This month's museum pick...

The Met’s Two Latest Painting Exhibitions

Span 100 Years of Art in Paris and France
by Sheri Leigh

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrates the annual return of The Annenberg Collection of Impressionist and Postimpressionist Masterpieces (June 6, 2000–November 5, 2000) and an original exhibition, Painters in Paris: 1895–1950 (through December 31), an exhibition of more than 100 paintings by many of the 20th century's most illustrious modern masters.

The 53 paintings, drawings, and watercolors that compose the Annenberg Collection of Impressionist and Postimpressionist masterworks annually go on view for six months in the Museum’s Nineteenth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries. The collection, acknowledged as one of the most distinguished private collections of its kind, includes the work of 18 of the greatest artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, including Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Picasso.

The Painters in Paris: 1895-1950 exhibit includes such artists as Bonnard, Braque, Chagall, Dubuffet, Léger, Matisse, Miró, Modigliani and Picasso. Representing 36 painters of the School of Paris, including the Fauves, the Cubists, and the Surrealists, the exhibition – drawn entirely from the Metropolitan's collection – traces the development of painting in France from its Impressionist roots at the turn of the century through the aftermath of World War II.

William S. Lieberman, the Museum's Jacques and Natasha Gelman Chairman of the Modern Art Department and curator of the exhibition, describes the exhibition as “the first such survey of masterworks from our collection, and it will be revelatory for our visitors. Not only will it recall a period and place of great vitality but it will also reveal unexpected relationships between the artists who so profoundly shaped the art of this century.”