Upcoming Exhibitions
The core of this exhibition will be the Cleveland Museum of Art’s masterpiece by Tilman Riemenschneider, Saint Jerome and the Lion, produced for the Benedictine abbey church of Saint Peter in Erfurt, Germany, depicting a legend in which Jerome kindly removes a thorn from a lion’s paw. Our exhibition will reunite Saint Jerome with another Riemenschneider work from the same church in Erfurt, the alabaster statuette The Virgin Mary of the Annunciation in the collection of the Louvre. These works are exceptionally rare, as they are two of only a few extant alabaster sculptures produced by Riemenschneider, with Saint Jerome being the only example in an American collection. The majority of the objects in the exhibition come from the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art and allow insight into the production of alabaster sculptures in this period. A few loans from North American museums will complement the exhibition.
Egyptian art has long served, and continues to serve, as a primary inspiration for fashion designers, solidifying the legacy of Egyptomania—the influence of the art of ancient Egypt. This exhibition, on view in the CMA’s textile and Egyptian galleries, brings together around 50 objects that explore the influence of Egyptomania in fashion by juxtaposing contemporary fashion and jewelry loaned from around the world with fine and decorative artworks from the CMA collection. Egyptomania: Fashion’s Conflicted Obsession examines designers’ interpretations of themes such as Egyptian dress, funerary process, and religion that shape our contemporary perceptions of ancient Egyptian culture.
In 2016, the museum acquired 37 photographs made by Raja Deen Dayal (1844–1905), hailed as the first great Indian photographer. This exhibition marks the Cleveland debut of these rare images, all of which come from a single album and were shot in 1886 and 1887, an important juncture in the artist’s life. On display alongside Dayal’s photographs are historical Indian paintings, textiles, clothing, and jewelry from the museum’s collection. These objects provide viewers with insight into the cultural context and help translate the objects in the photographs from monochrome into color.
With dazzling paintings on paper and cloth—many on public view for the first time—A Splendid Land reveals how artists visualized emotions, depicted places, celebrated water resources, and fostered personal bonds over 200 years in the rapidly changing political and cultural landscapes of early modern South Asia.
Ranging from the Garden of Eden and courtly love gardens to the biblical deluge, prints and drawings in Love Gardens / Forbidden Fruit: Nature and Landscape before 1600 highlight humankind’s fraught but interdependent relationship with the natural world. The 60 works on paper in the exhibition, spanning the late medieval through the Renaissance periods (about 1460 to 1600), are assembled entirely from the CMA’s collection, including examples by the Master E. S., Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer, Fra Bartolommeo, Titian, Jacopo de’ Barbari, Giulio Campagnola, Giorgio Ghisi, Nicolò Boldrini, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
The exhibition features about 200 objects from Neolithic times to the 18th century, ranging from jade, silk, prints, and paintings to porcelain, lacquer, and bamboo carvings. Jiangnan’s lush, green scenery inspired artists to conceive it as heaven on earth. China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta will explore how this region gained a leading role in China’s artistic production and how it succeeded in setting cultural standards. This international exhibition will present works of art from private and public collections and museums in the United States, Europe, China, and Japan.
This groundbreaking exhibition is the first to explore Impressionist artist Edgar Degas’s representations of Parisian laundresses. These working-class women were a visible presence in the city, washing and ironing in shops open to the street or carrying heavy baskets of clothing.