Alicja Kwade @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

The Roof Garden Commission: Alicja Kwade, ParaPivot
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
April 16 - October 27, 2019

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Photo: David H. Koch Plaza

© The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced yesterday that Berlin-based artist ALICJA KWADE has been selected to create a site-specific installation for The Met's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden.

"The Met's Roof Garden Commission is a catalyst for bold artistic intervention and the continuous rethinking of a unique space, and it's with great anticipation that we look forward to unveiling Alicja Kwade's project this spring," said Max Hollein, Director of The Met. "The setting—perched atop the Museum's vast collection and set against New York City's iconic skyline and Central Park—presents a compelling site for Kwade, whose works offer an expansive view of the history of art and science."

The Roof Garden Commission: Alicja Kwade, ParaPivot was conceived by the artist in consultation with Sheena Wagstaff, Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Kelly Baum, Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art, both of The Met's Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. It is the seventh in a series of site-specific commissions for the outdoor space.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a book published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.

  

Born in 1979, ALICJA KWADE lives and works in Berlin. Raised by a cultural scientist mother and a conservator and art historian father, she grew up in Poland and, later, Germany. In 1999, Alicja Kwade entered the Universität der Künste in Berlin to study sculpture, and three years later she began showing in solo and group exhibitions, achieving a remarkable degree of critical success in a relatively short period of time. Although Alicja Kwade has also made videos and sound art, she is best known for her sculptures and installations, most of which are designed with specific spaces in mind. With equal parts poetry and critical acumen, her work not only reflects on the nature of time and perception; it also investigates the structures and theories we have adopted to understand the physical universe in which we reside. The resulting works are elegant, astute, and highly experiential.

Alicja Kwade's work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including Out of Ousia, at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen (2018); Medium Median, at Whitechapel Gallery in London (2016); and The Void of the Moment in Motion, at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt (2015). Her work has also been featured in such prestigious exhibitions as the 57th Venice Biennale, Viva Arte Viva (2016), and the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Forming in the Pupil of an Eye. This is the artist's first solo exhibition at a museum in the United States.

The exhibition is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies. Additional support is provided by Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky.

THE MET - THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
metmuseum.org

Thomas Cole @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Thomas Cole's Journey: Atlantic Crossings
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
January 30 - May 13, 2018

Thomas Cole (American [born England], Lancashire 1801–1848 Catskill, New York). 

View of the Round-Top in the Catskill Mountains (Sunny Morning on the Hudson), 1827. 

Oil on panel, 18 5/8 x 25 3/8 in. (47.3 x 64.5 cm). 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 

Gift of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865 (47.1200). 

Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Celebrated as one of America’s preeminent landscape painters, THOMAS COLE (1801–1848) was born in northern England at the start of the Industrial Revolution, emigrated to the United States in his youth, and traveled extensively throughout England and Italy as a young artist. He returned to America to create some of his most ambitious works and inspire a new generation of American artists, launching a national school of landscape art. Opening January 30 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings examines, for the first time, the artist’s transatlantic career and engagement with European art. With Thomas Cole’s masterwork The Oxbow (1836) as its centerpiece, the exhibition features more than three dozen examples of his large-scale landscape paintings, oil studies, and works on paper. Consummate paintings by Thomas Cole are juxtaposed with works by European masters including J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, among others, highlighting the dialogue between American and European artists and establishing Thomas Cole as a major figure in 19th-century landscape art within a global context. The exhibition marks the 200th anniversary of Thomas Cole’s arrival in America. 

Thomas Cole (American [born England], Lancashire 1801–1848 Catskill, New York). 

Clouds, ca. 1830s. 

Oil on paper laid down on canvas, 8 3/4 x 10 7/8 in. (22.2 x 27.6 cm). 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Morris K. Jesup Fund (2013.201). 

Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The exhibition follows the chronology of Thomas Cole’s life, beginning with his origins in recently industrialized northern England, his arrival in the United States in 1818, and his embrace of the American wilderness as a novel subject for landscape art of the New World. Early works by Thomas Cole will reveal his prodigious talent. After establishing himself as the premier landscape painter of the young United States, he traveled back to Europe. 

Thomas Cole (American [born England], Lancashire 1801–1848 Catskill, New York). 

View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836. 

Oil on canvas, 51 1/2 x 76 in. (130.8 x 193 cm). 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908 (08.228).

Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

The next section explores in depth Thomas Cole’s return to England in 1829–31 and his travels in Italy in 1831–32, revealing the development of his artistic processes. He embraced the on-site landscape oil study and adopted elements of the European landscape tradition reaching back to Claude Lorrain. He learned from contemporary painters in England, including  J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, and John Martin, and furthered his studies in landscape and figure painting in Italy. By exploring this formative period in Thomas Cole’s life, the exhibition offers a significant revision of existing accounts of his work, which have, until now, emphasized the American aspects of his formation and identity. The exhibition also provides new interpretations of Thomas Cole’s work within the expanded contexts of the history of the British Empire, the rise of the United States, the Industrial Revolution and the American wilderness, and Romantic theories of history. 

Thomas Cole (American [born England], Lancashire 1801–1848 Catskill, New York). 

The Course of the Empire: The Consummation of Empire, 1835–36. 

Oil on canvas, 51 1/4 x 76 in. (130.2 x 193 cm). 

New-York Historical Society, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts (1858.3). 

Digital image created by Oppenheimer Editions

Upon his return to America, Thomas Cole applied the lessons he had learned abroad to create the five-part series The Course of Empire (1834–36). These works reveal a definition of the new American Sublime that comes to its fullest expression in The Oxbow (1836). Finally, the exhibition concludes with an examination of Cole’s legacy in the works of the next generation of American landscape painters whom Thomas Cole personally mentored, notably Asher B. Durand and Frederic E. Church. 

The exhibition was organized by Elizabeth Kornhauser, the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at The Met, and Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, with Chris Riopelle, Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London. 

Exhibition design is by Brian Butterfield, Senior Exhibition Designer; graphics are by Ria Roberts, Graphic Designer; and lighting is by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, Lighting Design Managers, all of The Met Design Department.

It is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The National Gallery, London. 

The exhibition is made possible by The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, White & Case LLP, the Enterprise Holdings Endowment, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. It is supported by an Indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK
Exhibition Location:
The Met Fifth Avenue, Floor 1,
Gallery 746, The Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery
www.metmuseum.org

Adolf de Meyer Photographs @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Quicksilver Brilliance: 
Adolf de Meyer Photographs
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Through March 18, 2018

Adolf de Meyer, American (born France), 1868–1946

Josephine Baker, 1925–26

Gum bichromate over platinum print

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection, 

Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 (1987.1100.16)

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A member of the “international set” in fin-de-siècle Europe, Baron Adolf de Meyer (1868–1946) was also a pioneering art, portrait, and fashion photographer, known for creating images that transformed reality into a beautiful fantasy. The “quicksilver brilliance” that characterized de Meyer’s art led fellow photographer Cecil Beaton to dub him the “Debussy of the Camera.” 

Quicksilver Brilliance: Adolf de Meyer Photographs is the first museum exhibition devoted to the artist in more than 20 years and the first ever at The Met. Some 40 works, drawn entirely from The Met collection, will reveal the impressive breadth of his career.

Adolf de Meyer, American (born France), 1868–1946

Etienne de Beaumont, ca. 1923

Gelatin silver print

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Paul F. Walter, 2009 

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Adolf de Meyer, American (born France), 1868–1946

The Shadows on the Wall. “Crysanthemums,” ca. 1906

Platinum print

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933 (33.43.231)

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The exhibition includes dazzling portraits of well-known figures of his time: the American socialite Rita de Acosta Lydig; art patron and designer Count Étienne de Beaumont; aristocrat and society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell; and celebrated entertainer Josephine Baker, among others. A highlight of the presentation is an exceptional book—one of only seven known copies—documenting Nijinsky’s scandalous 1912 ballet L’Après-Midi d’un Faune. This rare album represents de Meyer’s great success in capturing the choreography of dance, a breakthrough in the history of photography. Also on view are the artist’s early snapshots made in Japan, experiments with color processes, and inventive fashion photographs.

Born in Paris and educated in Germany, de Adolf de Meyer was of obscure aristocratic German-Jewish and Scottish ancestry. He and his wife, Olga Caracciolo, goddaughter of Edward VII, were at the center of London’s café society.

Adolf de Meyer, American (born France), 1868–1946

Rita de Acosta Lydig, ca. 1917

Platinum print

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Gift of Mercedes de Acosta, 1952 (68.615)

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Adolf de Meyer, American (born France), 1868–1946

Plate from Le Prelude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune, 1914

Collotype

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, 

Museum Purchase, 2005 (2005.100.1299)

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

After starting in photography as an amateur, Adolf de Meyer gained recognition as a leading figure of Pictorialism and a member of the photographic society known as the Linked Ring Brotherhood in London. Alfred Stieglitz exhibited de Meyer’s work in his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and published his images as photogravures in his influential journal Camera Work. At the outbreak of World War I, Adolf de Meyer settled in the United States and applied his distinctive pictorial style to fashion imagery, helping to define the genre during the interwar period.

The exhibition was organized by Beth Saunders, Assistant Curator in The Met’s Department of Photographs.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK
Exhibition Location:
The Met Fifth Avenue, Floor 2,
The Howard Gilman Gallery, Gallery 852
www.metmuseum.org

Irving Penn: Centennial at The Met, NYC - Metropolitan Museum of Art

Irving Penn: Centennial
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
April 24 - July 30, 2017

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents a major retrospective of the photographs of Irving Penn to mark the centennial of the artist's birth. Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, Irving Penn (1917–2009) mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance, detail, and printmaking. Irving Penn: Centennial, is the most comprehensive exhibition of the great American photographer's work to date and includes both masterpieces and hitherto unknown prints from all his major series.

Long celebrated for more than six decades of influential work at Vogue magazine, Irving Penn was first and foremost a fashion photographer. His early photographs of couture are masterpieces that established a new standard for photographic renderings of style at mid-century, and he continued to record the cycles of fashions year after year in exquisite images characterized by striking shapes and formal brilliance. His rigorous modern compositions, minimal backgrounds, and diffused lighting were innovative and immensely influential. Yet Irving Penn's photographs of fashion are merely the most salient of his specialties. He was a peerless portraitist, whose perceptions extended beyond the human face and figure to take in more complete codes of demeanor, adornment, and artifact. He was also blessed with an acute graphic intelligence and a sculptor's sensitivity to volumes in light, talents that served his superb nude studies and life-long explorations of still life.

Irving Penn dealt with so many subjects throughout his long career that he is conventionally seen either with a single lens—as the portraitist, fashion photographer, or still life virtuoso—or as the master of all trades, the jeweler of journalists who could fine-tool anything. The exhibition at The Met will chart a different course, mapping the overall geography of the work and the relative importance of the subjects and campaigns the artist explored most creatively. Its organization largely follows the pattern of his development so that the structure of the work, its internal coherence, and the tenor of the times of the artist's experience all become evident.

The exhibition is most thoroughly explore the following series: street signs, including examples of early work in New York, the American South, and Mexico; fashion and style, with many classic photographs of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, the former dancer who became the first supermodel as well as the artist's wife; portraits of indigenous people in Cuzco, Peru; the Small Trades portraits of urban laborers; portraits of beloved cultural figures from Truman Capote, Joe Louis, Picasso, and Colette to Alvin Ailey, Ingmar Bergman, and Joan Didion; the infamous cigarette still lifes; portraits of the fabulously dressed citizens of Dahomey (Benin), New Guinea, and Morocco; the late "Morandi" still lifes; voluptuous nudes; and glorious color studies of flowers. These subjects chart the artist's path through the demands of the cultural journal, the changes in fashion itself and in editorial approach, the fortunes of the picture press in the age of television, the requirements of an artistic inner voice in a commercial world, the moral condition of the American conscience during the Vietnam War era, the growth of photography as a fine art in the 1970s and 1980s, and personal intimations of mortality. All these strands of meaning are embedded in the images—a web of deep and complex ideas belied by the seeming forthrightness of what is represented.

Irving Penn generally worked in a studio or in a traveling tent that served the same purpose, and favored a simple background of white or light gray tones. His preferred backdrop was made from an old theater curtain found in Paris that had been softly painted with diffused gray clouds. This backdrop followed Irving Penn from studio to studio; a companion of over 60 years, it will be displayed in one of the Museum's galleries among celebrated portraits it helped create. Other highlights of the exhibition include newly unearthed footage of the photographer at work in his tent in Morocco; issues of Vogue magazine illustrating the original use of the photographs and, in some cases, to demonstrate the difference between those brilliantly colored, journalistic presentations and Penn's later reconsidered reuse of the imagery; and several of Penn's drawings shown near similar still life photographs.

Irving Penn: Centennial is co-curated by Maria Morris Hambourg, independent curator and the founding curator of The Met's Department of Photographs, and Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at The Met.

History of Irving Penn at The Met

The exhibition follows from a magnificent promised gift from The Irving Penn Foundation to The Met in honor of the artist's centenary of 187 photographs by Penn, representing every period and all facets of the artist's long career with the camera. Selections from this gift form the core of the exhibition. They are joined by some 50 prints selected from the 145 Penn prints already in the Museum's collection. These include a suite of 65 nude studies from 1949–50 donated by the artist in 2002 and featured that same year in The Met's exhibition Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949–50 and its publication. More recently, in 2014, 64 platinum prints from the artist's celebrated Small Trades series, 1950-51, depicting laborers with the tools of their trades in Paris, London, and New York, were acquired with funds from an anonymous donor.

Individual photographs by Irving Penn were first acquired and shown by The Met in 1959 in the context of Photography in the Fine Arts exhibitions. The Museum has presented two monographic shows of the artist's works: in 1977, Curator of Modern Art, Henry Geldzahler, organized Irving Penn: Street Material. Photographs in Platinum Metals, 1975–76; and, in 2002, Maria Morris Hambourg, working closely with the artist, curated Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949–50.

Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a 372-page book with 365 illustrations, including full-page reproductions of all the photographs exhibited, by Maria Morris Hambourg and Jeff L. Rosenheim. A probing introduction to the artist, his concerns, and the evolution of his work is provided by Hambourg, followed by lively in-depth studies of the central themes and episodes of his career, an illustrated chronology, and notes on Penn's printing by Hambourg, Rosenheim, and guest authors Alexandra Dennett, Philippe Garner, Adam Kirsch, Harald E.L. Prins, and Vasilios Zatse.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028
www.metmuseum.org

The Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Photographs - History (1992 - 2009)

The Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Photographs - History

Established as an independent curatorial department in 1992, the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs houses a collection of more than 20,000 works acquired by the Museum over 80 years.

The Museum's collection spans the history of photography. Among the treasures from the early years of the medium are an extremely rare album of photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot, made just months after he presented his invention to the public; a large collection of portrait daguerreotypes by the Boston firm of Southworth and Hawes; landscape photographs of the American West by Timothy O'Sullivan and Carleton Watkins; and fine examples of French photography from the 1850s by Edouard Baldus, Eugène Cuvelier, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, Nadar, and others.

In addition, in 1997 the Museum acquired 78 nineteenth-century photographs from the renowned Rubel Collection. This group includes rare and beautifully preserved examples by the major figures of early British photography—William Henry Fox Talbot, the painter-photographer team David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Roger Fenton, and Julia Margaret Cameron—and constitutes one of the most extraordinary representations of Britain's rich photographic history in the United States.

Alfred Stieglitz, a passionate advocate for the acceptance of photography into the pantheon of fine arts, made several important gifts to the Metropolitan (in 1928, 1933, and in his bequest of 1946) that ultimately numbered more than 600 works. In addition to superb examples of his own photography, his gift comprises the best collection anywhere of works by the Photo Secession, the circle of Pictorialist photographers shown at his influential gallery. The Stieglitz Collection is especially rich in large master prints by Edward Steichen; of special note are three large, unique prints of the Flatiron building, each a slightly different hue, evoking a different moment of twilight in the city. Also featured in the Stieglitz Collection are F. Holland Day, Adolph de Meyer, Gertrude Käsebier, Paul Strand, and Clarence White.

Building on the Stieglitz Collection, in 1997, through a major gift of Jennifer and Joseph Duke and The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, the Museum acquired 73 portraits of artist Georgia O'Keeffe taken by Alfred Stieglitz. Documenting one of the most famous and intimate artistic collaborations of modern times, the photographs are part of Stieglitz's extraordinary composite portrait of O'Keeffe, a series of more than 300 images produced between 1917 and 1937 that he considered to be among his greatest achievements.

The Ford Motor Company Collection, 500 works collected by John C. Waddell and donated to the Museum in 1987 as a gift of the Ford Motor Company and Mr. Waddell, represents avant-garde European and American photography between the two World Wars. Berenice Abbott, Brassaï, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, and some 70 other photographers chart the urban, technological, and psychological revolutions of the modern age.

In addition to these extensive holdings, the Metropolitan's representation of the first century of photography (1839-1939) was immeasurably enriched by the 2005 acquisition of the Gilman Paper Company Collection, widely regarded as the world's finest collection of photographs in private hands. Propelling the Metropolitan to the topmost ranks of museums collecting the art of photography, the Gilman Collection consists of more than 8,500 photographs, including many unique and beautiful icons of photography by the medium's greatest masters as well as works by little known—even unknown—photographers and extensive bodies of work by pioneers of the camera.

The personal archive of Walker Evans, acquired in 1994, traces the development of this American master and poet laureate of the documentary style, and provides scholars and the general public with a unique opportunity to study the complete creative output of this seminal photographer. The archive contains nearly 40,000 negatives and transparencies as well as Evans's boyhood snapshots, short stories, correspondence, library, postcard collection, and seldom-seen color Polaroids made in the year before his death.

In 2007 the Museum announced the gift and promised gift of the complete archive of Diane Arbus, including hundreds of the artist's early photographs; negatives and contact prints of 7,500 rolls of film; and her photography collection, library, and personal papers. The Diane Arbus Archive will be fully catalogued and eventually made available for research. Simultaneous with this acquisition, the Museum purchased 20 of Arbus's most iconic photographs.

The post-war years are also represented by important American photographers such as Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, William Klein, and Garry Winogrand. The Museum's collection is especially strong in representing the varied paths of photography since 1960: its role in conceptual art, earth art, and performance art, as seen in works by Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Douglas Huebler; the "Dusseldorf School," featuring works by Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gursky; the "Pictures Generation," including Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince; and other important contemporary artists who use photography, such as Jean-Marc Bustamante, Adam Fuss, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rodney Graham, Sigmar Polke, and Charles Ray. The Museum has also recently added examples by younger artists such as Sharon Lockhart, Roe Ethridge, Rachel Harrison, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Doug Aitken, among others.

In 2001, the department acquired the Metropolitan's first work of video art—Ann Hamilton's a,b,c (1994/99)—and has since gone on to represent significant developments in film, video, and new media by artists including Lutz Bacher, David Hammons, Maria Marshall, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, and Karin Sander.

In September 2007 the Museum inaugurated the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, the Metropolitan's first gallery designed specifically for and devoted exclusively to the display of photographs created since 1960. Menschel Hall, with installations that change every six months, allows the department to show its contemporary holdings within the broader context of photographic traditions on view in the adjacent Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery. Also nearby is The Howard Gilman Gallery, the Museum's first permanent gallery dedicated exclusively to the display of photographs, which opened in October 1997. Addressing a changing roster of themes and topics, installations in the Gilman Gallery rotate three times a year and are drawn from the Metropolitan's collection and, on occasion, from those of other institutions.

The Department of Photographs periodically presents special exhibitions in the Galleries for Drawings, Prints, and Photographs or special exhibition galleries elsewhere in the Museum. Among the major exhibitions organized by the Metropolitan during the past 15 years and accompanied by scholarly catalogues have been:

The New Vision: Photography Between the World Wars (1989)
The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century, Selections from the Gilman Paper Company Collection (1993)
The Photographs of Édouard Baldus (1994)
Nadar (1995)
Sugimoto (1995-1996)
Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz (1997)
Paul Strand Circa 1916 (1998)
Edgar Degas, Photographer (1998-1999)
Walker Evans (2000)
Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes, 1949-50 (2002)
Richard Avedon: Portraits (2002)
Thomas Struth (2003)
The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839-1855 (2003)
Diane Arbus Revelations (2005)
All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852-1860 (2005)
The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (2005)
Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860 (2007)
The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984 (2009)
Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans (2009)

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART - NEW YORK

www.metmuseum.org

Updated 07-02-2025

Photographs from the 1910s at the Metropolitan Museum, NYC

"Our Future Is In The Air": Photographs from the 1910s The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
November 9, 2010 - April 10, 2011

The 1910s—a period remembered for "The Great War," technological innovation, social ferment, the influenza epidemic, and the birth of Hollywood—was a dynamic and tumultuous decade that ushered in the modern era. The new age of the automobile, the airplane, and the industrial factory—as it was captured by the quintessentially modern art of photography—will be the subject of the exhibition "Our Future Is In The Air": Photographs from the 1910s, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

An eclectic centennial exhibition devoted to photography of the 1910s, "Our Future Is In The Air" provides a fascinating look at the birth of modern life through 44 photographs by some 25 artists, including Eugène Atget, E. J. Bellocq, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Eugène Druet, Lewis Hine, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Adolph de Meyer, Christian Schad, Morton Schamberg, Charles Sheeler, and Stanislaw Witkiewicz, among others. Drawn exclusively from the Museum's collection, the exhibition also features anonymous snapshots, séance photographs, and a family album made by Russian nobility on the eve of revolution.

"Our Future Is In The Air" complements the Museum's concurrent presentation of groundbreaking photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand, in the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand.

"Our Future Is In The Air" was a popular French slogan in the early 1910s and the title of a brochure promoting military aviation ("Notre Avenir est dans l'Air"). Pablo Picasso, who was very interested in the recent invention of the airplane, included the sentence in one of his 1912 Cubist compositions. Now, the double meaning of the phrase suggests the feelings of excitement and anxiety that characterized the period.

Jacques-Henri Lartigue, a painter who considered photography a hobby, was another artist fascinated by the soaring flight of the airplane, as well as the look and speed of the automobile. The exhibition features a rare early print of one of  show, Lartigue's most memorable photographs, Le Grand Prix A.C.F. (1913). Swinging his camera in a movement that follows a racing car, Lartigue barely managed to catch the speeding machine in his frame.

The camera afforded access to the previously invisible, whether capturing a broken leg bone, revealed in an X-ray from 1916; the swift movements of a smoker lighting a cigarette, in a 1911 motion study by the Futurist artist Anton Giulio Bragaglia; or the hidden life of New Orleans, seen in an extremely rare vintage print of a Storyville prostitute, photographed by E. J. Bellocq around 1912.

At the same time, photography became an agent of democratic communication, and documentary photographers used its growing influence to expose degrading conditions of workers, the injustice of child labor, and the devastation of war. Beginning in 1908, Lewis Hine made 5,000 photographs of children working in mills, sweatshops, factories, and street trades; six of his photographs will be featured in this exhibition, including Newsies at Skeeter Branch, St. Louis, Missouri, 11:00 A.M., May 9, 1910. Hine's reports and slide lectures were meant to trigger a profound, empathetic response in the viewer.

During World War I, photography was utilized to document the mass casualties of mechanized warfare; in the exhibition, an affecting image from 1916, by an unknown artist, shows wounded French soldiers performing drills in the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris as part of their rehabilitation.

Also in the exhibition is an evocative 1918 photograph, again by an unknown artist, of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks entertaining a huge crowd at a war bonds rally on Wall Street.

In addition, the exhibition includes photographs by several friends and compatriots of Alfred Stieglitz, including Alvin Langdon Coburn, Adolph de Meyer, Charles Sheeler, and Karl Struss, who reacted against the prevalence of snapshot photography by emphasizing the medium's possibilities for artistic expression.

"Our Future Is In The Air": Photographs from the 1910s is organized by Douglas Eklund, Associate Curator in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art 
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

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Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
November 10, 2010 - April 10, 2011

Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand, three masters of photography, 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 more than 100 photographs, drawn entirely from the Museum's collection. On view will be several 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.

ALFRED STIEGLITZ (1864–1946) was a photographer of supreme accomplishment as well as a passionate advocate for photography and modern art through his gallery "291" and his sumptuous journal Camera Work. Stieglitz also laid the foundation for the Museum's collection of photographs. In 1928, he donated 22 of his own works to the Metropolitan; these were the first photographs to enter the Museum's collection as works of art. In later decades he gave the Museum more than 600 photographs by his contemporaries, including Edward Steichen and Paul Strand.

Among Stieglitz's works to be featured in this exhibition are portraits, views of New York City from the beginning and end of his career, and the 1920s cloud studies he titled Equivalents, through which he meant to demonstrate how "to hold a moment, how to record something so completely, that all who see [the picture of it] will relive an equivalent of what has been expressed."

The exhibition will also include numerous photographs from Stieglitz's extraordinary composite portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986), part of a group of works selected for the Museum's collection by O'Keeffe herself. Stieglitz made more than 300 images of O'Keeffe between 1917 and 1937—some of them candid shots, some focusing on her face, hands, or feet alone, and many of them showing her nude. Through these photographs Stieglitz revealed O'Keeffe's strengths and vulnerabilities, and almost single-handedly defined her public persona for generations to come.

Stieglitz's protégé and gallery collaborator, EDWARD STEICHEN (1879–1973), was the most talented exemplar of the Photo-Secession, the group founded by Stieglitz in 1902, seceding, in his words, "from the accepted idea of what constitutes a photograph," but also from the camera clubs and other institutions dominated by a more retrograde establishment. In works such as The Pond—Moonrise (1904), made using a painstaking technique of multiple printing, Steichen rivaled the scale, color, and individuality of painting.

Steichen's three large variant prints of The Flatiron (1904) are prime examples of the conscious effort of Photo-Secession photographers to assert the artistic potential of their medium. Steichen achieved coloristic effects reminiscent of Whistler's Nocturne paintings by brushing layers of pigment suspended in light-sensitive gum solution onto a platinum photograph. Although he used only one negative to create all three photographs, the variable coloring enabled him to create three significantly different images that convey the chromatic progression of twilight. The Metropolitan's three prints, all donated by Stieglitz in 1933, are the only known exhibition prints of Steichen's iconic image.

In 1908 Steichen photographed the plaster of Rodin's sculpture of Honoré de Balzac in the open air, by the light of the moon, making several exposures as long as an hour each. In Balzac, The Silhouette—4 A.M., the moonlight has transformed the plaster into a monumental phantom rising above the brooding nocturnal landscape. Steichen recalled that when he presented his finished prints to Rodin, the elated sculptor exclaimed, "You will make the world understand my Balzac through your pictures."

Stieglitz's and Steichen's younger contemporary, PAUL STRAND (1890-1976), pioneered a shift from the soft-focus aesthetic and painterly prints of the Photo-Secession to the straight approach and graphic power of an emerging modernism. Strand was introduced to Stieglitz by his teacher, Lewis Hine, the social reformer and photographer, and quickly became part of the coterie of artists that gathered at "291," where he was exposed to the latest trends in European art through groundbreaking exhibitions of works by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi.

Strand incorporated the new language of geometric abstraction into his interest in photographing street life and machine culture. His photographs from 1915-1917 treated three principal themes: movement in the city, abstractions, and street portraits. The final double issue of Stieglitz's Camera Work (1917) was devoted to this young photographer's work, marking a pivotal moment in the course of photography.

In From the El (1915), Strand juxtaposed the ironwork and shadows of the elevated train with the tiny form of a lone pedestrian. In 1916, he experimented with radical camera angles and photographing at close range. Strand's Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut is among the first photographic abstractions to be made intentionally. When Stieglitz published a variant of this image in Camera Work, he praised Strand's results as "the direct expression of today."

In the same year, Strand made a series of candid street portraits with a hand-held camera fitted with a special lens that allowed him to point the camera in one direction while taking the photograph at a 90-degree angle. Blind, his seminal image of a street beggar, was published in Camera Work and immediately became an icon of the new American photography, which integrated the objectivity of social documentation with the boldly simplified forms of Modernism. As is true for most of the large platinum prints by Strand in the exhibition, the Metropolitan's Blind, a gift of Stieglitz, is the only exhibition print of this image from the period.

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand is organized by Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand: Masterworks from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The 160-page volume, by Malcolm Daniel, will feature 125 illustrations, including reproductions of many of the crown jewels from the Museum's collection of photographs. It is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press ($35).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org

Related Posts in this blog

The Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs [Wanafoto, October 2010]

"Our Future Is In The Air": Photographs from the 1910s, also on view at the Met from November 9, 2010 through April 10, 2011 [Wanafoto, October 2010]

Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction at the Whitney Museum of American Art – This exhibition featured famous photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz.[Wanafoto, December 2009]

This post has been updated in October 2010.

A Vienna Imperial Silver Service at the Met

Art Exhibition > United States > New York > NYC

 

Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service Rediscovered

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Through November 7, 2010

 

Following the acquisition in 2002 of two Viennese silver wine coolers from the Sachsen-Teschen Service, most of the set's surviving parts were discovered in a French private collection. This superb ensemble was last displayed at the beginning of the 20th century. Wine coolers, tureens, cloches, candelabra, candlesticks, dozens of plates, porcelain-mounted cutlery, and other kinds of tableware, totaling over 350 items, represent the splendor of royal dining during the ancien régime. It was made for Duke Albert Casimir of Sachsen-Teschen (1738-1822) and his consort, Archduchess Maria Christina of Austria (1742-1798), daughter of Empress Maria Theresa, by the Imperial court goldsmith Ignaz Josef Würth. The Sachsen-Teschen Silver Service, an embodiment of Viennese neo-classicism, is showing in the context of contemporary silver from other countries.

The exhibition is made possible by the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.

 

Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service Rediscovered
April 13 - November 7, 2010

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

Oberlin’s Masterworks at the Metropolitan Museum

Art Exhibition > United States > New York > NYC

 

Side by Side: Oberlin's Masterworks at the Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Through August 29, 2010

 

Founded in 1917, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College is one of the finest college or university collections in the United States, serving as an invaluable educational resource for aspiring art scholars and artists. While the museum is closed in 2010 for renovations, 20 of their masterpieces—19 paintings and one sculpture—are on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for five months. These includes the great Ter Brugghen painting Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene (one of the most important Northern Baroque paintings in the U.S.), Cézanne's Viaduct at l'Estaque, Kirchner's Self-Portrait as a Soldier, and a striking Kirchner sculpture. Each of these works are integrated into the Metropolitan Museum's great collection, creating new, provocative juxtapositions.

 

Side by Side: Oberlin's Masterworks at the Met
March 16 - August 29, 2010

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

Medieval Tomb Sculptures in the Met

Art Exhibition > United States > New York > NYC

 

The Mourners

Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Through May 23, 2010

 

The renovation of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon –France– provides an opportunity for the unprecedented loan of the alabaster mourner figures from the tomb of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, and his wife, Margaret of Bavaria. Each of the 38 statuettes is approximately 40 centimeters (16 inches) high. They were carved by Jean de La Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier between 1443 and 1456 for the ducal tomb originally in the church of Champmol. They follow the precedent of the mourner figures carved by Claus Sluter and colleagues for the tomb of Duke Philip the Bold (1342-1404). The tombs are celebrated as among the most sumptuous and innovative of the late Middle Ages. The primary innovation was the space given to the figures of the grieving mourners on the base of the tomb, who seem to pass through the real arcades of a cloister.

The installation at the Metropolitan is supplemented by related works from the Museum's collection, including the monumental Enthroned Virgin from the convent at Poligny (established by John the Fearless and Margaret of Bavaria) that was carved by Claus de Werve.

The exhibition was organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and the Musée des Beaux Arts de Dijon, under the auspices of FRAME (French Regional and American Museum Exchange).

The exhibition is supported by a leadership gift from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Florence Gould Foundation, the Eugene McDermott Foundation, Connie Goodyear Baron, and Boucheron. Major corporate support is provided by Bank of the West – Member BNP Paribas Group. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

 

The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy
March 2 - May 23, 2010

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

Tutankhamun’s Funeral - Metropolitan Museum Exhibition

Art Exhibition > United States > New York > NYC

 

Tutankhamun's Funeral

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Through September 6, 2010

 

Buried near his tomb in around 1327 B.C., remains from the mummification and funeral of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun were unearthed in 1907 by the American businessman and excavator Theodore M. Davis, who in 1909 donated the objects to the Metropolitan Museum. This exhibition is showing the most important pieces from the Davis find. On display are pottery vessels from the funeral meal, linen sheets and bandages, bags of natron and sawdust from the embalming process, and some fine linen head covers worn by the embalmers. Highlights are the miraculously well-preserved collars of real flowers that must have been intended to adorn the mummy, but were not used. A sculpted head of the youthful Tutankhamun, facsimile paintings representing contemporary funerary rituals, and photographs by Harry Burton rounds out this intimate glimpse into what went on at the king's funeral.

The exhibition is made possible by the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund. The catalogue is made possible by The Friends of Isis, Friends of the Department of Egyptian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Tutankhamun's Funeral
March 16 - September 6, 2010

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

The Art of Illumination at the Met

Art Exhibition > United States > New York > NYC

 

The Art of Illumination

The Limbourg Brothers and

the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Through June 13, 2010

 

The Belles Heures (1405-1408/9) of Jean de Berry, a treasure of The Cloisters collection, is one of the most celebrated and lavishly illustrated manuscripts to have survived from the late Middle Ages. Because it is currently unbound, all of the illuminated pages can be exhibited as individual leaves, a unique opportunity never to be repeated. The exhibition at the Met elucidates the manuscript, its artists – the young Franco-Netherlandish Limbourg Brothers – and its patron, Jean de France, duc de Berry. A select group of precious objects from the same early-15th-century courtly milieu places the manuscript in the context of the patronage of Jean de Berry and his royal family, the Valois.

The exhibition is made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Michel David-Weill Fund. The related publication is made possible by the Michel David-Weill Fund.

 

The Art of Illumination:
The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry

March 2–June 13, 2010

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

Italian Drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Art Exhibition > United States > New York > NYC

 

An Italian Journey

Drawings from the Tobey Collection, Correggio to Tiepolo

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

May 12 - August 15, 2010

 

An Italian Journey: Drawings from the Tobey Collection, Correggio to Tiepolo presents 72 extraordinary works of the 16th through 18th centuries, from one of the preeminent collections of Italian Old Master drawings in private hands. It features masterpieces by gifted and historically important draftsmen—principally Italian masters but also artists whose careers brought them south of the Alps—among them Correggio, Parmigianino, Bernini, Poussin, Guercino, Canaletto, and Tiepolo. The drawings represent the principal centers of Italian art: Florence, Rome, Naples, Bologna, Parma, Venice, Genoa, and Milan. Their strikingly broad range of subject matter includes figure studies, historical and mythological narratives, landscapes, vedute, botanical drawings, motifs copied from or inspired by classical antiquity, and designs for painted compositions.

The 16th-century Italian painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari has been credited with formulating the concept of Renaissance art in his celebrated Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550). He also invented the practice of systematically collecting Italian drawings in compiling his Libro dei disegni, a volume comprising examples by many of the artists whose biographies he authored. From Vasari's time until the present, such works—intimate glimpses of an artist's imagination and creative powers at work—have held a seductive allure and an intellectual appeal for collectors and connoisseurs alike. An Italian Journey offers a unique glimpse of the myriad riches of this exceptional collection, presented to the public for the first time.

Among the many treasures of the collection on view are a recently discovered, magnificent red chalk drawing of the head of Julius Caesar by Andrea del Sarto, the leading Florentine painter of the first decades of the 16th century; a luminous study by Correggio for the figure of Eve in his great masterpiece, the painted dome of the cathedral of Parma; a sprightly pen drawing by his younger contemporary Parmigianino—hailed in his day as the spirit of the divine Raphael reborn—for one of his most important painted portraits; brilliantly rendered colored studies by the Florentine artist Jacopo Ligozzi, one depicting, with poetry and scientific precision, a plant, and another an exotic Oriental theme; a powerful study of a recumbent nude man by the towering genius of Baroque Rome, Gianlorenzo Bernini, and of a fanciful ship by his contemporary, the sculptor Alessandro Algardi, made for the pope; a rich concentration of drawings by some of the leading Bolognese painters of the 17th century, notably Guercino (who is represented by three masterful studies), Guido Reni, and Domenichino; and fine examples by the great Venetian draftsmen of the 18th century, among them Canaletto, Guardi, Piranesi, and the greatest artistic luminary of the age, Giambattista Tiepolo.

An Italian Journey: Drawings from the Tobey Collection, Correggio to Tiepolo is organized by Linda Wolk-Simon, Curator, George R. Goldner, Drue Heinz Chairman, and Carmen C. Bambach, Curator, all of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Drawings and Prints.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue by Linda Wolk-Simon and Carmen C. Bambach, with contributions by Stijn Alsteens, George R. Goldner, Perrin Stein, and Mary Vaccaro. It is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press and is for sale in the Museum's bookshops (hardcover, $50).

Among the educational programs accompanying the exhibition are lectures; gallery talks; film screenings; a workshop for teachers; and family programs in English and Spanish.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art 
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028