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| Rich Man, Poor Man: Art, Class, and Commerce in a Late Medieval Town |
| OPENING SOON |
Opens March 6
The Met Cloisters |
Below the monarch, nobility, and land-owning gentry in the highly stratified society of sixteenth-century England stood those known as the "middling sort." Like their compatriots of higher rank, they too saw art and architecture as a means of self-fashioning.
This exhibition examines the emergence of distinctly middle-class taste in late medieval England by showcasing a rare set of large-scale domestic sculptures from Exeter. Commissioned by a merchant named Henry Hamlyn, the sculptures, which adorned the exterior of his house, feature stock characters drawn from popular prints and bawdy tales: a jester, a quarreling couple, peasants, and musicians. Rustic in style and subject matter, they fascinatingly came across as figures both amusing and menacing.
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| Learning to Paint in Premodern China |
| JUST OPENED |
Through January 7, 2024
The Met Fifth Avenue |
| This exhibition will consider the underexplored question of how painters learned their craft in premodern China. Some painters learned at home, from fathers, mothers, or other relatives among whom painting was a shared language of familial communication. Others learned from friends who shared their passion. Still others turned to painting manuals, treatises that expanded knowledge of painting to anyone who could buy a woodblock-printed book. Paintings from The Met collection, along with a choice selection of important works from local private collectors, will illuminate these and other pathways to becoming a painter in premodern China. The exhibition will be presented in two rotations.
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| Berenice Abbott's New York Album, 1929 |
| JUST OPENED |
Through September 4, 2023
The Met Fifth Avenue |
| In January 1929, after eight years in Europe, the American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) boarded an ocean liner to New York City for what was meant to be a short visit. Upon arrival, she found the city transformed and ripe with photographic potential. "When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life," she recalled. With a handheld camera, Abbott traversed the city, photographing its skyscrapers, bridges, elevated trains, and neighborhood street life. She pasted these "tiny photographic notes" into a standard black-page album, arranging them by subject and locale. |
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For more information on the exhibitions, including sponsorship credits, visit Rich Man, Poor Man: Art, Class, and Commerce in a Late Medieval Town, Learning to Paint in Premodern China, Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929, Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, Water Memories, Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art, Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish Art, and Decorated Paper: A Selection of Publications in Watson Library.
Bloomberg Connects is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Images: Architectural Support with a Peasant Holding a Club, 1524–1549. Made in Exeter (by French woodworkers), England. French. Oak, 83 x 9 1/2 x 12 in., 111 lb. (211 x 24.1 x 30.5 cm, 50.3 kg). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1974 (1974.295.3) | Wang Yuanqi (Chinese, 1642–1715). Streams and Mountains without End (detail), Qing dynasty (1644–1911), undated. Handscroll; ink on paper, 7 1/8 in. x 70 ft. (43.5 x 2133.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Partial and Promised Gift of the Family of Lo Chia-Lun, 2022 (2022.128) | Berenice Abbott (American, 1898–1991). Page from New York Album, 1929–30. Gelatin silver prints, 10 x 13 in. (25.4 x 33 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1984 (1984.1097.9–.18). © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc. | Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (French, 1827–1875). Why Born Enslaved! (detail), modeled 1868, carved 1873. Marble, H. 22 7/8 in. (58.1 cm), W. 16 in. (40.6 cm), D. 12 1/2 in. (31.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace, Wrightsman Fellows, and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation Gifts, 2019 (2019.220) | Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, Reconstruction of marble finial in the form of a sphinx (detail), 2022. 3D print in polymethyl metacrylate, natural pigments in egg tempera, gilded copper, gilded tin. Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung (Liebieghaus Polychromy Research Project), Frankfurt am Main; original: Greece, ca. 530 B.C. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (11.185d, x) | © Cara Romero (Native American (Chemehuevi), born 1977). Water Memory (detail), 2021. Photograph, Framed: 41 × 41 in. (104.1 × 104.1 cm). | Maya artist. Whistle with the Maize God emerging from a flower (detail), Mexico, Late Classic period (A.D. 600–900). Ceramic, pigment. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979 (1979.206.728) | Martinus Rørbye. View from the Citadel Ramparts in Copenhagen by Moonlight (detail), 1839. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Eugene V. Thaw, 2007 | Beverly Sky. Autumn Birches, Pulp Painting, 2005. From The Art of Pulp Painting, 2005, Hand Papermaking, publishers. United States, Washington, DC. 1 case (46 p., 18 portfolios) : samples ; Height: 11 13/16 in. (30 cm). Thomas J. Watson Library (TS1220 .A78 2005). Paper sample © 2005 Beverly Sky. |
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