Displaying items by tag: Metropolitan Museum of Art

The textiles historian Terry Satsuki Milhaupt had nearly finished her comprehensive book on kimonos when she committed suicide in 2012. Her widower, Curtis J. Milhaupt, heroically completed her work, “Kimono: A Modern History” (Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press), and a show of the same title, based on her scholarship, opens on Sept. 27 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and runs through Jan. 24.

Mr. Milhaupt, a law professor at Columbia, said in an interview that when the book galleys finally arrived, “I burst into tears, mostly from relief.”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is going east — far east, for The Costume Institute’s spring 2015 exhibition, to be titled “Chinese Whispers: Tales of the East in Art, Film, and Fashion.”

Incorporating the realms of fine and filmic art from the Department of Asian Art, the summer show will explore how China has fueled the creative imagination of designers all over the world for centuries, resulting in layers of cultural translations, re-translations, and, of course, mistranslations.

On September 9, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will debut its renovated David H. Koch Plaza. The four-block-long plaza, which stretches across the museum’s landmark Fifth Avenue façade, took two years to renovate. The $65 million-project was helmed by OLIN, a Los Angeles- and Philadelphia-based landscape architecture, urban design, and planning firm. David H. Koch, a Museum Trustee, funded the entire project.

The revamped plaza will include new paving, energy-efficient lighting, tree-shaded allées, and seating areas for visitors.

It's 11:59 A.M. on a recent Wednesday and Clare Vincent, a 78-year-old associate curator at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, is perched before an ornate 17th-century clock on the Met's first floor, keeping a close watch on a technician winding the timekeeper.

Visitors wandering among the Met's paintings, mummies and other treasures probably don't notice that every European clock on exhibit not only still ticks but also tells the right time.

That's because for 40 years, Ms. Vincent, who oversees the museum's European timepieces, has been making sure they are wound like clockwork. Until recently, she wound up to 15 clocks a week on her own, climbing stepladders to reach into the tallest ones. 

El Greco’s Vincenzo Anastagi, acquired a century ago by Henry Clay Frick, is one of The Frick Collection’s most celebrated paintings and one of only two full-length portraits by the master. It was executed during the artist’s six-year stay in Rome, before he moved to Spain, where he spent the rest of his career. Much of the force of this work emanates from the resplendent half-armor worn by Anastagi. Rich highlights applied with broad brushstrokes accentuate the steel, its metallic sheen contrasting with the velvety texture of Anastagi’s green breeches and the dark crimson curtain. To mark the 400th anniversary of El Greco’s death, the Frick will pair Vincenzo Anastagi with the rarely seen Jacopo Boncompagni by the artist’s Roman contemporary Scipione Pulzone. With its gleaming, highly detailed polish, Pulzone’s portrait of Boncompagni, on loan from a private collection, epitomizes the elegant style that dominated high-society portraiture in Rome during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. El Greco’s painterly portrayal of Anastagi stands in stark contrast, underscoring the artist’s innovative departures from convention. The exhibition, held in the Frick’s East Gallery, is organized by Jeongho Park, Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow. It is generously funded by gifts from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Sidney R. Knafel and Londa Weisman in memory of Vera and Walter A. Eberstadt. The Frick will continue its celebration of El Greco this autumn and winter with a collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On October 20, 2014, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the most important exhibition of the essential Cubists -- Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso -- in over 30 years. “Cubism” will feature iconic works from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection, which is unmatched in its holdings of Cubist art. Lauder, a philanthropist and cosmetics mogul, promised his collection to the Met in April 2013. “Cubism” will mark the first time that the collection will be shown in public.

The exhibition will explore the invention and development of Cubism, a movement that transformed the landscape of modern art. Cubism departed from the traditional interpretations of art, challenged conventional perceptions of space, time, and perspective, and paved the way for abstraction -- a concept that dominated the art world for much of the 20th century.

Before 10 a.m. on a recent steamy morning, lines started forming up the front steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with visitors clutching New York City street maps waiting patiently for the doors to open.

While the museum has always been a magnet for tourists during the summer months, New Yorkers who frequent the Met should be aware that there are many new things to see in its permanent galleries. Keith Christiansen, chairman of the museum’s European paintings department, has shaken things up a bit, hanging works lent for the summer and uniting treasures that have recently returned home after traveling to exhibitions around the world.

Esther Bell, a former Fulbright scholar and current curator at the Cincinnati Art Museum, was named on Wednesday as the new curator in charge of European paintings at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Bell, who specializes in 17th- and 18th-century European art, has more than a decade of experience at museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.

Colin Bailey, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco – which includes the de Young in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor, said, “We are delighted to appoint someone of Bell’s caliber who brings a depth of knowledge and expertise that will benefit our future exhibitions and the museums’ permanent collections.”

Paris’s Musée du Louvre has announced an anticipated thirty percent increase in its annual attendance over the next 11 years. By 2025, reports the Art Newspaper, the world’s most visited museum (see artnet News report) expects to welcome 12 million annual visitors, up from a record 9.3 million in 2013.

As reported by artnet News last week, the Louvre is among a number of French institutions considering to open its doors a full seven days a week, following the lead of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, and major museums in London and Madrid.

This exhibition celebrates the gift of Thomas Hart Benton's epic mural America Today from AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in December 2012. Benton (1889–1975) painted this mural for New York's New School for Social Research to adorn the school's boardroom in its International Style modernist building on West 12th Street. Showing a sweeping panorama of American life throughout the 1920s, America Today ranks among Benton's most renowned works and is one of the most remarkable accomplishments in American art of the period.

The ten-panel mural will be featured in a space that recreates the boardroom in which it originally hung.