Press Releases

Michelangelo (1475-1564) was one of the most creative and influential artists in the history of western art. This exhibition explores the full range of his work as a painter, sculptor, and architect through more than two dozen of his extraordinary drawings, including designs for celebrated projects such as the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Medici Chapel tombs, and the Last Judgement. These working studies and sketches enable us to witness Michelangelo at work, and to experience firsthand his boundless creativity and his pioneering representation of the human form. Curated by Julian Brooks and Edina Adam.

Why did artists leave their homes behind? How did they use the medium of drawing to record their journeys? And how did mobility impact their draftsmanship? This exhibition, featuring works by Rubens, Canaletto, van Gogh, and Gauguin, explores such questions through a selection of European drawings from the Museum’s permanent collection, spanning from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Curated by Edina Adam.

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) earned his place as the leading avant-garde painter of modern Paris through a series of provocative paintings that shocked contemporary audiences. The first exhibition ever to explore the last years of his short life, Manet and Modern Beauty highlights a less familiar and more intimate side of this celebrated artist’s work. Stylish portraits, luscious still lifes, delicate pastels and watercolors, vivid café and garden scenes convey Manet’s elegant social world and reveal his growing fascination with fashion, flowers, and the parisienne—for the artist, a feminine embodiment of modern life in all its particular, fleeting beauty. Curated by Scott Allan and Emily Beeny.