and monuments and to introduce biblical and mythological subjects with erotic nude figures into the mainstream of northern painting. Most often credited with successfully assimilating Italian Renaissance style into northern European art of the early 16th century, he is the pivotal Old Master who redirected the course of early Flemish painting from the legacy of its founder, Jan van Eyck, and charted new territory that eventually led to the great age of Rubens.
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Praised by the international press and exhibited throughout the United States and Europe at the turn of the 20th century, the American furniture designer Charles Rohlfs (1853–1936) created innovative works that combined elements of Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and proto-modernism in surprising and original ways. In a meteoric career that barely spanned one decade, he designed only a few hundred works—many of them for his own home. While Rohlfs's forms were too eccentric for the commercial market of his time, he achieved recognition as a unique voice and seminal force in the history of American art furniture.
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The Yuan Revolution: Art and Dynastic Change, a complement to the exhibition The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty, traces the momentous stylistic transformation in painting and calligraphy that began under Mongol rule and culminated in the literati traditions of the early Ming. Featuring more than 70 works in all pictorial formats—hanging scrolls, handscrolls, album leaves, and fans—the installation focuses on the rise of a new scholarly aesthetic in the graphic arts that occurred in response to the wrenching social and political changes brought about by the Mongol conquest. Drawn primarily from the Metropolitan's own holdings, the installation also includes 17 important loans from local private and university collections.
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During a trip to the Netherlands in spring 1928, the Catalan painter Joan Miró (1893–1983) purchased postcards from the museums he visited. Two 17th-century Dutch genre scenes particularly caught his attention and served as the inspiration for a series of paintings he created that summer. The traveling exhibition Miró: The Dutch Interiors, which opens at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning October 5, features Miró's three "Dutch Interiors" and the two Old Master paintings on which they are based. The New York venue will also show preparatory drawings and additional paintings by Miró in the Metropolitan's collection. This exhibition is the first in which Miró's paintings have been hung alongside the Dutch Golden Age pictures that inspired them.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a major international loan exhibition devoted to the art of the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368)—one of the most dynamic and culturally rich periods in Chinese history—beginning September 28. Bringing together over 200 works drawn principally from China, with additional loans from Taiwan, Japan, Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty will explore the art and material culture that flourished during the pivotal and vibrant period in Chinese culture and history dating from 1215, the year of Khubilai Khan's birth, to 1368, the fall of the Yuan dynasty. The assemblage of extraordinary works will include paintings and sculpture, as well as decorative arts in gold and silver, textile, ceramics, and lacquer, and the exhibition will highlight new art forms and styles that were generated in China as a result of the unification of the country under the Yuan dynasty, founded by Khubilai in 1271. The loans from China will include key pieces from recent archaeological finds that add immeasurably to our knowledge and understanding of Chinese art of this period.