Photography and the Civil War at the Met

An ambrotype image of the Pattillo brothers, from Georgia

Credit: Jack Melton, David Wynn Vaughan Collection

More than two hundred of the finest and most poignant photographs of the American Civil War have been brought together for this landmark exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through examples drawn from the Metropolitan's celebrated holdings of this material, complemented by important loans from public and private collections, the exhibition will examine the evolving role of the camera during the nation's bloodiest war. The "War between the States" was the great test of the young Republic's commitment to its founding precepts; it was also a watershed in photographic history. The camera recorded from beginning to end the heartbreaking narrative of the epic four-year war (1861–1865) in which 750,000 lives were lost. This traveling exhibition will explore, through photography, the full pathos of the brutal conflict that, after 150 years, still looms large in the American public's imagination.

Punk Couture Chaos @ The Met

Sid Vicious in 1977.

Photo By Dennis Morris

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is going punk couture for its Spring 2013 exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, "Punk: From Chaos to Couture" will "highlight the origins of the punk movement and draw direct connections to haute couture and ready-to-wear creations that it has inspired for the past three decades," Women's Wear Daily reports.

Designers who had a real influence on punk designs will be shown.  The Spring 2013 exhibit will highlight looks from Azzedine Alaia, Ann Demeulemeester, Dolce & Gabbana, Marc Jacobs, Rei Kawakubo, Alexander McQueen, Alexander Wang and Rodarte. This show will pinpoint the origin of punk designs in the early to mid-1970s in both New York and London and trace the influence of punk stylings throughout the decades. Perhaps we will see Elizabeth Hurley's famous Versace safety-pin dress from 1994 again.

Watch for it, May 9 to Aug. 11

Read more details over at WWD

Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: Cloud City at the Met

Metropolitan Museum of Art

May 15, 2012–Through November 4, 2012 (weather permitting)

"Artist Tomás Saraceno will create a constellation of large, interconnected modules constructed with transparent and reflective materials for the Museum's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Visitors may enter and walk through these habitat-like, modular structures grouped in a nonlinear configuration. Over the past decade, Saraceno has established a practice of constructing habitable networks based upon complex geometries and interconnectivity that merge art, architecture, and science. The interdisciplinary project "Cloud Cities/Air Port City" is rooted in the artist's investigation of expanding the ways in which we inhabit and experience our environment."

The Met Hosts a 3D Hackathon to Scan, Replicate, and Remix Collection Objects

A 3D printed object

How does New York’s largest, most traditional art museum suddenly become its most progressive? The Metropolitan Museum is embracing the latest innovations in technology and allowing its collection objects to be scanned and replicated in a 3D-printing hackathon led by tech-savvy artists. Wait… just what is a hackathon again?

The museum will invite 25 different digital artists and programmers to “experiment with the latest 3-D scanning and replicating technologies,” according to their blog. The term “hackathon” is a portmanteau for a hacking marathon — basically, a lot of programmers get together in a big space somewhere and lock themselves in for a while, seeing what they can possibly come up with in a limited span of time.

Just who is participating in the two-day hackathon is a closely-guarded secret, but we are advised to keep an eye on the Met blog and the hashtag #Met3D for further updates. [Metropolitan]

More at Artinfo

Naked Before the Camera at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Oscar Gustav Rejlander, Ariadne, 1857. Albumen silver print from glass negative. Gilman Collection, Purchase, 

The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005. 
Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Naked Before the Camera 
March 27 2012-September 9 2012

The depiction of the nude has always been fraught with danger. Whether depicted in ancient art or modern times, when a nude figure is seen there tends to be some controversy. The nude seem stir up desire and pleasure or anger and sin.

Why does the nude figure stir up more controversy when the nude is a photograph? Most likely it sometimes becomes an emotional subject because we then know the person being photographed willingly stood before a photographer naked. It wasn’t a sculpture or a painting with an imaginary figure, not this person sat and posed without hesitation. Censors were always a problem and  to avoid them photographers of the nude had to often called their works “studies for artists.”

Now through September 9, 2012 we can view Naked before the Camera. More than 60 images from the museum’s collections will be on display beginning with the 19^th century through modern times.

"In twentieth-century art, the body became a vehicle for surreal and modernist manipulation and for intimate odes to beauty or poems to a muse. Beginning with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, nudity and its representation took on new meanings—as declarations of freedom from societal strictures, as assertions of individual identity, as explorations of sexuality and gender roles, and as responses to AIDS."




Read more at the Met: Naked Before the Camera

Artdaily.org:  History of the nude in photography in Naked before the Camera at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

New York Times: Capturing the Body ‘Naked Before the Camera’ at the Metropolitan Museum

A Vast Museum That You Can Carry

You may think that guidebooks put out by museums to highlight their most prized possessions should be on the endangered list Along with the Encylopaedia Britannica. Maybe not. Consider a new one for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Equipped with a soft but durable cover and about the dimensions of a middleweight novel, “The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide” (distributed by Yale University Press, $24.95) displays in 449 pages images and brief descriptions of 600 of the Met’s nearly two million works. 

Read more here at the New York Times.

‘Rembrandt at Work’ at Metropolitan Museum

Rembrandt at Work A self-portrait from Kenwood House, from around 1665

A never before seen Rembrandt is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It comes from the collection of Kenwood House in North London. This self-portrait was painted around 1665 four years before his death and is his second largest self-portrait. Before travelling to Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, you can see it at the Met's permanent collection galleries — Gallery 614 on the second floor, to be exact — beside the museum’s smaller, more modest, earlier Rembrandt self-portrait, from 1660.
Read the full text at,  You Can Almost Hear Him Sigh ‘Rembrandt at Work’ at Metropolitan Museum.

Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations

  “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” Saturday, May 12, 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.

In May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will open “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” linking Elsa Schiaparelli, the leading designer of the Surrealist movement, with Miuccia Prada, herself a formidable patron of the arts. 

Andrew Bolton, curator, The Costume Institute, MMA

The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium 

The Costume Institute's latest exhibition explores the affinities between Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada, Italian designers from different eras. Andrew Bolton will address the ways in which both women employed unconventional textiles, colors, and prints to play with conventional ideas of good and bad taste, and how they exploited whimsical fastenings, fanciful trompe l'oeil details, and deliberately rudimentary embroideries for strange and provocative outcomes.

Admission to Members' free lectures is by ticket, obtainable in advance by calling the Membership Office at 212-650-2620 or emailing meghann.mckale@metmuseum.org.

New American Wing at the Met

New American Wing: Galleries for Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts

Mrs. Mayer and Daughter  Ammi Phillips  (1788–1865)

The Metropolitan Museum's collection of American art, one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world, returned to view in expanded, reconceived, and dramatic new galleries on January 16, 2012, when the Museum inaugurated the New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts. The new installation provides visitors with a rich and captivating experience of the history of American art from the eighteenth through the early twentieth century. The suite of elegant new galleries encompasses 30,000 square feet for the display of the Museum's superb collection.