Image Galleries from Special Exhibitions Through 2006

It's evident that dismissing Norman Rockwell as "merely" an illustrator is foolish. He captured life in the United States through bad times (the Great Depression and World War II) and good (the idyllic 50s), and, with the onset of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, uncomfortable and unjust. He did this with an unsparing, albeit...

Comprised of approximately 100 paintings, many of which are world famous and have never before been hung together, Americans in Paris, 1860-1900 explores those heady decades when United States artists flocked to France to study, absorb and expand upon their painting techniques. Gallery includes 47 portraits, interiors and scapes from land, sea and city.

Her latest traveling exhibition, "Annie Leibovitz: American Music" showcases 70 color and black-and-white portraits of American musicians in intimate settings. It includes Leibovitz's recent work in addition to several classic images from the late 1970s and 1980s. "American Music" is organized by Experience Music Project, Seattle and all works are courtesy of Annie Leibovitz.

Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia was a recent special exhibition at London's British Museum and Barcelona's Caixa Forum. Herein lies several more images from that show and one other from the Brooklyn Museum.

Drawn exclusively from the collection of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1950s is comprised of some seventy iconic paintings and sculptures. The exhibition covers 100 crucial years of American art history during which United States visual artists hit their stride on the global scene.

The first major museum exhibition in the United States to focus exclusively on the brief but hugely influential movement, Dada surveys the six principal cities in which its artists worked between 1916 and 1924.

Commissioned by the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Figueres, Spain, in celebration of the centennial of the artist's birth, "Dalí" was a major retrospective exhibition. Over 200 paintings and three dimensional objects traced Dalí's career from early Cubist-inspired works, through his famous Surrealist phase and well into his Classic period.

Twenty-eight works, many of which have not been seen publicly for upwards of 50 years, are culled from the private collection of Seattle businessman and philanthropist Paul G. Allen. Exhibition curator Paul Hayes Tucker has creatively paired Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pieces with modern and contemporary works, placing the former side-by-side with the latter in groups of two or three.

An exhibition of twenty large-scale graffiti paintings, Graffiti explores how a genre that began as a form of subversive public communication has become legitimate -- moving away from the street and into private collections and galleries.

The Portland Art Museum is hosting Great Painters in Brescia from the Renaissance to the 18th Century from April 29 through September 17, 2006. Museums from the northern Italian city of Brescia in Lombardy have graciously lent 35 Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces for this special exhibition. The works displayed offer a broad sweep of artistic achievement by Brescian painters in terms of portraiture, fresco production, religious images, decorative cycles, landscapes and genre pieces.

Through magnificent examples of sculpture, reliefs, exceptionally crafted jewelry, ceremonial objects and those of everyday use, Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh poignantly describes the artistic innovations of Egypt's Early Eighteenth Dynasty. On view from March 28 through July 9, 2006 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The first major Cornell retrospective since 1980, Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination brings together more than 170 of the artist's box constructions, collages, dossiers, films and graphic designs from public and private collections. The exhibition is organized by ten themes, each of which represents a recurrent motif in Cornell's work.

Features 23 illuminated manuscripts and one book from the prestigious collection of Los Angeles' J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition explores the late-medieval and Renaissance development of perspective and representations of water, the garden, light, depth, atmosphere and the bird's-eye view in manuscripts and paintings.

'Femme' uniquely displayed approximately 40 works from the personal collection of sculptor Louise Bourgeois scattered, by cultural theme, throughout the Museum's comprehensive collection.

Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History once again exhibits Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas through August 27, 2006. More than 200 ceramic, bone, metal, stone, textile and wooden works of art and artifacts describe the culture of the Inca at Machu Picchu during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.

The Morgan Library & Museum's inaugural special exhibition celebrates the institution's recent expansion and reopening by highlighting some 300 objects from its world-class collection of more than 350,000 objects from the Third Millennium B.C. through the Twentieth Century. Here you'll find seven selections including a Dürer, a Picasso, and a Gutenberg Bible.

"Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt," at the Dahesh Museum of Art brings together Orientalist paintings from the museum's permanent collection along with more than 80 large engraved plate illustrations from the seminal, twenty-four volume Déscription de l'Égypte (1809-1822).

Natural Moderns: Georgia O'Keeffe and Her Contemporaries is a one-room special exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum focusing on Modernist works by American artists Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), John Marin (1870-1953), Marsden Hartley (1887-1943) and Arthur Dove (1880-1946) painted between the years 1926 and 1946.

Raphael at the Met: The Colonna Altarpiece, exclusively at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, reunites the seven panels of the Italian High Renaissance artist's masterwork for the first time since their dispersal in the Seventeenth Century. All seven works by Raphael (Raffaelo Sanzio or Santi, 1483-1520) are available for viewing within this picture gallery.

Here is a selection of some of the more than 200 exquisite Mesopotamian works of art and artifacts on display, including: the Great Lyre; the Ram Caught in a Thicket; a gold ostrich egg; superb examples of weaponry; and other precious masterpieces from Sumer's Early Dynastic IIIA period (ca. 2600-2500 B.C.).

Showcasing more than 80 sculpted heads dating from before the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance, Set in Stone... describes the importance of facial expression in medieval sculpture, the role of iconoclasm in the dismemberment of many statues and how scientific innovations helped to uncover important information about many of the works on view.

The Frick Collection has assembled all five of Paolo Veronese's allegorical paintings held in the United States for an exhibition entitled Veronese's Allegories: Virtue, Love, and Exploration in Renaissance Venice. Stan Parchin here takes us on a brief tour of the five Veronese paintings on display and offers a few words of wisdom about that which each is supposed to depict.