"Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting"

Metropolitan Museum of Art
5th Avenue at 86th Street
March 4 to April 8, 2003

By a stroke of good fortune, the Metropolitan Museum currently has an exhibition displaying the cultural context within which the creation of Bizet's Carmen occurred -- namely the reception in France, by French 19th-century painters, predominantly realist and impressionist painters, of Spanish visual culture.

This exhibition examines the impact of Spanish painting on French artists, presenting some 150 paintings by masters of Spain's Golden Age -- Velázquez, Murillo, Ribera, El Greco, and Zurbarán -- as well as masterpieces by the 19th-century French artists they influenced, among them Delacroix, Courbet, Millet, Degas, and, most notably, Manet.

This offers Music Humanities students an unrivaled opportunity to absorb the background the the opera offered by New York City Opera on its visits of April 7-8 this semester. For further information, visit the exhibition's Web site:

"The French Taste for Spanish Painting"