Displaying items by tag: Metropolitan Museum of Art

In 1881, a year after opening its building on Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, the Metropolitan Museum of Art received its first official bequest of Japanese art: a collection formed by Stephen Whitney Phoenix, scion of a New York merchant and political family. The Met has since amassed a world-class Japanese collection. That story will be told in “Discovering Japanese Art: American Collectors and the Met,” which opened at the museum on Saturday.

One of the Taft Museum of Art's most distinctive paintings is on loan to an exhibition featuring John Singer Sargent that will travel to London, England, and New York. In exchange, Cincinnati art lovers will be able to view an intimate painting by Mary Cassatt, on loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Taft Museum's painting, "Robert Louis Stevenson" by John Singer Sargent, is being loaned to the exhibition "Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends." The show will be on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London from Feb. 12 to May 25. After that, it will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it can be viewed from June 30 to Oct. 4.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is preparing to launch “the most high-profile cultural building project in New York over the next ten years,” Thomas Campbell, the museum’s director, recently told "Vanity Fair." Now, the institution is putting its money where its mouth is. The Met is planning a $250 million bond offering on January 26 to finance capital infrastructure improvements over the next decade, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

The Met’s $250 million increase in debt coincides with an ambitious plan to overhaul its Modern and contemporary galleries. Although the museum has not tapped an architect or revealed a budget for the project, Campbell hopes to finish the gut renovation in time for the Met’s 150th anniversary in 2020.

All exhibitions during the 50th anniversary year in 2015 are inspired by the MFA’s stellar collection. Masterpieces created by French artists and by others working in France are a hallmark, and four are included in "Monet to Matisse—On the French Coast."

Exceptional paintings are also coming from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and closer to home, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Private collectors in both the U.S. and Europe are sharing their treasures.

"Monet to Matisse," set for Saturday, February 7-Sunday, May 31, brings together paintings created on both the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of France and opens on the same day the MFA opened to the public in 1965. To commemorate this joyous occasion, the MFA is presenting a Founders Day Open House—free for everyone—on the first day of the exhibition from 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

She looks off to the right, staring out into the middle distance, her mouth shut tight, her dainty nose directed ever so slightly downward. Her right hand rests upon a bare wooden table, while her left hand, decorated with a wedding ring, clutches a folded fan. Her hair is twisted up, away from her shoulders – which are bare save for two straps, somewhat unconvincingly holding up her cinched, classical black gown. On her head is a little diamond tiara, but other than that and the ring she wears no jewelry. Between her long neck and the plunging, heart-shaped neckline of her dress lie acres of flesh, as cold and pale as ice milk.

John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the so-called ‘Madame X’, painted in 1884 and now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has attracted and repelled generations of gallery-goers.

For nearly half a century, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Marcel Breuer building has dominated Madison Avenue and 75th Street.

But with the Metropolitan Museum of Art preparing to take over the space, a flurry of construction — including what may be an Apple store — could be construed as the Met effect.

In October, the Whitney closed its doors in anticipation of its move to a space designed by Renzo Piano that is scheduled to open in the meatpacking district in May.

Italy is turning to the private sector to try to increase the profitability of some of its cultural treasures, including the Uffizi gallery in Florence and Borghese gallery in Rome.

Under a new initiative sponsored by the government of the prime minister, Matteo Renzi, Italy’s cultural centers are likely to begin to look more like other great museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, by opening more restaurants, gift shops, ticket booths, guides, and other tourist-friendly additions that can start generating bigger profits.

Maxwell K. Hearn remembers when he first arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1971. “There were only two spaces for Asian art: the Great Hall Balcony, which housed Chinese ceramics, and an adjacent gallery of Chinese Buddhist art,” he recalled. “Douglas Dillon, then chairman, and Thomas Hoving, the director, surveyed the museum and realized that Asian art was the weakest department. They also recognized that it was too important an area to neglect.”

Since then the number of galleries devoted to Asian art has grown to over 50, and the Met now has one of the world’s greatest collections.

“175 Masterworks To Celebrate 175 Years of Photography: Property from Joy of Giving Something Foundation" auction held at Sotheby's New York on December 11th and 12th, broke the world record for a photography auction. The sale was drawn from a collection gathered by the late American financier Howard Stein. The auction grossed the grand sum of $21,325,063, or £13,591,629 - beating its presale estimate of $13–20 million, or £8.2 - £12.7 million. The sale greatly surpassed the previous record, set in 2006 by a Sotheby's sale of photographs from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which reached the total of $15 million, or £9.5 million.

The auction also set a number of artist's records. The top lot, an impressionistic view of Venice by Alvin Langdon Coburn ("Shadows and Reflections, Venice," 1905) fetched the staggering sum of $965,000, or £614,726.

Glassmaking originated around 2500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, and by the mid-first millennium B.C. it had spread throughout the ancient world. The number of vessels made from glass remained limited, however, until the introduction of two important technical advances—the use of the blowpipe and closed multipart molds—in the late first century B.C. and the early first century A.D., respectively. These advances revolutionized the glass industry under the Roman Empire, making glass vessels accessible to all and allowing producers to create a wide range of shapes, sizes, and usages. Some of the earliest vessels made by mold blowing bear the names of the craftsmen who “signed” the molds.

In the early first century A.D. the most outstanding examples of Roman mold-blown glass were made by a craftsman called Ennion, and products of his workshop are the focus of the exhibition "Ennion: Master of Roman Glass," at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is the first exhibition of ancient glass organized by the Metropolitan, which has one of the finest collections of this material in the world.