Assistant/Associate Curator, European Paintings

About the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art collects, studies, conserves, and presents significant works of art across all times and cultures in order to connect people to creativity, knowledge, and ideas. Occupying three iconic sites in New York City, The Met is one of the most comprehensive art museums in the world. Its collections span the art of the globe from Asian to American, ancient to the contemporary. Committed to its mission to create a place of encounters between the present and the past, the familiar and the unfamiliar, it endeavors to engage a local as well as global audience with thought-provoking installations, exhibitions, and programs based on the scholarship and of its curatorial and educational staff.

About the European Paintings collection
The Met's celebrated European Paintings collection encompasses more than 2,500 works of art from the thirteenth through the early twentieth century. Apart from individual masterpieces by artists as diverse as Jan van Eyck, Caravaggio, and Gustav Klimt, The Met possesses a rich display of early Italian and Northern art, along with one of the world's greatest collections of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, including outstanding works by Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and Johannes Vermeer. The Museum's holdings of El Greco and Goya are the finest outside of Spain. Its galleries of nineteenth-century French paintings are second only to the museums of Paris, presenting in depth the art of Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and others. The collection traces its origins to the Museum's founding purchase of 174 paintings from European dealers in 1871. Since then, numerous donations, bequests, and curatorial purchases have greatly enriched the department's holdings. In recent years, the department has built up a notable collection of seventeenth-century Italian painting; acquired an unrivalled survey of plein-air oil sketches from the decades before Impressionism; and expanded its display of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Northern and Central European art. As it grows, the collections reflects our constantly evolving ideas about art history and offers new opportunities for discovery by the public and scholars alike.

General Statement of Duties and Responsibilities:
The Assistant/Associate Curator will be a full-time member of the seven-person curatorial team of European Paintings, responsible for the collection of French, Spanish and Italian paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries (currently, numbering just under four hundred pictures). The applicant should therefore have a strong background and established publishing history in one or more of those areas. He/she will be responsible for performing such curatorial duties as: researching and studying works currently in the collection; recommending acquisitions; proposing exhibitions and research projects; maintaining and updating the online catalogue; working with colleagues in the museum and academic world as well as with dealers and auctioneers, and cultivating Museum trustees, collectors and other supporters. The ideal candidate will not only have an established reputation in his or her field, but will be someone passionately interested in connoisseurship and in shaping the European Painting Department’s collection through display, gifts and purchase for the next generation; someone deeply committed to the Museum's mission of public engagement and outreach.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES & DUTIES:
- Commitment to scholarship in the fields of French, Spanish, and/or Italian painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to communicating the results of that scholarship to a broad public; contributing to the online catalogue
- Gallery installations with the attendant tasks of research, label writing and participating in digital platforms such as blogs
- Organize exhibitions that have the potential of redefining an artist, period, or work of art
- Participate in the Museum's public education and outreach programs
- Foster and maintain good working relationships with donors, trustees, and colleagues from other institutions in the U.S. and abroad as well as with the scholarly community, dealers and collectors; actively cultivate potential sponsors, including departmental support groups;

REQUIREMENTS & QUALIFICATIONS: Experience and Skills:
- Three to six years curatorial experience preferred
- Competency in French, Spanish and/or Italian languages
Knowledge and Education:
- Ph.D. in art history with a specialization in at least one of the following: French, Spanish and Italian painting of the seventeenth and/or eighteenth centuries
Please e-mail applications to careersmetmuseum.org. Please put the following in the subject line of the e-mail: Dept-European Paintings-Assistant Curator

The Metropolitan Museum of Art provides equal opportunity to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, age, mental or physical disability, pregnancy, alienage or citizenship status, marital status or domestic partner status, genetic information, genetic predisposition or carrier status, gender identity, HIV status, military status and any other category protected by law in all employment decisions, including but not limited to recruitment, hiring, compensation, training and apprenticeship, promotion, upgrading, demotion, downgrading, transfer, lay-off and termination, and all other terms and conditions of employment. AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, and national service alumni encouraged to apply.