The study of individual artists has dominated modern art history, to the neglect of important works produced by multiple hands. In Japan, as in many other cultures, collective creativity played--and still plays--a major role in art-making. Multiple Hands: Collective Creativity in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Painting explores the collective art-making process. This exhibition focuses on two types of cooperative painting practices--workshop and collaborative-in eighteenth-century Japan. Multiple Hands offers an intimate look at paintings from the Princeton University Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a private collection.

Japanese. Edo period, 1600-1868; Kano Tsunenobu, 1636-1713; Four Accomplishments (Kinkishoga) detail, ca. 1700. Pair of hanging scrolls; ink and color on silk, 224.8 x 190.5 cm. Museum purchase, Carl Otto von Kienbusch Jr. Memorial Collection Fund, and gifts of Dr. and Mrs. Robert Feinberg; Mimi Gardner Gates; Sinead Kehoe, Graduate Class of 2002; Cary Y. Liu, Class of 1978 and Graduate Class of 1997; Christian Murck, Graduate Class of 1978 and Alfreda Murck, Graduate Class of 1995; David Ake Sensabaugh, Graduate Class of 1990; Ann Yonemura, Graduate Class of 1973; Virginia Bower, Graduate Class of 1977; Dora C. Y. Ching, Graduate Class of 1993; Robert E. Harrist Jr., Graduate Class of 1989; Richard K. Kent, Graduate Class of 1995, in honor of Yoshiaki Shimizu, Graduate School Class of 1975. 2009-15 a-b photo: Bruce M. White

Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, three of the major systems of thought in China, have been transmitted through texts and teachings over centuries; pictures also have been used to visualize and bring these traditions to life. Immortals, Deities, and Sages in Chinese Painting presents works of art that include images of Buddhist immortals, Daoist deities, and Confucian sages, all of whom figure meaningfully in the arts of China: used as objects of worship and meditation or as illustrations of sacred or classical knowledge. Han dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220) palaces and tombs, such as in the Wu Family Shrines cemetery structures, were decorated with painted and carved images of exemplary figures of Confucian and Daoist virtue as well as powerful deities who were believed to be models of good behavior for family descendants, or possibly to embody activities or needs of the deceased in the afterlife.

Chinese, Qing dynasty, 1644–1912, Zhou Wenjing, active 18th century: Guan Yu, God of War 1755. Hanging scroll; ink and colors on paper, 152.5 x 105 cm. Gift of DuBois Schanck Morris, Class of 1893 (y1946-153) / photo: Masatsugu Nokubo.

John Singer Sargent's distinguished painting An Interior in Venice, on loan from the Royal Academy, London, in exchange for the loan of the Art Museum’s Dancers by Edgar Degas, is a highlight this fall in the Mary Ellen Bowen Gallery of American Art. The painting joins Princeton's equally distinctive Elizabeth Allen Marquand, a portrait that Sargent completed more than a decade earlier. The two very different works offer an enhanced perspective on the artist's eventful career. Technically the most gifted of nineteenth-century American artists, Sargent is best known for his remarkably assured, bravura portraits of the European and expatriate American haute bourgeoisie-painted embodiments of Gilded Age privilege and elegance.

John Singer Sargent, American, 1856-1925: An Interior in Venice, 1899. Oil on canvas, 66 x 83.5 cm. Diploma Work given by John Singer Sargent, R.A., accepted 1900 (03/1387). © Royal Academy of Arts, London / Photo: R.A./Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.

The loan of Mark Rothko's 1949 painting Magenta, Black, Green on Orange (No. 3/No. 13), from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, offers a rare opportunity in Princeton to view a masterwork from the beginning of the artist’s mature period. Sublimity is pronounced in No. 3/No. 13, in which a sense of boundlessness and spatial plenitude triggers feelings of awe and wonder.

Mark Rothko, American, 1903-1970: No. 3 / No. 13, 1949. Oil on canvas, 216.5 x 164.8 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Bequest of Mrs. Mark Rothko through The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. (428.1981). © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Rich narratives in Japanese Buddhism, Shinto mythology, and folklore have furnished artists with a variety of subjects throughout history. Divinity, Compassion, and Wrath in Japanese Religious Art comprises paintings, prints, and sculpture---made from the 10th to the 20th century and drawn from the Museum’s collections as well as a private collection---that range from solemn to compassionate to playful.

As Buddhism spread throughout the Japanese islands, new sects were established, and as artists of each sect promoted their own values, they transformed Japanese Buddhism and its art into a distinctive cultural tradition. Before the importation of Buddhism occurred, Japan had a native belief system that is today known as Shinto. No form of “Shinto art” existed before Buddhism’s arrival. As Buddhist temples began to be built and Buddhas depicted, however, Shinto shrines and deities also started to take physical forms. As aesthetic practice changed and printing techniques gained prominence in popular culture, Japanese religious art reached new audiences by the Edo period (1600-1868). The ease with which iconography was disseminated through new printing techniques played a large role in introducing popular society to the world of religious art.

Japanese, Heian period, 794–1185: Bonten, ca. late 11th century. Wood with traces of red pigment, h. 103.0 cm., w. approx. 39.5 cm., d. approx. 19.0 cm. Museum purchase, gift of J. Lionberger Davis, Class of 1900, and William R. McAlpin, Class of 1926 (y1966-26) / photo: Bruce M. White.

On the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, this exhibition looks beyond those events to address the long-term flux of built environments—their birth and evolution, disappearance and excavation, re-use and re-invention—as a mode of continuity that defines history and civilization. The exhibition will serve as the capstone event in a yearlong collaborative exploration entitled “Memory and the Work of Art,” organized by arts and cultural organizations at Princeton University and in the Princeton community.

Frith Series. York, Railway Station, after 1877. Princeton University Art Museum. Museum purchase, anonymous gift.

As Princeton's first professor of the history of photography, from 1972 to 2002, Peter C. Bunnell mentored a generation of scholar-curators while building one of the great North American teaching collections. In celebration of the endowment of the Peter C. Bunnell Curatorship of Photography, this exhibition presents a “timeline” of works representing the major photography exhibitions mounted at the Museum during Bunnell's years. Showcasing the great range of his scholarly interests, from the daguerreotype to Pictorialism to contemporary color photography, the exhibition chronicles the collection’s evolution from its beginnings to the turn of this century, by which time it numbered over 20,000 objects.

Lewis W. Hine, American, 1874–1940: An Industrial Design, 1920, Gelatin silver print, 34.1 x 24.6 cm. Anonymous gift (x1973-34).

How do you map time? Is history linear? The exhibition Cartographies of Time will explore graphic representations of European and American history, and the evolution of the modern timeline, through a selection of twenty-seven rarely seen books, manuscripts, charts, and other ingenious devices, drawn primarily from the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of the Princeton University Library. This exhibition is part of Memory and the Work of Art, a yearlong collaborative investigation into the arts and cultural memory, organized by arts and cultural organizations at Princeton University and in the Princeton community.

Petrus Apianus, German, 1495–1552: Astronomicum Caesareum, Ingolstadt: 1540. Bound printed book with hand colored woodcut illustrations, 45.4 x 32.3 cm. (volume). William H. Scheide Library, Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

The first overview of this pioneering artist’s work in the United States since 1985, this exhibition—hailed by the New York Times as “a gift of a show”—provides an unparalleled opportunity to view Schwitters’s experiments in depth, including a full-scale reconstruction of his walk-in sculptural environment, the Merzbau, never before seen in this region. Schwitters developed an unusual form of artistic practice, one that merged art and life, embraced disparate media, and utilized found objects and printed materials. His work bridges some of the period’s most important aesthetic movements, among them Dada, Constructivism, Expressionism, and abstraction, and it exerted a profound influence on artistic developments after World War II: Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns counted Schwitters among their sources of inspiration, and contemporary installation art is hardly imaginable without the precedent of the Merzbau.

Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage is organized by The Menil Collection, Houston.

Kurt Schwitters
Mz 371 bacco [Mz 371 bacco], 1922
Collage of cut and torn printed, handwritten, tissue, and coated papers on paperboard
Sheet: 11; Image: 6-1/4 x Sheet: 7-1/2; Image: 4-7/8 inches
The Menil Collection, Houston
Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston
© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

During the eighteenth century, Rome became the ultimate destination for upper middle class tourists from Northern Europe and Britain. This exhibition explores the ways in which artists sought to give visual form to the Grand Tour, with a particular emphasis on the city views, or vedute of the printmaker Giuseppe Vasi. Also showcased are paintings, etchings, and maps of ancient and modern Rome by Canaletto, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Giuseppe Nolli—together with other collectibles, including caricatures and fashionable portraits of Roman citizens and British aristocrats. Captured with an eye for antiquity, topography, and social life, the works on display provide a compelling perspective on a great world capital in the age of the Grand Tour.”

Organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene.

Hubert Robert, French, 1733-1808
A View of the Loggia at Villa Madama, with Artist Sketching
1760
Red chalk on cream laid paper
49.3 x 36.0 cm. (19 7/16 x 14 3/16 in.)
Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund and Laura Hall Memorial Fund in honor of David Coffin, Class of 1940 and Graduate School Class of 1954
2003-246
photo: Bruce M. White

What is the relationship between land and people in China, and how has it changed from past to present? Mountains as towering peaks bringing man close to the heavens, or as earthen ranges marking "dragon veins," serve as the geography in which human beings live and roam. Selected from the Museum and private collections of Chinese painting, prints, and photography, various ways of imaging man's relationship to mountains are explored through the ages. In traditional China, it can be said that people lived in balance between the unpredictable forces of nature and the manufactured order of civilization. In this sense, cultural development can be viewed as a struggle to impose order on the world of mountains and streams.

Zhang Huan, born 1965, and Beijing East Village performers: To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, performance at Miaofeng Mountain, Beijing, May 22, 1995. Archival pigment print, edition 4/21, 83.0 x 124.8 cm. Museum purchase, Asian Art Department Fund and Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund [2010-122] © Zuoxiao Zuzhou / photo Bruce M. White.

Tōkaidō, the three-hundred mile travel route from Edo (present-day Tokyo) to Kyoto with fifty-five stops, became a popular subject for Japanese artists since the nineteenth century. This exhibition showcases prints from the different editions of more than a thousand Tōkaidō prints that Andō Hiroshige (1797-1858), one of the most famous Japanese woodblock print artists, designed. Also featured are handscrolls and an illustrated book on the same subject recaptured by twentieth-century artists.

Japanese, Edo period, 1600–-1868, Andō Hiroshige, 1797–-1858: Shōno, from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (Tōkaidō gojüsan tsugi no uchi: Shōno),1832-34. Woodblock print, (ōban yoko-e format); ink and color on paper, 24 x 36.4 cm. Gift from the collection of Anne van Biema (1997-550).

Over the last ten years, “land” and “space” have become pressing subjects for artistic investigation, so much so that we can now speak of a new generation of environmental artists. Nobody's Property will explore this development and probe the reasons for its appearance at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The exhibition features the work of seven artists and two artist-teams: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Yael Bartana, Andrea Geyer, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Emre Hüner, Matthew Day Jackson, Lucy Raven, and Santiago Sierra. Using media that range from video and photography to digital animation, performance, and assemblage, these artists parse the economic, geopolitical, and phantasmatic conditions of land and space.

Lucy Raven, American, born 1977
China Town, 2009
Photographic animation, running time 51:30 minutes
Courtesy of the artist

When asked, in 1942, whether he worked from nature, painter Jackson Pollock replied: “I am nature.” In the 1940s and 1950s, whether working in abstract or realist modes, artists began to regard the artwork as a microcosm in which forces in the larger universe (harmony, conflict, complexity) came into focus through a living lens, the artist. This two-part international overview unites photographs of the midcentury decades with contemporaneous paintings, prints, and drawings. Featured artists include Barbara Morgan, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Peter Blume, Lotte Jacobi, Roberto Matta, and Otto Steinert.

Barbara Morgan, American, 1900–1992
Pure Energy & Neurotic Man
1940, print 1980
Gelatin silver print
image: 47.1 x 38.6 cm.
sheet: 51 x 40.4 cm.
Gift of Douglas and Liliane Morgan
x1987-90
© 1980 Barbara Morgan
photo: Bruce M. White

Gauguin's Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints will be on view in the Art Museum from September 25, 2010 to January 2, 2011. The exhibition will focus on the ten revolutionary Noa Noa (Fragrance) woodcuts produced by Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) in Paris during the winter and spring of 1893-94 following the artist's first Tahitian voyage.

Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa Prints is made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Joseph L. Shulman Foundation Fund for Publications, the Frances E. and Elias Wolf, Class of 1920, Fund, the Judith and Anthony B. Evnin, Class of 1962, Exhibition Fund, an anonymous foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Partners and Friends of the Princeton University Art Museum.

Paul Gauguin, French, 1848–-1903
Printed by Pola Gauguin
L'Univers est créé (The Universe is Created), 1893–94, printed in 1921
Woodcut printed in black and light gray ink on light gray Japanese paper, 26.8 x 43.2 cm.
Museum purchase, Felton Gibbons Fund
[2009-106](Photo: Bruce M. White)

Green, Amber, Cream is a special research exhibition brings together Princeton, Metropolitan, and Philadelphia sculptures to introduce the almost forgotten art of the Ming period in hopes of finding additional surviving examples and information.

Chinese, Ming dynasty, 1368-–1644
Qiao Bin, the younger, act. ca. 1480-after 1500
Guanyin, 1500 Earthenware with tri-color (sancai) glaze
h. 68.5 cm
Museum purchase, in memory of Frederick W. Mote through the Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund
[2005-63] (Photo: Bruce M. White)

Screened from dusk to 11:00 p.m. every day.

Installed on the Museum's front lawn, Doug Aitken's monumental video installation migration (empire) (2008) reflects poignantly on the experience of migration, a subject steeped in American history, as well as on the loss of open spaces and protected wilderness. Projected onto a custom-designed billboard, the video will be on view from dusk to 11:00 p.m. every evening. migration (empire) was recently acquired by the Museum, where it joins a growing body of video by contemporary artists.

Doug Aitken (American, born 1968). migration (empire), 2008.
Single channel video projection with billboard (steel and PVC projection screen);
24 minute loop; billboard: 30.7 x 46.7 x 11.4 m. Princeton University Art Museum
Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund.
©2008, Doug Aitken / Image courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York.

Starburst, the first-ever museum survey of the "New Color Photography" in the 1970s, stars 18 artists who fast-forwarded their medium out of its black-and-white past and put it at the center of contemporary art. The exhibition features generous bodies of work by eighteen artists, from the still-prominent, such as Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Jan Groover, and Joel Sternfeld, to key figures of the period, including Eve Sonneman, Neal Slavin, John Pfahl, and Barbara Kasten. Organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum.

Presented with the generous support of The Carl Jacobs Foundation, Fund Evaluation Group, and LPK. Further support has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kathleen C. Sherrerd Program Fund for American Art, the Frances E. and Elias Wolf Fund, and the Partners and Friends of the Princeton University Art Museum.

Stephen Shore, American, born 1947
Sault Ste.-Marie, Ontario, August 13, 1974, 1974
Chromegenic print, 20 x 24 in.
© Stephen Shore, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Centered upon an image of the Remembrance bell erected on Princeton’s campus in memory of the 13 alumni who tragically lost their lives on September 11, 2001, this exhibition features new gifts from the artist as well as older favorites from the Museum's and University's collections, highlighting one of the great ceramic artists of the twentieth century. Contemporary artist Toshiko Takaezu's ceramics have many unique attributes. She is perhaps best known for closing the vessel form to render it useless as a functional object, transforming into solely an aesthetic sculpture. In this seemingly simple act, Takaezu's pieces gain presence and resonates sound that lingers into memory.

Toshiko Takaezu, American, born 1922
White Tamarind, 1970s
Stoneware, 89 cm.
Gift of the artist
©1970, Toshiko Takaezu
[2008-13] (Photo: Bruce M. White)

Extended by popular demand!!! Presenting selected paintings, prints, ceramics, lacquers, and photographs, this exhibition aims to showcase various renditions of nature—birds, insects, beasts, flower, and plants—in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean art. The works on display exemplify different ways in which nature is represented, from observation based studies to symbolic devices of auspicious messages, manifestations of virtue, to ornamental motifs. A perfect outing for summer, this exhibition offers a diverse representation of nature the rich meanings embedded within that is both visually pleasant and intellectually fulfilling.

Chinese, Ming dynasty, 1368-1644
Wu Weiqian
Manchurian Crane, Deer, Pine, Plum, Rocks, and Flowers, ca. 16th century
Hanging scroll; ink and colors on silk, 177.7 x 94.2 cm.
Gift of DuBois Schanck Morris, Class of 1893
[y1947-231] (Photo: Bruce M. White)

Inner Sanctum: Memory and Meaning in Princeton's Faculty Room at Nassau Hall takes viewers inside Princeton University’s historic Nassau Hall to explore the Faculty Room’s role as the symbolic center of Princeton and venerable repository of its institutional memory, and looks at how the room and its portrait collection both reflect and helped shape the University’s identity. Located at the heart of the Princeton campus, the Faculty Room served as a prayer hall, library, and museum—as well as the seat of the U.S. government for a few critical months in 1783—until University President Woodrow Wilson had it remodeled in 1906 for executive and ceremonial use, installing a remarkable collection of portraits depicting University founders, American presidents, British monarchs, clergymen, scholars, scientists and others. The exhibition traces the Faculty Room’s changing function and symbolic role, while the diverse portraits on its walls tell the story of Princeton's evolution from a small school of dissident theologians to the world-renowned research university it is today.

Inner Sanctum is on view Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Sunday, 1:00 to 5:00 p.m.

Sidney Edward Dickinson, American, (1890-1980)
Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), Class of 1879, University President (1902-1910), 1929
Oil on canvas
Gift of William Church Osborn, Class of 1883, and friends
(Photo: Bruce M. White)

Devoted to the surprising and diverse tradition of nested imagery, Pictures of Pictures explores the ingenious way in which artists create one picture within another. Drawn from the Museum's collections, the fifty objects in this exhibition include prints, photographs, collages, paintings, and sculptures, and span centuries, ranging from a seventeenth–century Alsatian still-life of precious objects to a Japanese woodblock print of a merchant and his painted fans. The exhibition also casts fresh light on the postmodern practice of appropriation by placing classics of the genre side-by-side with their inspiration. Pictures of Pictures, with its examination of paintings of paintings, sculptures of sculptures, drawings of drawings, and photographs of photographs, comes together to offer an experience that is at once witty and profound.

Chinese, Modern period, 1912–present
Wang Ruihui
Grandparents and Grandchildren Before a Portrait of Mao
Gouache on paper, 57 x 43.2 cm.
Museum purchase
[2003-28] (Photo: Bruce M. White)

Discover the puzzling history of two of François Boucher's finest works, Arion on the Dolphin and Vertumnus and Pomona. Commissioned in the mid-eighteenth century by Louis XV, these works symbolizing water and earth were originally intended as part of a series representing the Four Elements. Then why were the companion pieces of Fire and Air never executed? Why was the commission abandoned? Reunited for the first time in over twenty years, these works, in conjunction with several loans and other holdings from the Princeton University Art Museum's collection, give consideration to the mysteries surrounding one of France's most successful painters.

François Boucher, French, 1703–1770
Arion on the Dolphin, 1748
Oil on canvas, 86.0 x 135.5 cm
Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund
[y1980-2] (Photo: Bruce M. White)

The exhibition will be the first of its kind devoted to the topic of Byzantine architectural representation, challenging long-held assumptions in Western art history and providing new ways of understanding Byzantine art and architecture from A.D. 300 to the early nineteenth century.

Icon of Saint Dimitrios
Crete (?), late 16th–early 17th century
Tempera on wood, 108 x 82.5 x 9 cm
Museum of Antivouniotissa, Corfu, Greece
[Photo courtesy of the Museum of Antivouniotissa, Corfu, Greece]

The Princeton University Art Museum hosts Artistic Realization Technologies (A.R.T.) and a very special exhibition of works by artists with physical disabilities. A.R.T. utilizes innovative techniques to help individuals express their creativity despite physical restrictions.

An opening reception will be held in the galleries from 6-8 p.m. on Thursday, February 25.

This exhibition explores representations of artistic identity in modern European and American art. The works on view span two centuries and utilize various media, but all engage with the nineteenth century myth of the “artist”: a rebellious, temperamental, and uniquely privileged social being who sees the world from a position of relative independence and genius. From Francisco Goya’s Self-Portrait as a smug, supercilious gentleman to contemporary works by Kiki Smith and Glenn Ligon that introduce issues of gender and race, these works track significant shifts in the conceptualization and representation of the modern artist. Drawing heavily on the Museum’s extensive collection of prints and drawings, Artist as Image features the works of Andy Warhol, Edgar Degas, Marc Chagall, Edvard Munch and other seldom-seen pieces like a self-portrait by Paul Cézanne.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes
Self-portrait, 1799
Etching and aquatint, also drypoint 31.8 x 22.1 cm.
Laura P. Hall Memorial Collection
[x1946-239]

The Annunciation by Giovanni Bezzi (Il Nosadella) is one of the finest treasures at the Princeton University Art Museum, and beginning on February 20, will be the focus of The Making of a Masterpiece: Nosadella’s Annunciation. Curated by Museum conservator Norman Muller, this exhibition offers an in-depth study of the creative process of this previously unexplored Mannerist artist. Preparatory sketches, drawings, and completed paintings join with newly prepared x-radiograph and infrared images to reveal the various stages of creation of this Bolognese painter.

Nosadella (Giovanni Francesco Bezzi), Italian, active 1550–1571
formerly attributed to Pellegrino Tibaldi, Italian, 1527–1596
The Annunciation
Oil on wooden panel, 107.3 x 78.8 cm.
Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund
[y1976-25] (Photo: Bruce M. White)

A special exhibition, on view for a short time only in the Peter B. Lewis Gallery, highlights programs offered by the Museum’s education department. This year’s exhibition celebrates the creativity of children who participated in the Frances Lange Public Schools program and the innovative tools and props used in the Museum's Touchable Tours for the Blind and Partially Sighted. Mini Masters will be open in conjunction with the Museum's Gala, the Black and White Ball. The annual Gala is the sole fundraising event dedicated to supporting the Museum's education and outreach efforts.

A research exhibition using Chinese and Western landscape works from the twelfth century to the present in an examination of what is meant by the term landscape.” Is landscape a subject or theme to be represented as natural scenery or imagined geography? Does it show a location in time—past, present, or future—or is it timeless, placeless, or sometimes even without form? This exhibition begins research into concepts of land as embodied in the arts as experiences between man and environment. How do Chinese experiences and notions of land accord with artistic representations and aesthetic perceptions of actual or idealized landscapes? Do such concepts differ from the Western experience of landscape?

Chinese Qing dynasty, 1644-1912
Xiao Chen, ca. 1645 - ca. 1715
Valley and Mountains, after Zhao Boju, undated; late 17th - early 18th century
Hanging scroll; ink and colors on silk
Gift of DuBois Schanck Morris, Class of 1893
[y1947-100] (Photo: Bruce M. White)

These compelling graphic images illustrate the changing appearance of the Devil in Western art from the Renaissance to the Romantic eras.

The exhibition celebrates the ongoing creative career of a great artist and legendary Princeton professor who retires at the end of 2009.

Edith and Moth Flight, Danville, Virginia, Emmet Gowin, SP2004.7, Photo: Bruce M. White

Gifts from the Ancestors is a major exhibition that brings to light the artistry and life practices of the hunters who worked across two millennia in what are now the American and Russian sides of Bering Strait.
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Life Objects: Rites of Passage in African Art features twenty-three superb works from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, and private collections. The online exhibition is now closed.

Photographers have been presenting Asia to the west through their photographs since the mid-nineteenth century, yet during this period paintings, ceramics, woodblock prints, and other forms of art have also served to document Asian moments, places, people, and events.

The exhibition presents selected works of Japanese and Chinese art from the museum's permanent collection, as well as recent gifts and new acquisitions in honor of Yoshiaki Shimizu, Princeton University Graduate School Class of 1975, the Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, who will retire this spring after twenty-five years of teaching.

Venturing outside the discipline of art history, this exhibition presents two dozen photographs from the museum's permanent collection in response to a philosophical question posed by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) in his 1950 lecture "The Thing."

Contemporary "Chinese" art has become the darling of international art exhibitors and collectors, but much of it looks alike to the audience and much of it is made in America. Looking at what is Chinese, contemporary, and American, Outside In: Chinese x American x Contemporary Art and its accompanying publication focus on the diversity of Chinese artistic styles today through an examination of the work and lives of six contemporary artists, often told in their own voices, all of whom are United States citizens and "American" artists deeply engaged in Chinese artistic traditions, style, subject matter, and philosophical outlook.

The recent acquisition of John Flaxman's Angels Guiding a Soul to Heaven provides the occasion to exhibit this unusually large and mystical work together with a small selection from the museum's collection of more than seventy drawings by the artist.

This installation features six works by Nuremberg-born Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), the most prodigious artist of the German Renaissance.

The Princeton University Art Museum will be the first and only venue in the United States for Myth and Modernity: Ernst Barlach's Images of the Nibelungen and Faust, an exhibition conveying the versatility and narrative power of the German sculptor, printmaker, and playwright Ernst Barlach (1870-1938).

A special exhibition of children's art inspired by works in the museum's collections and exhibitions. The exhibition celebrates the creativity of children who participated in museum programs throughout the year. "Mini Masters" opens in conjunction with the museum's annual Friends Gala, "aMUSEment". The Gala is the sole fundraising event dedicated to supporting the museum's educational and outreach efforts.

Featuring selected works from the permanent collection, More than One explores the nuances of syntax and sense in multi-image photographic art. The exhibition and the 2008 issue of the Record mark the centennial of photographic artist, editor, and educator Minor White (1908-1976).

Recognized as one of the great structural artists of the twentieth century, Spanish-born Felix Candela (1910-1997) designed and built innovative thin shell concrete roof structures using the hyperbolic paraboloid geometric form. The exhibition examines Candela's process of design and construction through several of his most significant works.

The exhibition features twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of art that focus on the body as subject, medium, or expressive device. Prints, drawings, collages, and performance documents will be displayed alongside historical photographs that invite comparison to contemporary art through their diversity of thematic concerns and visual modes.

Frank Gehry: On Line celebrates the inauguration of the Princeton University's Peter B. Lewis Science Library, designed by Gehry Partners. The exhibition features thirty-one original drawings by the renowned architect and several models for his buildings. The sketches, some of which have never been published, represent a wide array of projects culled from the last two decades, ranging geographically from the United States and Canada, to Germany, Spain, Great Britain, and Israel.

The exhibition, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, focuses on Jasper Johns's first sculpture, Light Bulb I (1958), and brings together for the first time the artist's light bulb sculptures and all of the related drawings and prints, including several from the artist's collection that have never before been exhibited.

Featuring twelve paintings and calligraphies from Qing dynasty (1655-1912) imperial collections, the exhibition examines the provenance of each object and considers the object within its new context, far from its country of origin.

The museum celebrates the fiftieth reunion of distinguished artist and alumnus Frank Stella with an exhibition of his paintings, drawings, and prints. Ranging in date from 1958 to 1997, the works demonstrate Stella's bold experiments with shape, structure, composition, and color.

A group of early paintings and drawings by Andy Warhol on loan from the Ileana and Michael Sonnabend Collection will be presented with works by other artists from the late 1950s and early 1960s to trace Warhol's stylistic influences and evolution.

The museum celebrates its 125th anniversary with an exhibition featuring many of its most important works selected from among the museum's distinguished holdings. An Educated Eye also commemorates the publication of the Princeton University Art Museum Handbook of the Collections, the first comprehensive guide of the permanent collection in more than twenty years.