Published to coincide with the 150th anniverary of the battle of Gettysburg, features both familiar and rarely seen Civil War images from such photographers as George Barnard, Mathew Brady, and Timothy O'Sullivan.

The Met’s collection of drawings, prints, and photographs is an expansive work in progress and is considered one of the nation’s greatest repositories of humanity’s creativity. This Bulletin celebrates the centennial of the founding of the Department of Prints. William M. Ivins, the visionary founding curator of the department, had an expansive view of what constituted a “work on paper”—a philosophy that informed much of The Met’s collecting over the next century. The result today is a comprehensive repository reflecting an astonishing diversity of artists, genres, and media. Arranged as a provocative series of pairings—one drawing or print with one photograph—this Bulletin invites the reader to find connections and divergences between works of art that are rarely seen together, ranging in date from the fifteenth century to present day.

This special issue of the Bulletin reflects on some of the crises gripping our world in the present moment, including the catastrophic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the continuing tragedy of racial injustice. Voices from The Metropolitan Museum of Art present their personal perspectives on issues and challenges facing us all while connecting these difficult times to art, artists, and the Museum’s history. Conceived and written during the Museum’s unprecedented closure, this compelling publication reflects on art’s power to inspire, comfort, and heal.

The second volume in a special two-part edition of Recent Acquisitions, this Bulletin celebrates works acquired by the Museum in 2019 and 2020, many of which were gifts bestowed in honor of the Museum’s 150th anniversary year. Highlights of this volume include Jean-Baptise Carpeaux’s astonishing portrayal of an African woman in the marble sculpture Why Born Enslaved!, a monumental storage jar by African American potter and poet David Drake, an exquisite lacquer mirror case depicting an 1838 meeting between the crown prince of Iran and the tsar of Russia, and Carmen Herrera’s abstract work dating to 1949, Iberic. This publication also honors the many generous contributions from donors that make possible the continued growth of The Met's collection.

Every two years the fall issue of The Met's quarterly Bulletin celebrates notable recent acquisitions and gifts to the collection. Highlights of Recent Acquisitions 2022–2024 include the monumental handscroll painting Streams and Mountains without End, a masterwork by the Qing-dynasty painter Wang Yuanqi; the nineteenth century painting Bélizaire and the Frey Children which offers a rare depiction of an identified Black teenager with the children of his enslaver; Helene Schjerfbeck’s The Lace Shawl, which is a layered, dramatic portrait of the artist’s friend and landlady. Meanwhile, Leopoldo Méndez’s linocut depiction of the great Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada expands the already distinguished collection of twentieth-century Mexican graphic arts in the Department of Drawings and Prints. This publication also honors the many generous contributions from donors that make possible the continued growth of The Met collection.

An unprecedented overview of the early work of a preeminent 20th-century artist Diane Arbus (1923-1971) is one of the most distinctive and provocative artists of the twentieth century. Her photographs of children and eccentrics, couples and circus performers, female impersonators and nudists, are among the most recognizable images of our time. This book is the definitive study of the artist's first seven years of work, from 1956 to 1962. Drawn primarily from the rich holdings of the Metropolitan Museum's Diane Arbus Archive--a remarkable treasury of photographs, negatives, appointment books, notebooks, and correspondence--it is an essential contribution to our understanding of Arbus and her oeuvre. diane arbus: in the beginning showcases over 100 of the artist's early photographs, more than half of which are published here for the first time. The book provides a crucial, in-depth presentation of the artist's genesis, showing Arbus as she developed her evocative and often haunting imagery. The photographs featured in this handsome volume reveal an artist defining her style, honing her subject matter, and in full possession of the many gifts for which she is now recognized the world over.

This new study of nineteenth-century American photography presents a bottom-up history of the United States, featuring works by lesser-known practitioners that capture the changing scene across the country In this groundbreaking history of early American photography, Jeff L. Rosenheim explores how the medium's evolution as a cultural, commercial, and artistic preoccupation mirrored the dramatic development of the nation's sense of itself before, during, and after the Civil War and throughout its westward expansion. Alongside acknowledged early masters such as Josiah Johnson Hawes and Carleton E. Watkins, this publication highlights exceptional portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes produced by little-known makers in small towns and cities outside the major urban centers. These daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, cyanotypes, cabinet cards, and gelatin silver prints span the gamut of early formats and processes and present a portrait of the burgeoning nation outside of the traditional grand narratives. Tracing the history of technological advances--such as the advent of the Kodak roll-film camera in the 1880s, which increased the accessibility of the medium--this landmark publication both highlights photography as the most democratic of art forms and celebrates the beguiling physical materiality that photographs possessed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (TBD)