Current Exhibitions
The newly reinstalled galleries invite visitors to join exciting fresh conversations among works in the museum’s contemporary collection. The galleries will feature longtime favorites alongside more recent additions and a selection of foundational video artworks. Together, these works demonstrate the wide range of perspectives that animate contemporary art.
Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, Paris,1889–1900 explores the beautiful, enigmatic, and paradoxical work of Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Félix Vallotton, four members of the Nabi brotherhood. The Nabis were a group of young artists who were inspired by Paul Gauguin and the growing current of Symbolism in literature and theater. They sought to create an art of suggestion and emotion. Private Lives takes a close look at their paintings, prints, and drawings of home, family, and children, or what Bonnard referred to as the small pleasures and “modest acts of life.”
Recent conservation of the CMA’s Italian Baroque painting Danaë by Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639) has revealed a more vibrant and refined painting than has hitherto been possible to perceive.
Ashcan School Prints and the American City, 1900–1940 presents prints of city life made by urban realists during a time of rapid demographic, social, and economic change to America’s cities. With New York City as an epicenter of change—packed with vibrant new communities of immigrants from Europe and Latin American countries, and Blacks migrating from the American South—artists responded to the everyday lives and experiences of city dwellers, incorporating advertising and mass media techniques into their depictions of the lower classes, immigrants, working women, and social elites alike.
Street photography—spontaneous images of everyday life captured in public places—blossomed in New York City during the first half of the 20th century. This young genre of photography was heir to the slightly earlier tradition of urban realism in painting and printmaking, as seen in the complementary exhibition Ashcan School Prints and the American City, 1900–1940, on view in the James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Gallery from July 17 to December 26, 2021. Both movements turned to depictions of the everyday activities of urban dwellers to explore the radical demographic, social, and economic shifts then transforming the city.
This display celebrates the recent conservation of two monumental rubbings from the Buddhist caves of Longmen in central China. They were shown for the first time at the museum’s opening in 1916 and have not been on display for almost a century.
Gold and silver reliquaries, jeweled crosses, liturgical garments, and illuminated manuscripts are among the rare treasures kept in the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Münster, in northwestern Germany.
Artwork from the Islamic world is as diverse and vibrant as the peoples who produced it. The objects presented in this gallery were created during the 8th through 19th centuries, a period of great cultural and geographic expansion.
Due to its remarkable malleability and durability, gold has been widely used in artifacts for the wealthy and for royalty since the fifth millennium BC. In Korean art, this precious mineral was the main material for luxury goods during the Three Kingdoms period (57 BC−668).
Rinpa is a style of Japanese art focused on abstracted natural motifs and allusions to classical literature. Coined in the early 1900s, Rinpa means “Rin School,” after painter Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), whose work was critical to the later transmission of the tradition.
Moralizing fables involving animal characters traversed the Indo-Iranian world for centuries. At times, they were written down and collected into volumes; when made for a wealthy patron, the manuscripts were illustrated.
The mola is a key component of traditional dress among the Indigenous Guna (formerly Kuna) women of Panamá. Guna women have been sewing mola blouses since the turn of the 20th century, and they have become powerful symbols of their culture and identity.