CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

Side by side: Oberlin’s masterworks at the Met

Exhibition: 16 March - 29 August 2010

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art website, 17 March 2010

Founded in 1917, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College is one of the finest college or university collections in the United States, serving as an invaluable educational resource for aspiring art scholars and artists. While the museum is closed in 2010 for renovations, twenty of their masterpieces—nineteen paintings and one sculpture—will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for five months. These will include the great Ter Brugghen painting Saint Sebastian tended by Irene (one of the most important Northern Baroque paintings in the United States), Cézanne’s Viaduct at L’Estaque, Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier, and a striking Kirchner sculpture. Each of these works will be integrated into the Metropolitan Museum’s great collection, creating new, provocative juxtapositions.

From the Allen Memorial Art Museum, 17 March 2010

The AMAM is proud to present 20 of its European and American masterworks in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during spring and summer 2010. The works on display, which span the 16th-20th centuries, will be integrated into the Met’s galleries, giving visitors the rare opportunity to see the AMAM works with those by the same artists or from similar contexts from the Met’s world-renowned collections. The AMAM’s important Ter Brugghen painting, St. Sebastian Tended by Irene, will be seen with the Met’s The Crucifixion with the Virgin and St. John by the same artist, and AMAM paintings by Domenichino, Sweerts, Turner, Monet, and Cézanne will hang alongside important works by those artists.

In other cases, the AMAM works on loan will provide the opportunity to add new voices to the Met’s extensive holdings: the AMAM’s paintings by Erhard Altdorfer, the Cavaliere d’Arpino, Giovanni Battista Gaulli, Henri-Edmond Cross, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner—along with the AMAM’s wooden sculpture by Kirchner—will be integrated into galleries with similar works, but will represent artists not in the Met’s permanent collection of paintings and sculptures. The AMAM’s Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman paintings will be shown in the Met’s Modern galleries; the first two were instrumental in the early definitions of the importance of abstract art in the United States in the early 1940s.