The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Department of Drawings and Prints has installed a new rotation in the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery titled "Allegory and Abstraction." The exhibition features up to 100 works on paper, including Henri Matisse's 1947 series "Jazz," Louise Bourgeois's "He Disappeared into Complete Silence" (1947), and watercolors by J.M.W. Turner and Thomas Girtin marking the 250th anniversary of their births. The show explores how artists embed complex meanings through symbols (allegory) or through line, color, and pattern (abstraction).
The exhibition matters because it highlights the vast and light-sensitive collection of over one million works on paper, which can only be displayed for limited periods. By rotating four times a year, the department offers fresh perspectives on the breadth of European and American art from 1400 to the present, while this particular installation draws connections between historical and modern approaches to layered meaning in art.