Displaying items by tag: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Human beings may excel at making things, but destroying them is equally a specialty. The second skill has given the history of art many tantalizing mysteries, remnants of cultures whose achievement is unmistakable yet fragmentary, limited by extensive losses resulting from accident, neglect or war.

One such mystery is examined in “Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy,” a landmark exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This beautiful, sometimes heart-rending show is the most comprehensive yet to focus on the cosmopolitan Muslim kingdoms that ruled the verdant Deccan Plateau of south-central India for nearly two centuries, fostering a turbulent golden age.

Today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced its plans for the opening of The Met Breuer, the building formerly housing the Whitney Museum. With the Whitney's move into their brand new building at the edge of the High Line and opening this May, the Met has finally publicized its plans for its takeover of the old museum site. With an opening planned for March 10, 2016, the Met's contemporary and modern art department will feature multiple exhibitions and programs at the Breuer Building.

A boxy, drab concrete building, the Madison Avenue structure was designed by Hungarian Marcel Breuer and built in 1966 specifically to house the collection that Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney left behind.

New research by an Italian scholar has shown that a painting in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum known as the "Meidum Geese" may be a fake. Writing for our sister newspaper, "Il Giornale dell’Arte," the Egyptologist Francesco Tiradritti called the five-foot-long fragment of wall decoration “what the Mona Lisa is to Western art.” A facsimile is on view in the Egyptian galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

According to the historical records of Egypt’s Antiquities Service, the work was discovered in 1871 at the tomb of prince Nefermaat and his wife Itet (also Atet) at Meidum, and dates to around 2575-2551 BC in the early fourth dynasty.

When a dozen weather-worn wood sculptures from southeastern Nigeria debuted in a Paris gallery in 1974, they were radically different from any African art that had been exhibited in the West. After that brief assembly, the carved Mbembe figures mostly retreated from public view to private collections, excepting one on proud view in the Louvre. "Warriors and Mothers: Epic Mbembe Art" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art now reunites those works from the 17th to 19th centuries for the first time since the 1974 Paris exhibition.

The sculptures — originally part of massive drums used to communicate between Mbembe communities — remain as enigmatic as they were in 1972 when gallery owner and art dealer Hélène Kamer acquired them from a Malian dealer named O. Traoré.

A portrait of Rubens’ young daughter Clara Serena, recently deaccessioned by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is going on display at the Rubenshuis in Antwerp. In 2013, it was auctioned as by a “follower of Rubens”, with an estimate of $20,000-$30,000. Now upgraded as authentic, it will hang in the artist’s own house, in the exhibition “Rubens in Private: the Master Portrays his Family” (March 28-June 28).

The earliest certain provenance of the portrait goes back to a New York collector in the 1930s and it was considered authentic until the American specialist Julius Held downgraded it in 1959.

“The Plains Indians: Artists of the Earth and Sky,” one of the greatest exhibitions of American Indian art you may ever see, opened Monday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show was originated by the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (where I saw it) in Kansas City, Mo., and organized by the inestimable Gaylord Torrence, the Nelson-Atkins’s curator in the field and also the orchestrator of its acclaimed permanent collection galleries.

Asian art is gloriously basking in the sun this year. While 42 extraordinary galleries from around the globe open their doors with one-of-a-kind exhibitions during Asia Week New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art is celebrating the centennial of its world-renowned Department of Asian Art. Even Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour jumped on the bandwagon as she recently visited Beijing to promote the Met Costume Institute’s upcoming exhibition "China: Through the Looking Glass."

Works of art from all over the Asian continent and spanning over four millennia will be shown throughout Manhattan by international Asian art specialists during Asia Week New York, starting March 13 to March 21, 2015.  Art lovers can take in museum-caliber treasures including the rarest and finest Asian examples of painting, sculpture, bronzes, ceramics, jewelry, jade, textiles, prints, and photographs from all over Asia.

“Navigating the West” takes visitors on a river journey while telling the tale of the men who worked on Midwest rivers in the 1800s.

"Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River,” an exhibition that for the first time in decades brings together the river paintings and drawings of George Caleb Bingham, opened Sunday, Feb. 22, at the Saint Louis Art Museum. The exhibit runs through Sunday, May 17. It then will go for the summer in June to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted a press presentation on Monday, February 16, 2015, in the Museum’s Chinese Galleries to reveal early details about The Costume Institute’s upcoming exhibition "China: Through the Looking Glass," opening on May 7.

Silas Chou, Wendi Murdoch, Anna Wintour, Wong Kar Wai, and Joe Zee joined Museum President Emily K. Rafferty, Costume Institute Curator Andrew Bolton, and Douglas Dillon Chairman of the Department of Asian Art Maxwell K. Hearn in the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery for a glimpse at some of the Chinese art and film, as well as high fashion, to be featured in the exhibition, on view May 7–August 16, 2015, at the Met in New York City.

The hurdles of running a contemporary-art museum in the West African country of Benin might seem light years away from the concerns of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the world’s largest and wealthiest.

But some issues span continents, affecting institutions big and small—how to connect with audiences, for example, in an increasingly digital world.

The Met in April is hosting a meeting of museum leaders from 15 countries to talk shop, compare notes on management and forge new ties with peers from other parts of the world.