metropolitan museum

Cezanne's Card Players United In New York Exhibit

A new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City brings together a full house of Paul Cézanne's famous card players. The Metropolitan Museum was, in 1913, the first public institution in the United States to acquire a painting by the artist and has a healthy collection of his works. The new exhibition brings together the "The Card Players" 1890-92 shown above left and "Study for The Card Players" at right among other works. The Card Players belongs to the Metropolitan while the Study is on loan from the Worcester Art Museum inWorcester, Massachusetts.

The artworks were created in the 1890s while the artist was living at his family's estate outside Aix-en-Provence and showcase Cezanne's appreciation of the local people as well as tracking his progress as a painter. He used peasants and laborers at his family's estate as models. The sittings resulted in five closely related canvases of different sizes, three of which will be reunited in the exhibit. Reuters reports that this exhibit was previously on display at the Courtauld Gallery in London. A fourth painting belongs to the Barnes Foundation and cannot be loaned out and the fifth is in a private collection which opted not to show it. Cezanne also produced a larger number of paintings of the individual farm workers, major examples of which will be on view along with oil sketches and watercolor studies for these paintings.

The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Courtauld Gallery, London. A variety of educational programs will accompany the exhibition, including gallery talks, film screenings, and a Sunday at the Met lecture program on April 3. The exhibit runs from now through May 8. More information is available at the Museum's website at www.metmuseum.org .

Tags: metropolitan museum, metropolitan museum of art, paul cezanne

Khubilai Khan at the Met

by Bobbie Leigh (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

The Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) knew how to live. Today, we could say they had a talent for "living large," enjoying all the arts in this life and the next. If there is a message in the Met's new show, "The World of Khubilai Khan, Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty," it is that during the roughly 100 years of the Yuan, there was a new artistic awakening and a flourishing of all the arts including architecture, textiles, calligraphy, painting, and porcelain. According to the curators, the Yuan world laid the foundation of what today we think of as traditional Chinese art.

Tags: Chinese Art, Genghis Khan, Khubilai Khan, Metropolitan Museum, metropolitan museum of art, Mongol Empire, new york city, Yuan Dynasty

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Francis Bacon Anthology

by Jared Paul Stern (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art, Books

The contemporary art market has hit such hard times that even eternal bankables like Francis Bacon are being affected; even a relatively cheap painting of his failed to sell at Sotheby's in December. Expect interest in the twisted Irish genius to revive when a massive centenary exhibition if his work opens in at NYC's Metropolitan Museum of Art in the spring, however. Meanwhile, you can sate yourself on a slew of new Bacon books just hitting shelves. For starters there's an English edition of a lavish catalog produced for an exhibition in Milan earlier this year, Francis Bacon: Anthology by Rudy Chiappini (above), which covers the whole of Bacon's oeuvre dating from the 1930s, as well as a revised edition of Michel Leiris' landmark monograph on the artist. Others focus on Bacon's portraits and his photography collection - but if you just want a nice buzz as opposed to an OD, we'd go with the Anthology.

Tags: Contemporary Art, ContemporaryArt, Francis Bacon, FrancisBacon, Metropolitan Museum, MetropolitanMuseum

Frolicking in Ford at the Met Gala

by Jared Paul Stern (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Apparel, Events, Celebrity Shopping, Men's Style

At the Metropolitan Museum's star-studded Costume Institute Gala in Manhattan the other night, all the best-dressed men wore tuxedos by Tom Ford. While some fellows got creative with their black tie and others simply looked boring in notched lapel numbers, those who sported Ford's threads -- including Gisele Bundchen's football star beau Tom Brady, actors Djimon Hounsou and Jimmy Fallon, and A-list shoe designer Christian Louboutin -- were the evening's standouts.

Ford himself (pictured here with actress Natasha Richardson) went with a classic double-breasted dinner jacket with grosgrain lapels. Brady, Fallon and Louboutin all wore Ford's signature single-breasted peak lapel style; Brady and Fallon went the extra mile with matching waistcoats. Hounsou wore a black three-piece wool and cashmere suit which was equally elegant, as you'll see in the gallery below. Ford's suits start at about $5,000.

Gallery: Frolicking in Ford at the Met

Christian Louboutin and the Olsen Twins.

Tags: Christian Louboutin, ChristianLouboutin, Costume Institute, CostumeInstitute, Gisele Bundchen, GiseleBundchen, Jimmy Fallon, JimmyFallon, Metropolitan Museum, MetropolitanMuseum, Natasha Richardson, NatashaRichardson, Tom Brady, Tom Ford, TomBrady, TomFord

Paul Smith iPod mini case

by Anne Metz (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Gadgets

In honor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibit, Anglo-mania, a retrospective of British fashion, I thought I'd join in the Anglophilia with something hip and Brit: Paul Smith's leather iPod Mini carrying case.

If you're not familiar with Paul Smith, let me gush about him for a few minutes. He's best known for his tailored suits, but in the past few years, he extended his collection to include women's ready to wear, accessories and perfumes. What Paul Smith does best is basically what the British do best -- mixing subsersiveness with tradition. Smith's suits, are on the outside, exactly what you would expect a stuffy British business man to wear. On the inside, though, he includes details like lavender satin or this funky ticking stripe liner.

It's the same striped patten he uses in this iPod mini case. The sleek elastic sides enable this carrier to accomodate both the 4 and the 6 GB Mini.

Sort of mod, sort of cheeky, this pod holster gives me the feeling that I should be spending a good part of my life listening to The Kinks' song "Waterloo Station" on iPod repeat. Price: $130.

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Tags: anglo-mania, british, ipod, ipod carriers, IpodCarriers, Kinks, Met, Metropolitan Museum, MetropolitanMuseum, paul smith, PaulSmith, stripes, Waterloo station, WaterlooStation