Interwoven
Globe
The Worldwide Textile Trade,
1500–1800
1500–1800
September 16, 2013–January 5,
2014
Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800 is the
first major exhibition to explore the international transmittal of design from
the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century through the medium of textiles.
It highlights an important design story that has never before been told from a
truly global perspective.
The exhibition features 134 works, about two-thirds of which are drawn
from the Metropolitan Museum's own rich, encyclopedic collection. These objects
are augmented by important domestic and international loans in order to make
worldwide visual connections. Works from the Metropolitan are from the
following departments: American Decorative Arts, Asian Art, Islamic Art,
European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Costume Institute, European
Paintings, Drawings and Prints, and Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.
They include numerous flat textiles (lengths of fabric, curtains, wall
hangings, bedcovers), tapestries, costumes, church vestments, pieces of seating
furniture, and paintings and drawings.
In the ancient world, the Korean kingdom of Silla (57
B.C.–A.D. 935) was renowned as a country of gold. Through over 100 spectacular
objects created between A.D. 400 and 800—Silla's seminal period—the landmark
exhibition Silla: Korea's
Golden Kingdom presents the remarkable artistic achievements of a
small kingdom that rose to prominence, embraced cosmopolitanism, and eventually
gained control over much of the Korean peninsula. The exhibition is the first
in the West to focus exclusively on the arts of Silla. Among the highlights are
exquisite regalia discovered from the tombs of royalty and the elite; unique
treasures made in places between China and the Mediterranean and preserved in
Korea; and Buddhist icons and reliquaries reinterpreting pan-Asian styles with
native aesthetics.
The exhibition features several designated National
Treasures and many works with few parallels outside of Korea, including a
graceful and charming gilt-bronze sculpture of a bodhisattva in pensive pose,
known as National Treasure 83.
Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China
December 11, 2013–April 6, 2014
The first
major exhibition of Chinese contemporary art ever mounted by the Metropolitan, Ink Art explores how
contemporary works from a non-Western culture may be displayed in an
encyclopedic art museum. Presented in the Museum's permanent galleries for
Chinese art, the exhibition features artworks that may best be understood as
part of the continuum of China's traditional culture. These works may also be
appreciated from the perspective of global art, but by examining them through
the lens of Chinese historical artistic paradigms, layers of meaning and
cultural significance that might otherwise go unnoticed are revealed.
Ultimately, both points of view contribute to a more enriched understanding of
these artists' creative processes.
For more than two millennia, ink has been the principal
medium of painting and calligraphy in China. Since the early twentieth century,
however, the primacy of the "ink art" tradition has increasingly been
challenged by new media and practices introduced from the West. Ink Art examines the creative
output of a selection of Chinese artists from the 1980s to the present who have
fundamentally altered inherited Chinese tradition while maintaining an
underlying identification with the expressive language of the culture's past.
Featuring some seventy works by thirty-five artists in
various media—paintings, calligraphy, photographs, woodblock prints, video, and
sculpture—created during the past three decades, the exhibition is organized
thematically into four parts: The Written Word, New Landscapes, Abstraction,
and Beyond the Brush. Although all of the artists have challenged, subverted,
or otherwise transformed their sources through new modes of expression, Ink Art seeks to demonstrate
that China's ancient pattern of seeking cultural renewal through the
reinterpretation of past models remains a viable creative path.
Eighteenth-Century Pastels
August 2–December 29, 2013
With the 1929
bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, the Metropolitan Museum acquired its first
pastels—about twenty nineteenth-century works by Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, and
Édouard Manet. For forty years, they were shown with our European and American
paintings. It was not until 1956 that we were bequeathed a pastel by Jean
Pillement (1728–1808). Between 1961 and 1975 we acquired a small group of works
by John Russell (1745–1806), and there the matter stood until 2002, when the
Metropolitan bought a pastel by the Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera
(1673–1757). Since then we have purchased nearly a dozen others by Italian,
French, British, German, and Danish artists. Most are portraits, and they are
exhibited here with two vivid seascapes by Pillement from a private collection.
Pastels are made from powdery substances that are fragile and subject to fading.
In accordance with modern museum practice, they are exhibited in very low light
or rotated to ensure their long-term preservation. This display is therefore a
temporary extension of the new installation in the adjoining galleries for
European Old Master paintings.
Described by the great Salon critic and encyclopedist
Dennis Diderot as no more than dust, pastel owes it distinctive velvety quality
to its powdery surface, which reflects diffuse scattered light. Consisting of
finely ground pigment and a white mineral extender moistened with a minute
quantity of binder (such as oatmeal whey, mineral spirits, and gum tragacanth)
rolled into sticks of color, pastels are made in a progression of tints and
shades. Pastelists kept hundreds of such crayons on hand. The popularity of
pastel—especially for portraiture—swept across Europe and Britain in the
eighteenth century. Unlike today, such compositions were regarded as paintings.
They were executed in vibrant colors on paper mounted on a wood strainer, elaborately
framed with costly glass and on an intimate scale that suited the refined
living spaces of the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie. These works have
retained their original brilliance because the pastel medium does not contain
resins and the surfaces of works in pastel were never varnished and rarely
fixed, thereby precluding the darkening or yellowing that so often alters the
hues of paintings in oil.
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/current-exhibitions
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