National Museum of Korea:
Collectors of Light

Collectors of Light is a special exhibition from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Met, at the National Museum of Korea in Seoul. Centred on the Robert Lehman Collection, it follows French painting and drawing from late nineteenth-century Impressionism to early twentieth-century Modernism. I had been looking through a good deal of Met material for work recently, so I was pleased to hear that the exhibition was coming to Seoul.

Bringing the Lehman Wing to Seoul

The Robert Lehman Collection grew out of the private collection assembled by the banker over sixty years. His bequest is said to have stipulated that the works be displayed in surroundings that evoked the atmosphere of the Lehman family home. The Robert Lehman Foundation's website shows the house as it was, while the Met's Lehman Wing page shows how that setting was recreated.

The National Museum of Korea explains that the exhibition's opening space also draws on the domestic atmosphere of the Lehman Wing. During my visit, I wondered whether the red walls and curtains were meant to suggest an American theatre interior of the period. It was interesting to discover afterwards that they referred to the Met's Lehman Wing, and, further back, to Lehman's wishes for his collection.

From Taipei to Seoul

The exhibition travelled to Seoul after its showing at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The Met lists both venues under Loans and Touring Exhibitions. They appear to share the same checklist and arrangement into five themes, although the National Palace Museum's published photographs suggest that Taipei used red walls to reinterpret the Lehman Wing within a more contemporary exhibition space.

Robert Lehman and Salvador Dalí

The exhibition begins with the story of Robert Lehman commissioning Salvador Dalí to copy a Vermeer. Lehman valued Old Master painting, and the commission is presented as a way of filling the Vermeer-shaped gap in his collection.

I tend to enjoy these stories behind the works, so I looked into whether Dalí and Lehman had also been personal friends. The sources I found establish little beyond their direct correspondence about the commission. What caught my attention was that this was the only Dalí in his collection.

Volume 3 of the Met's Robert Lehman Collection catalogue describes a 1956 letter in which Lehman wrote that, if he liked the copy, he would commission another, choosing a Vermeer in the United States. No further commissions seem to have followed. The catalogue also records Lehman's view that the weave of the canvas in Dalí's copy was too coarse.

Memorable Exhibition Lighting

The way several paintings were lit has stayed with me. Pierre-Auguste Cot's Springtime seemed particularly well suited to an exhibition called Collectors of Light. Even saying that the painting glowed hardly does it justice.

Another work that stayed with me was Camille Pissarro's The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning. The light in Albert Marquet's The Port de Bougie, Algeria, in Sunlight brought back memories of the waterfront in Tongyeong, on Korea's southern coast.

Looking Through the 81 Works

The National Museum of Korea's official exhibition microsite provides a list of all 81 works. The exhibition brings together 65 works from the Robert Lehman Collection and sixteen from the Met's European Paintings, Modern and Contemporary Art, American Art, and Drawings and Prints collections. An asterisk in the table marks a Met work from outside the Robert Lehman Collection.

Where

Special Exhibition Gallery 1, National Museum of Korea, Seoul

Exhibition

Collectors of Light
14 November 2025 - 15 March 2026

Hours

Mon, Tue, Thu, Fri, Sun 10:00-18:00; Wed, Sat 10:00-21:00

Ticket

Standard adult admission: KRW 19,000 (about US$14)

The dollar figure gives a sense of scale at the 23 October 2026 reference rate of KRW 1,325.06 per US dollar.