Rembrandt seldom needs an introduction. But several works by the Dutch Golden Age artist have never made their way to American audiences, a distinction that will change next year with a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, organized with the Louvre, the Met announced Thursday.
At least three Rembrandts never seen in the United States (“Bathsheba Holding King David’s Letter,” “Oath of the Batavians” and “Woman Bathing in a Stream”) will go on view, joining more than 120 paintings, prints and drawings from over 40 lenders in “Rembrandt and the Ancients,” which opens in November 2027. The show moves to the Louvre in March 2028.
Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, a Met curator of European drawings and prints, is organizing the exhibition with Blaise Ducos, curator of Dutch and Flemish paintings at the Louvre. Seidenstein said in an interview that the exhibition explores Rembrandt’s fascination with antiquity, tracing what she described as “this relationship between tradition and innovation and this idea of the past as a lens for the present.”
She added that one of her favorite Rembrandts is “Bathsheba,” which captures the subject’s moral dilemma as she reflects on a summons she has received from the king. Seidenstein called it “a masterpiece of painting and one of the artist’s most affecting treatments of emotion and psychological interiority.” The Met has also borrowed from the National Roman Museum an ancient relief, known to Rembrandt through a print, that inspired the foot-washing ritual in “Bathsheba.”
The Louvre quickly emerged as a natural partner — there have been joint exhibitions before — “Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio” and “Cast in Bronze: French Sculpture from Renaissance to Revolution.” The Met owns 20 paintings attributed to Rembrandt’s own hand, 11 drawings and hundreds of impressions of his etchings.
For “Rembrandt and the Ancients,” the Met will contribute four paintings, three drawings and 11 prints, while the Louvre will lend two paintings and two drawings by the artist.
Among the Met’s contributions is “Aristotle With a Bust of Homer,” which last left the museum 56 years ago.
While this is the largest Rembrandt exhibition at the Met in 20 years, Dutch art has been central since its founding in 1870, just as New York, once the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, has deep ties to the Netherlands. It makes the artist’s enduring prominence part of a much longer cultural history.
The work of two contemporary artists will also offer American audiences a new perspective at the Met next year — as the construction of its Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art gets underway in earnest. The museum announced on Thursday that its facade commission — which invites artists to transform its niches along Fifth Avenue into an exhibition space — goes to Danh Vo, the Vietnamese-born artist who lives and works in Berlin and Mexico City.
Vo’s work uses objects to expose the histories and power structures they carry. In 2018, a midcareer survey, “Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away,” was at the Guggenheim. (Vo has a solo exhibition ongoing at White Cube New York through Friday.)
“He is one of the most deft thinkers about history and how objects hold history, and that’s what the Met does,” said David Breslin, the Met’s curator in charge of modern and contemporary art. “We recontextualize objects and histories to make them visceral and present to new audiences.”
That approach runs through Vo’s sculptural practice. In “We the People” (2014), he created a copper replica of the Statue of Liberty, divided into 250 fragments, inviting viewers to reconsider ideals of freedom. For “Lot 20. Two Kennedy Administration Cabinet Room Chairs” (2013), Vo stripped the leather from two original chairs from John F. Kennedy’s Cabinet Room, exposing their underlying materials in a critique of the Vietnam War.
The Met — which is currently displaying four sculptures by Liu Wei, a Beijing-based artist, through June 8, 2027 — entrusts its facade artists with an unusual degree of creative freedom, Breslin said. “There’s a type of bravery to take this out of our hands and say to an artist, ‘This is up to you.’”
That freedom is integral to Vo’s creativity. “I’m just concerned that I can do whatever I want to,” Vo said in an interview.
Vo has yet to reveal plans for the facade, which will be unveiled on Sept. 16, 2027. “I don’t have any ideas,” he said. “It’s a very difficult space to deal with.”
The Met also announced that Sandra Mujinga, born in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, and raised in Norway, will be the creator of its 2027 Great Hall Commission. Mujinga’s past work has included sculpture, text, performance and digital media, often exploring political themes. Her installation will be on view starting Nov. 4, 2027.
Between Rembrandt, Vo and Mujinga, the Met’s 2027 season will bring artists and ideas from disparate centuries and continents into fresh conversation, inviting audiences to see familiar histories in unfamiliar ways. “If our audiences begin to feel like they know what’s going to happen next,” Breslin said, “I’m not and the museum isn’t doing its job.”
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