New York City.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art is proud to present “Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe”. This exhibition is the first large-scale presentation of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from Alfred Stieglitz’s collection, acquired by the Metropolitan in 1949. For more than 60 years, the Alfred Stieglitz Collection has been the cornerstone of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s holdings of modern art from the first half of the 20th century. This is the first large-scale exhibition of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from Stieglitz’s personal collection, acquired by the Metropolitan in 1949. The exhibition will feature some 200 works by major European and American modernists, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Vasily Kandinsky, Francis Picabia, Gino Severini, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, and Arthur Dove. “Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe” is on view in the 2nd Floor Tisch Galleries from October 13th through January 2nd 2012.
In addition to being a master photographer, Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was a visionary promoter of modern American and European art, and he assembled a vast art collection of exceptional breadth and depth. Through a succession of influential galleries that he ran in New York City between 1905 and 1946, Stieglitz exhibited many of the most important artists of the era and collected hundreds of works of art by his contemporaries. Highlights of the Metropolitan’s exhibition “Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe” include “Woman Ironing” and “Standing Female Nude” by Pablo Picasso, “Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II)” by Wassily Kandinsky, “Sleeping Muse” by Constantin Brancusi, O’Keeffe’s “Black Iris” and “Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue”, Demuth’s “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold” and Hartley’s “Portrait of a German Officer”. In addition to the paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints displayed, the exhibition will include a number of photographs by the Photo-Secessionists, as well as publications by Stieglitz, all from his personal collection.
This will be the first time since their acquisition in 1949 that the Museum’s vast holdings from the Stieglitz Collection—including many works on paper that are rarely on view—will be exhibited together. After his death in 1946, Stieglitz’s wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, as executrix of his estate, decided which institutions would receive gifts of art from his collection. The Metropolitan Museum was very fortunate to receive the largest share of Stieglitz’s personal collection: more than 400 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints. The remaining works from his collection were distributed among the Art Institute of Chicago, Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Fisk University in Nashville, and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (colloquially The Met) is an art museum on the eastern edge of Central Park, along “Museum Mile” in New York City, United States. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works of art, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, often called “the Met”, is one of the world’s largest art galleries; there is also a much smaller second location, at “The Cloisters”, in Upper Manhattan, which features medieval art. Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens. The founders included businessmen and financiers, as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day, who wanted to open a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. It opened on February 20, 1872, and was originally located at 681 Fifth Avenue. Today, the Met measures almost 1/4-mile (400 m) long and occupies more than 2,000,000 square feet (190,000 m2). The Met’s permanent collection is cared for and exhibited by seventeen separate curatorial departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as four dedicated conservation departments and a department of scientific research.
Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine and Islamic art. After negotiations with the City of New York in 1871, the Met was granted the land between the East Park Drive, Fifth Avenue, and the 79th and 85th Street Transverse Roads in Central Park. A red-brick and stone “mausoleum” was designed by American architect Calvert Vaux and his collaborator Jacob Wrey Mould. Vaux’s ambitious building was not well-received; the building’s High Victorian Gothic style being already dated prior to completion, and the president of the Met termed the project “a mistake.” Within 20 years, a new architectural plan engulfing the Vaux building was already being executed. Since that time, many additions have been made including the distinctive Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue facade, Great Hall, and Grand Stairway. These were designed by architect and Met trustee Richard Morris Hunt, but completed by his son, Richard Howland Hunt in 1902 after his father’s death. The wings that completed the Fifth Avenue facade in the 1910s were designed by the firm of McKim, Mead, and White. The modernistic sides and rear of the museum were the work of Roche, Dinkeloo, and Associates in the 1970s and 1980s. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.metmuseum.org/