Among the most compelling of Nicholas Nixon’s series of photographs are the portraits that he has made of his close-knit family. These photographs, taken over time, explore the nature of long-committed relationships. The exhibition features the entire sequence of the celebrated portraits of...
The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), has graciously lent The Sower, painted in the town of Arles in southern France in November of 1888. It is shown in the Sidney and Esther Rabb Gallery with a work that van Gogh had known through reproductions since at least the early...
The Shahnama, often called the "national epic" of Iran, was completed around the year 1010 by the Persian poet Abu'l Qasim Firdawsi. A vast and complex poem, it opens with the creation of the world and concludes with the Muslim conquest of Iran in the mid-seventh century, thus...
For the "Signs and Symbols" project, children from after-school programs and community organizations across Boston looked at how words and characters are paired together to convey messages. Working with Cambridge-based artist and author Caleb Neelon, the children then created signs...
This year’s “SMFA Traveling Scholars” exhibition features works by five Museum School alumni who each received the prestigious Traveling Scholarship Award in 2008. The artists traveled locally and internationally and produced a new body of work on view in the exhibition. Fresh and...
Tattooing became an important feature of Japanese urban popular culture in the early 19th century, influenced strongly by the success of a series of woodblock prints featuring Chinese martial arts heroes with spectacular tattoos, vividly imagined by the artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Tattoo artists...
Luis Meléndez (1716–1780) was the greatest still life painter of 18th-century Spain. An accomplished painter of miniatures, he began creating still lifes as early as 1759. In 1771 he was awarded a commission from the Prince of Asturias (later Charles IV), an avid amateur of the new...
By juxtaposing pieces from Africa and Oceania selected from private collections with photographs, “Object, Image, Collector” explores the complex intertwining of the histories of these objects, photography, and collecting. Objects from the African continent and the Pacific came to...
Albrecht Dürer was the pivotal figure of Late Gothic and High Renaissance German art. He remains, after 500 years—like Rembrandt, Goya, and Picasso—one of the supreme masters of printmaking. His engravings and woodcuts are a dazzling combination of observation, imagination, and...
The French aristocrat Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), one of the most innovative artists of the late nineteenth century, is known for his bold and subtle images of performers in the centers of Parisian entertainment in the 1880s and 1890s: the café-concerts and cabaret nightclubs in...
Harry Callahan was one of the most innovative photographers working in America in the mid-twentieth century. Images of his wife, Eleanor; passers-by on the street; cityscapes; landscapes; close-ups from nature; multiple exposures; and darkroom abstractions reveal the elegantly spare formalism and...
Shinto is not an organized religion or even a unified system of beliefs. Instead, the Japanese use the word to describe a whole group of religious ideas and practices focused on the forces of nature and ancestors, both mythological and real. Originally, Shinto did not use images. The various...
“Bharat Ratna,” which translates literally to the “Jewel of India,” presents a selection of outstanding works by some of India’s most celebrated modern painters. Drawn from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Rajiv Jahangir Chaudhri, the exhibition focuses on a generation...
Nagoya and Boston Exchange Artwork This exhibition marks the sixth annual exchange between young people in Nagoya, Japan, and Boston. This unique project links young audiences and celebrates the international partnership between the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts,...
In a 1915 excavation, archaeologists from the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition discovered the entrance to a tomb at the picturesque site of Deir el-Bersha in Egypt. Inside, the MFA team found, in jumbled array, the largest burial assemblage of the Middle Kingdom (2040-1640...
More than 400 years ago, Japan forged strong trading partnerships with China and the West, and Japan’s lacquer and porcelains were among the most sought-after luxuries in the world. Although Japan largely closed itself to the West around 1640 to preserve domestic stability, Chinese and Dutch...
.crop_.result_listing.jpg "Noh costume (karaori), Japanese, Edo period, 19th century")
Just as the stories of many No plays—peopled with historic and legendary figures, gods, spirits, and ghosts—are drawn from the classical literature of the Heian (794–1185) or Kamakura (1185–1336) periods, the robes worn by the actors recall court costumes of the Nara (710...
The Carpenter gallery is usually home to Chinese paintings, of which the Museum of Fine Arts holds one of the world’s great collections. The current exhibition is a departure. It does feature some Chinese paintings, but it also includes works from Tibet. Since the fourteenth century, Chinese...
Using selections from the Museum’s collection of Persian paintings for inspiration, Conley Harris, an artist and collector of Indian and Persian art, has created six interpretative works depicting a continuing theme in Persian paintings: animals and landscape. Displayed beside the Museum...
Look back to the glorious past of the ancient Japanese imperial capital of Kyoto, originally called Heian-kyō, as it was envisioned by artists of the ukiyo-e school working many centuries later in the city of Edo (modern Tokyo). The exquisitely refined court culture of the Heian period (794-1185...
In 1915, architect Charles Greene (1868-1957) wrote, "I seek till I find what is truly useful, and then I try to make it beautiful." The architecture and decorative arts designed by Charles and his brother Henry Greene (1870-1954) a century ago are now recognized internationally as among...
Technology has rendered music more accessible and pervasive than ever before. MP3 players are omnipresent; every cell phone can make a statement about the owner's musical taste. Music is everywhere, and in the process has become both more public and more private. We all travel through life with...
Alberto Beltran's large drawing titled "Vida y drama de Mexico," made in 1957 as a preparatory design for a poster, sums up the spirit of this exhibition, which shows that twentieth-century Mexican printmakers recorded contemporary life and all its complexity in a distinctly modern...
In the decades following the Constitution of 1917, Mexico became a powerful magnet for foreign artists and intellectuals drawn to its ideal climate, dramatic landscapes, and inexpensive cost of living. Photographer Edward Weston's early biographer, Nancy Newhall, described Mexico as his...
Boston's individual communities may appear to be unrelated, but by considering the city as a whole, we can begin to understand what we share, and revel in our differences. On view in the Courtyard Gallery, "Paper Telephone" is a collaborative artist's book made by children from...
This year's "SMFA Traveling Scholars" exhibition presents work by seven recipients of the 2007 Traveling Scholarship Awards given annually by the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Nicolas Brynolfson, Matthew Paul Cleary, Daniel Dueck, Daniel Johnson, Timothy A. Kadish, John...
In the sixteenth century, Venice was one of the largest and richest cities in Europe, and steady demand for paintings from both local and international clients fostered a climate of exceptional competition and innovation. "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice" is...
In keeping with the MFA's Venetian theme this spring and summer, a display of European and American canvases is on view in the Upper Hemicycle in "Mad on Color: Paintings of Nineteenth-Century Venice." Works by Renoir, Monet, Whistler, and others show the influence of Venice's...
The Museum recently acquired seventeen Japanese paintings largely produced and exhibited in Tokyo in the 1930s—the early Shōwa era—an overlooked period in the history of the arts in Japan. In many cases the subject matter, as well as the size, gave these paintings a commanding...
"Splendor and Elegance: European Decorative Arts and Drawings from the Horace Wood Brock Collection" features aristocratic European furniture and decorative arts, drawings, and paintings from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Organized chronologically, stylistically,...
Celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston-Kyoto Sister City relationship at this vibrant exhibition focusing on contemporary ceramics and prints created by artists in Kyoto and the surrounding Kansai region. Included are ceramics on loan from private collections, including the magnificent...
Artists have long taken advantage of the camera’s ability to capture expressive images of the human form—from gesture or body language, to straightforward documentation, to poetic metaphor. Celebrate with us the inauguration of the Herb Ritts Gallery, our first permanently dedicated to...
In the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), Suzhou was a center of beauty, thought, and culture. Many of the period's greatest minds eschewed civil service in favor of a life of refinement in China’s garden city, where they composed poems, wrote calligraphy, and produced paintings of great...
Samuel Pepys, the famous British diarist who often ended his daily entries with "and so to bed," wrote in 1663, "...bought my wife a chintz, that is, a painted Indian callico, for to line her new study, which is very pretty." During the later part of the seventeenth century,...
Widely known for her public monuments, including Water Tower (1998) in New York (now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art) and Holocaust Memorial (1995/2000) in Vienna, Rachel Whiteread considers the scale and structure of familiar forms through the overlooked spaces essential to their...
From the thirteenth through the fifteen centuries Zen monasteries were important centers of religious and cultural learning, but as a spiritual malaise gradually set in the painting and calligraphy traditions became formulaic. Through the leadership of monks such as Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1768...
In celebration of the 100th birthday of renowned photographer Yousuf Karsh (1908–2002), the MFA hosts an exhibition of the great portraitist’s work, offering a visual biography of this twentieth-century legend. Born in Armenia, settling first in Canada and eventually in the United...
From the ninth to the seventh centuries BC, the Assyrians emerged as the dominant power in the Near East, controlling all of present-day Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt, as well as large parts of Turkey and Iran. It was the largest empire known until that time. In their homeland...
Boston’s sister city for the past fifty years, Kyoto was the capital of Japan for over a thousand years, from its founding in 794 until the emperor moved to Tokyo in 1868. Today, the city’s many temples and palaces, and some of its older residential areas, still look much as they did...
Discussion with FBCG guild members: Aug 9: 11 am and 2 pm Aug 10: Noon and 2:30 pm From 1937 to 1968, General Motors Corporation conducted a student model "dream car" competition and "auto styling" talent search; college scholarships were awarded for the scale models...
This exhibition includes about 120 works by the leading designers and fabricators of late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Art Nouveau jewelry. Although many of these artists acquired their skills in traditional, high-style jewelry houses, they found inspiration in the work of the Pre-...
This select installation in the Lower Rotunda features masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism from the Lane Collection, including the lyrical Dancing Willows by Arthur G. Dove, shown above. Also on view are works by Stuart Davis, John Marin, Charles Sheeler, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
At the heart of the second floor of the Evans Wing, at the top of the great staircase that opens from the new State Street Corporation Fenway Entrance, enjoy a special installation of some of the MFA's greatest European portraits. Paintings and sculpture span the Renaissance to the twentieth...
As part of celebrating the renovation and re-opening of the State Street Corporation Fenway Entrance, this exhibition tells the story of the Museum's history, its architecture, and its vital role as a community resource and partner. Rarely seen historic photographs, paintings, sculpture,...
Selections from the Museum's rich collection of works by Winslow Homer (1836–1910) are on view in the Lee Gallery, just inside the newly opened State Street Corporation Fenway Entrance. From a childhood drawing through his late seascapes in oil, the exhibition includes designs for...
This groundbreaking exhibition examines a fascinating period (1598–1621) bracketed by the two giants of Spanish painting, El Greco and Velázquez. Discover the masterpieces of Philip III’s court and the artists who flourished during his reign. To separate themselves from Philip...
It is impossible to describe Antonio López García simply as a painter in the “realist” school. His masterful paintings of the prosaic, familiar places of his world and of the family and friends comprising it reveal an unusual sensitivity to his subject. Through...
In honor of the second Red Sox World Series Championship in four seasons and opening day in Japan and Boston, the MFA proudly presents "Rockwell and the Shinjin: Celebrating Baseball and the Red Sox." The exhibition, on view in the Upper Rotunda, features The Rookie by beloved American...
This select installation in the Lower Rotunda features masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism from the Lane Collection, including the iconic That Red One by Arthur G. Dove. Also on view are works by Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
"Kufic Korans," on display in the Islamic Corridor, features a broad range of visual cultures, from Egypt to Iran, united by an appreciation for beautiful Arabic text. Calligraphy serves many purposes in Islamic art, from conveying meaning to acting as decoration, and its importance...
The annual exhibition of work by recipients of the prestigious Traveling Scholarship Awards—three Museum School alumni and three Fifth Year students—is always an intriguing selection of challenging, original work by emerging contemporary artists. Modes of communication, intersection...
Featuring approximately one hundred lithographs, etchings, woodcuts and color linocuts by fourteen artists, “Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914-1939” examines the impact of Futurism and Cubism on British Modernist printmaking from the beginning of World War I to the beginning...
Throughout Asia birds and flowers have been cherished for their beauty, but they have carried rich symbolic messages as well. For example, the lotus—a delicate bloom born of the muck of a pond—was adopted early in India as a Buddhist metaphor for the beauty of the soul that can emerge...
Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) casts a long shadow over the modern history of Chinese painting. As a painter, he was known for his singular ability to mix traditional techniques and styles with contemporary ideas and currents. As a collector, he accumulated important examples from all genres of Chinese...
Scottish artist Jim Lambie is the third artist to participate in the series RSVPmfa, in which the Museum invites artists to consider the extraordinary collections, architecture, and grounds that comprise the Museum of Fine Arts as a background for the installation of their work. Lambie...
From its legendary prehistoric beginnings until the present day, sumô wrestling has dominated the world of traditional Japanese sport. Like Kabuki actors and noted courtesans, wrestlers were idols of the urban popular culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and so appeared...
"Drawing: A Broader Definition" brings together sixty-six objects from across the Museum’s collections to show various approaches to drawing on both paper and non-paper surfaces (for example, Mayan, Greek, Asian, and European ceramics; Etruscan bronze mirror backs; Egyptian...
Named for the Napoleonic Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Empire style is one of the grandest and most opulent in the history of decorative arts. Designs inspired by Greco-Roman antiquity were enlivened with bold colors, costly and elaborately worked materials, a massive...
The MFA celebrates its acquisition of a rare album of 264 cyanotypes by New Englander Arthur Wesley Dow with an installation of the blue-toned photographs alongside the artist’s color woodcuts. Inspired in the 1890s by the MFA's outstanding Japanese collection, the artist and educator...
While shoes serve a practical function by protecting our soles from the elements and hazards underfoot, they have also become highly ornamented objects of obsession. Whatever the materials or the cost, however, shoes always reflect the time and place in which they were made and worn and the...
One of the finest private holdings of Japanese art outside Japan, Dr. John C. Weber's collection has been formed over the last decade, a period during which the bursting of the economic bubble has forced several private museums and collectors to part with some of their most treasured...
This select installation in the Lower Rotunda features iconic paintings by Winslow Homer from the permanent collection, including Boys in a Pasture, The Lookout—“All’s Well,” and Driftwood. These are joined by the oil sketch The Dinner Horn and its related print as well as...
Encompassing works of art in a variety of media, this exhibition features nearly 120 highlights from the distinguished collection of Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick of California. Beginning in 1985, the Wornicks assembled a major collection of contemporary decorative arts, primarily by American...
With the establishment of Edo (modern-day Tokyo) as the major political and commercial center of Japan in the seventeenth century, artists developed a new imagery, known as ukiyo-e. Masters of the genre explored the daily activities of the city's inhabitants and detailed the stylish...