December 18, 2008
Museumgoers will eagerly anticipate next year's offerings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first year in the post-Philippe de Montebello era. The museum has announced the following exhibitions:
Raphael to Renoir: Drawings from the Collection of Jean Bonna
January 21–April 26, 2009
This is the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to European old master and 19th-century drawings from the distinguished collection of Mr. Jean Bonna in Geneva, Switzerland. Many of the 120 drawings on display are masterpieces, ranging through 500 years of art history, from the Renaissance to 1900, and representing a diversity of artistic schools in Italy, Northern Europe, France, and Great Britain, among other regions. The selection includes works by famous artists-—such as Carpaccio, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Parmigianino, Canaletto, Rembrandt, Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Chardin, Boucher, Fragonard, Goya, Ingres, Gericault, Delacroix, Manet, Burne-Jones, Whistler, Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat—as well as superb and poignant drawings by others less well-known.
Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors
January 27–April 19, 2009
The first exhibition to focus entirely on the radiant late interiors and still lifes of Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), the 80 paintings, drawings, and watercolors on display date from the artist’s later years, when he centered his painting activity in his pink stucco house overlooking the Mediterranean in the village of Le Cannet. Working in a converted upstairs bedroom, Bonnard transformed the rooms and objects that surrounded him into iridescent subjects, remarkable in color, light, and vision. Compelling metaphors for a range of sensations, the late paintings convey a disquieting effect. It is these luminous late interiors that define Bonnard’s modernism and prompt a reappraisal of his reputation in the history of 20th- century art.
Cast in Bronze: French Sculpture from Renaissance to Revolution
February 24–May 24, 2009
Beginning in the 16th century, a tradition of bronze sculpture developed in France that was influenced by achievements of the Italian Renaissance but soon revealed its own distinct force, refinement, and panache. Even though French bronzes were among the glories of royal châteaux, including Versailles, and were always collected eagerly by connoisseurs, they have received relatively little public scrutiny. Evolving from a decadelong collaborative study among scholars, this is the first exhibition to address the subject in 40 years. Approximately 110 of the finest statuettes, portrait busts, and monuments proclaim the French genius for bronze from the late Renaissance through the times of Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI. Germain Pilon, Barthélemy Prieur, Michel Anguier, François Girardon, Antoine Coysevox, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, and Jean-Antoine Houdon are only a few of the cavalcade of masters in the exhibition who lent their prodigious talents to this prestigious medium.
Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400–1600
March 17–June 21, 2009
This international loan exhibition presents approximately 45 works of art that illustrate the height of artistic production under court and elite patronage during the first 200 years of the Chos_n dynasty (1392–1910), a time of extraordinary cultural achievements. The diverse yet cohesive group of secular and religious paintings, porcelain, sculpture, lacquer, and metalwork highlights the aesthetics, conventions, and innovations of a Neo-Confucian elite and its artistic milieu. This is the first in a series of special international loan exhibitions at the Museum focusing on significant periods in Korean art history.
The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984
April 21–August 2, 2009
This is the first major museum exhibition to focus exclusively on “The Pictures Generation.” Born into the media culture of postwar America, this tightly knit group of New York-based artists created some of the most important and influential works of the late 20th century. Their overarching subject was how pictures of all kinds not only depict but also shape reality. Highly seductive photographs by Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman reveal the ways in which images from B movies and magazine advertisements determine much of our sense of who we are. Louise Lawler and Sherrie Levine examine how the myths and legends of modern art are inextricably tied to the institutions of the museum and art history. Also included are photographs by Laurie Simmons, James Casebere, James Welling, and Allan McCollum, as well as works in other media by Robert Longo, Troy Brauntuch, David Salle, Matt Mullican, Jack Goldstein, and Dara Birnbaum, among others.
Roxy Paine on the Roof: Maelstrom
April 28–October 25, 2009 (weather permitting)
American artist Roxy Paine (b. 1966) is creating a 130-foot-long by 45-foot-wide stainless- steel sculpture, especially for the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Immersing viewers in what seems to be a cataclysmic force of nature, Maelstrom (2009) is Paine’s largest and most ambitious work to date. The most recent in a diverse body of work, this sculpture is one of the artist’s dendroids based on systems such as vascular networks, tree roots, industrial piping, and fungal mycelia. Set against Central Park and its architectural backdrop, the installation explores the interplay between the natural world and the built environment amid nature’s inherently chaotic processes.
The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion
May 6–August 9, 2009
Exploring the reciprocal relationship between high fashion and evolving ideals of beauty, The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion focuses on iconic models of the 20th century and their roles in projecting, and sometimes inspiring, the fashion of their respective eras. The exhibition, organized by historical period from the early 1900s to 2000, will feature haute couture and ready-to-wear masterworks accompanied by fashion photography and video footage of models who epitomized their epochs.
Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective
May 20–August 16, 2009
The first major exhibition in New York in 20 years devoted to one of the most important painters of the 20th century, Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective will feature 153 works (70 paintings, 19 drawings, and 64 archival items) that span the entirety of the artist’s full and celebrated career. The landmark exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, which mark the centenary of the artist’s birth in Dublin in 1909, will bring together the most significant works from each period of Bacon’s career, focusing on the key subjects and themes that run through his extraordinary creative output. This presentation will afford the most comprehensive examination to date of Bacon’s sources and working processes, offering a reevaluation of the artist’s work in light of a range of new interpretations and archival materials that have emerged since his death in 1992.
Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages
June 2–August 23, 2009
For hundreds of years before the old masters, medieval artists explored and tested the medium of drawing, producing whimsical sketches, intriguing graphic treatises, and finished drawings of marvelous refinement. Gathering some 70 works from the 9th to the early 14th century, this exhibition will be the first to celebrate the quality and range of drawings from the Middle Ages. Early maps, artists’ sketchbooks, and masterfully decorated manuscripts—rarely seen objects borrowed from European and American libraries and museums—will appear alongside related works in ivory, enamel, and stained glass.
African and Oceanic Art from the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting
June 2–September 27, 2009
The collections of African and Oceanic art in the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva, begun in the 1920s by Josef Mueller and continued by Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller, represent the culmination of more than eight decades of wide-ranging collecting of works from both regions. Presenting more than 30 highlights from the Barbier-Mueller’s holdings of African and Oceanic sculpture, most never before displayed in the United States, this exhibition will explore a rich legacy of connoisseurship. The African works on view will feature a select group of sculpture and masks from western, eastern, and central Africa. From miniature to monumental, made of wood, ivory, metal, and terracotta, the outstanding African works have been selected to illustrate both the creativity of the continent’s artists and the discerning eye of the collectors. The Oceanic works will comprise an array of rare and spectacular objects exemplifying the breadth of achievement by artists from across the Pacific. They will include a striking group of figures, masks, and decorative art from Indonesia, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Easter Island, and other areas.
Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul
June 23–September 20, 2009 Ancient Afghanistan—at the crossroads of major trade routes and the focus of invasions by great powers and nomadic migrations—was home to one of the most complex, rich, and original civilizations on the continent of Asia. This exhibition will celebrate the unique role of Afghanistan as a center for both the reception of diverse cultural elements and the creation of original styles of art that combine multiple stylistic materials—such as the Hellenized examples from the second-century B.C. city of Ai Khanoum, the array of trade goods found in the first-century city of Begram, and the astonishing nomadic gold found in the hoard at Tillya Tepe, which also dates to the first century. It will also commemorate the heroic rescue of the heritage of one of the world’s great civilizations, whose precious treasures were thought to have been destroyed. Among the highlights of the exhibition will be gold vessels from the Tepe Fullol hoard; superb works and architectural elements from Ai Khanoum; extraordinary turquoise-encrusted gold jewelry and ornaments from the tombs at Tillya Tepe; and sculptural masterpieces in ivory, plaster medallions, and Roman glass from Begram. T
Augustus Saint-Gaudens
June 30–October 12, 2009
The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns some 45 sculptures by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848– 1907), the American Beaux-Arts sculptor who worked in New York, Paris, and Cornish, New Hampshire. The Museum’s collection fully represents the range of his oeuvre—from early cameos to innovative painterly bas-reliefs to reductions after stirring public monuments for East Coast cities. Through the lens of the Museum's unparalleled holdings as well as some related loans, this exhibition will offer a reappraisal of Saint-Gaudens's groundbreaking role in the history of late 19th-century American sculpture and the Aesthetic Movement.
The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry
September 22, 2009–January 3, 2010
On view will be all the illuminated pages of the Belles Heures painted by the Limbourg Brothers in 1405–1408/09 for Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Works of art in other media acquired by the duke and other Valois princes in the opening decade of the 15th century will also be included.
Imperial Privilege: Vienna Porcelain of Du Paquier, 1718–44
September 22, 2009–March 21, 2010
The second porcelain factory in Europe able to make true porcelain in the manner of the Chinese was established in Vienna in 1718. Founded by Claudius Innocentius Du Paquier, the small porcelain enterprise developed a highly distinctive style that remained Baroque in inspiration throughout the history of the factory, which was taken over by the State in 1744. Du Paquier produced a range of tablewares, decorative vases, and small-scale sculpture that found great popularity with the Hapsburg court and the Austrian nobility. This exhibition will chart the history of the development of the Du Paquier factory, setting its production within the historic and cultural context of Vienna in the first half of the 18th century.
Robert Frank: The Americans
September 22–December 27, 2009
This exhibition will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Americans, Robert Frank’s elegiac suite of black-and-white photographs made on a cross-country road trip as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1955–56. The show will feature all 83 photographs published in the compact volume that became one of the medium’s most influential publications. In addition, the exhibition will include a full set of contact sheets, the artist’s earlier essays in sequencing photographs, and his later reuse of iconic images from the series.
Watteau, Music, and Theatre
September 22–November 29, 2009
The exhibition will demonstrate the place of music and theatre in Watteau’s art, exploring the tension between an imagery of power, associated with the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and a more optimistic and mildly subversive imagery of pleasure, developed in opera-ballet and theatre in the first years of the 18th century. It will show that the painter’s utopian vision was directly influenced by musical works devoted to the island of Cythera, the home of Venus, and to the Venetian carnival, and will shed new light on, and offer new interpretations of, the subjects of a number of Watteau’s pictures.
Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733–1799)
October 6, 2009–January 10, 2010
Luo Ping was one of the most versatile, original, and celebrated artists in 18th-century China. The youngest of the so-called Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, he was a fiercely independent artist whose works—including portraits, landscapes, and flower paintings—deeply influenced the course of later Chinese painting. Organized by the Museum Rietberg, Zurich, the exhibition, which consists of 37 paintings by Luo Ping, members of his family, and his mentor Jin Nong, is drawn primarily from leading museums in China and will feature a number of National Treasures that have never been shown in the West.
American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915
October 6, 2009–January 24, 2010
This loan exhibition of more than 100 masterpieces of American painting explores a major mode of artistic expression from the pre-Revolutionary era to the beginning of World War I: figural scenes of ordinary people engaged in life’s tasks and pleasures. In the exhibition’s first section (ca. 1765–1830), John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Samuel F. B. Morse and others produce evocative portraits that tell personal stories and reflect the shift from colonies to nation. The second section (ca. 1820–1860) includes multi-figured compositions by William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others that help to define national identity and national character. In the exhibition’s third section (ca. 1860–1876), Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Thomas Eakins, and others respond to the Civil War and, going forward, encode Reconstruction and the Centennial in pictures that contribute to healing the nation’s spirit. In the fourth and final section (ca. 1876–1915), Homer and Eakins are joined by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Sloan, George Bellows, and others who respond to new subjects and new expressive modes in an increasingly cosmopolitan age.
Arts of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor from the Late Heian through the Edo Period (ca. 1156–1868)
October 20, 2009–January 10, 2010
This will be the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to the arts of the samurai. Arms and armor will be the principal focus, bringing together the finest examples of armor, swords and sword mountings, archery equipment and firearms, equestrian equipment, banners, surcoats, and related accessories of rank such as fans and batons. Drawn entirely from public and private collections in Japan, the majority of objects date from the rise of the samurai in the late Heian period, ca. 1156, through the early modern Edo period, ending in 1868, when samurai culture was abolished. The martial skills and daily life of the samurai, their governing lords, the daimyo, and the ruling shoguns will also be evoked through the presence of painted scrolls and screens depicting battles and martial sports, castles, and portraits of individual warriors. The exhibition will conclude with a related exhibition documenting the recent restoration in Japan of a selection of arms and armor from the Metropolitan Museum’s permanent collection. This will be the first exhibition ever devoted to the subject of Japanese arms and armor conservation.
Duncan Phyfe, America’s Legendary Cabinetmaker
November 30, 2009–March 7, 2010
Referred to during his lifetime as the "United States Rage," Duncan Phyfe (1768–1854) remains to this day America's most widely recognized cabinetmaker. This will be the first major retrospective on Phyfe since 1922, when the Metropolitan mounted a monographic show on the cabinetmaker and his work. The exhibition will cover the full chronological sweep of Phyfe's distinguished career, including his earliest and best-known furniture based on the published designs of Thomas Sheraton as well as work from the middle and later stages of his career, when he adopted the richer "archaeological" antique style of the 1820s and a refined plain Grecian style based on French Restauration prototypes.
photograph © 2008 NYC.com Inc.
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met, met museum, national museum of afghanistan, philippe de montebello, raphael, renoir
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Posted on 12/18/2008
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