New York Events Today

The new Gelman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art display 50 French modern works, almost all paintings drawn from the Gelmans' gift of their collection. Free for members and children. On view through December 31, 2010

This major career retrospective on Tim Burton (American, b. 1958), consisting of a gallery exhibition and a film series, considers Burton's career as a director, producer, writer, and concept artist for live-action and animated films, along with his work as a fiction writer, photographer and illustrator. Following the current of his visual imagination from his earliest childhood drawing through his mature work, the exhibition presents artwork generated during the conception and production of his films, and highlights a number of unrealized projects and never-before-seen pieces, as well as student art, his earliest non-professional films, and examples of his work as a storyteller and graphic artist for non-film projects. Tim Burton  is organized by Ron Magliozzi, Assistant Curator, and Jenny He, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, with Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, The Museum of Modern Art. On view through April 26, 2010

The Museum of Modern Art presents Monet’s Water Lilies from September 13, 2009, to April 12, 2010, an installation that features the full group of late paintings by Claude Monet (1840-1926) in the collection for the first time since the Museum's reopening in 2004. The four MoMA paintings are a mural-sized triptych (Water Lilies, 1914–26); a single panel painting of the water lilies in the Japanese-style pond that Monet cultivated on his property in Giverny, France (Water Lilies, 1914–26); The Japanese Footbridge (c. 1920–22); and Agapanthus (1914–26), the majestic plants in the pond’s vicinity.

With the inauguration of the Deutsche Guggenheim in 1997, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Deutsche Bank launched a unique and ambitious program of contemporary art commissions that has enabled the Guggenheim to act as a catalyst for artistic production. Anish Kapoor: Memory is the fourteenth commission project to be completed since the program’s inception and is the Guggenheim’s first collaboration with Anish Kapoor, an artist celebrated for his expansive vision and profound aesthetics. On view through March 28th, 2010.

This is the first exhibition in an art museum to be devoted exclusively to Oceanic musical instruments. It explores the rich diversity of musical instruments created and used in the Pacific Islands. Drawn primarily from the Metropolitan’s collections, the exhibition features more than fifty instruments from small personal types such as panpipes and courting whistles to larger forms played at performances heard by the entire community, such as the exquisitely carved temple drums of the Austral Islands or the imposing sacred slit gongs of New Guinea. On view through September 6th, 2010.

This exhibition celebrates the thirty-fifth anniversary of the acquisition of the Packard Collection, showcasing its particular strengths in archaeological artifacts, Buddhist iconographic scrolls, ceramics, screen paintings of the Momoyama and Edo periods (sixteenth through nineteenth centuries), and sculptures of the Heian and Kamakura periods (ninth through fourteenth centuries). The Met offers a highlight of this exhibition, a pairing of masterpieces by a Kano school master and his son: Old Plum, a set of sliding-door panels by Kano Sansetsu (1589-1651) in the Packard Collection. On view through June 6th, 2010.

This exhibition is the first ever dedicated to Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572), and will present nearly all the known drawings by, or attributed to, this leading Italian Mannerist artist, who was active primarily in Florence. A painter, draftsman, academician, and enormously witty poet, Bronzino became famous as the court artist to the Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici and his beautiful wife, the Duchess Eleonora di Toledo. This monographic exhibition will contain approximately 60 drawings from European and North-American collections, many of which have never before been on public view. Accompanied by a catalogue, authored by a team of international scholars, to be published by the Metropolitan Museum. On view through April 18th, 2010.

The Belles Heures (1405–1408/9) of Jean de Berry, a treasure of The Cloisters collection, is one of the most celebrated and lavishly illustrated manuscripts in this country. Because it is currently unbound, it is possible to exhibit all of its illuminated pages as individual leaves, a unique opportunity never to be repeated. The exhibition will elucidate the manuscript, its artists—the young Franco-Netherlandish Limbourg Brothers—and its patron, Jean de France, duc de Berry. A select group of precious objects from the same early fifteenth-century courtly milieu will place the manuscript in the context of the patronage of Jean de Berry and his royal family, the Valois. On view through June 13th, 2010.

In this exhibition, acclaimed artist Kiki Smith presents a unique, site-specific installation exploring ideas of creative inspiration and the cycle of life in relation to women artists. Kiki Smith: Sojourn draws on a variety of universal experiences, from the milestones of birth and death to quotidian experiences such as the daily chores of domestic life. An important eighteenth-century silk needlework by a young woman named Prudence Punderson, The First, Second and Last Scene of Mortality (Collection of the Connecticut Historical Society), which provided original inspiration for Smith’s installation, is included in the exhibition. On view through September 12th, 2010.

Sixty years before the embrace of collage techniques by avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, aristocratic Victorian women were already experimenting with photocollage. The compositions they made with photographs and watercolors are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects. Such images, often made for albums, reveal the educated minds as well as the accomplished hands of their makers. With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, these images stand the rather serious conventions of early photography on their heads. The exhibition features forty-eight works from the 1860s and 1870s, from public and private collections. On view till May 9th, 2010.

Hilla Rebay: Art Educator features some of the artist's remarkably progressive efforts to provide a variety of audiences—from youth and teachers to artists and museum visitors—with opportunities to learn about nonobjective art, or art without representational links to the material world. On view through August 22, 2010.