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Day 420 - Tiepolo and Gandolfi

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August 8, 2025 I had to detour through the Islamic galleries to reach my destination and was abashed and disconcerted to note how unfamiliar they seemed.  Yes, I explored these several years ago, but still.... I would like to think the galleries have been rearranged, and that that explains my confusion. En route to gallery 643, though, I paused to look at a wonderful print of a beached whale surrounded by curious onlookers made by a Dutch artist in the first decade of the 17th century. It's the largest of several treatments of this subject and interesting, though on reflection not surprising, to note that the citizens of early modern Europe were as fascinated by these huge creatures as we are today. It's yet another reminder of how many treasures are to be found in the museum. According to the wall signage, the oil paintings in Gallery 643 include both preparatory sketches and finished works. Featuring lots of clouds, putti, and other figures in the sky, the works depict Biblic...
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Day 419 - Decor and pastels

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  July 28, 2025 When I walk into gallery 642, I see an odd assemblage of works: four frescos (subsequently transferred to canvas) by Tiepolo and his school that imitate sculpture and depict classical figures representing arithmetic, grammar, geometry, and metaphysics (what is  metaphysics, anyway?); a huge Tiepolo oil painting; and three18th-century  French portraits.  Then I notice that there are two introductory wall signs. The first deals with the role of painters in creating what the sign calls "immersive  interiors, " I have only an instinctive sense of what this term means, but the sign points out that many artists were engaged in the design of theater sets, gardens, tapestries, furniture, and interior decor more generally. The second wall sign discusses the use of pastels in 18th century portraiture. This certainly explains the mix of genres The Tiepolo painting is so immense - maybe 20 feet across and 12 feet high - that it occupies a whole wall of the g...
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Day 418 - Goya and Fuseli

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  July 19, 2025 I was ambivalent about going to the Met today - not that I had anything much better to do - but what a spectacular return it turned out to be! Gallery 641 contains 11 canvases by Goya, all of them notable.  These include “Two Majas on a Balcony” - although I learn that the Met version may have been painted by a follower. The original is in a private collection, and I'm annoyed that it's inaccessible to the general public. Also in the gallery is an old friend,  "Don Manuel Osorio, " a work I've known since I was young and first saw it in Betsy Chase's wonderful book on art for children. Goya depicts the little boy, dressed in bright red and holding his pet magpie on a leash, while three cats - one of which is indicated only by a  black form and shining eyes -  crouch watchfully, either hypnotized by or preparing to pounce. on the bird.  A number of portraits show Goya’s skilled brushwork, especially in painting lustrous fabrics. Today’s selec...
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Day 417 - Painting on various supports

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  May 11, 2025 Going to the museum only a few hours before my car service was scheduled to take me to JFK for my flight seemed crazy enough, even when I decided to save a few minutes by cabbing over to the East Side. When I discovered that  81st Street  was blocked off between Columbus and Central Park West, necessitating a long (and costly) detour, I thought briefly about just going back home. But I wanted to get to one more gallery before a three-week hiatus set in, and I was able to do that, although my visit to that gallery was very abbreviated The theme of Gallery 640 is painting on different “supports” - that is, media other than canvas, including copper, wood, plaster ( as is fresco painting), and stone. On display are works from different countries that span the period from about 1330 to 1860. One I particularly like is an oil on copper painting, measuring about 24 inches high and 16 inches high, by Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri), a Bologna-born painter (another ...
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Day 416 - Sketches and character sketches in oil

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 May 3, 2025 Gallery 639 contains a number of small oil paintings, and its introductory wall sign bears the title "Oil Sketches." In fact, however, only some of the paintings are "sketches" - that is, preparatory works intended to guide larger treatments of the same subject. The remaining paintings are what I would term character studies - paintings of men and women meant not to capture a likeness, as a portrait would do, but to convey a quality that is generalizable, not tied to a particular individual. Many works of both types are by well-known artists, including Rubens, Van Dyck, and Tintoretto. My choice for today, in contrast, is by a Roman painter I'd never heard of, Orazio Borgianni, who se dates are 1578-1616. It's a relatively small (about 20 inches high and 15 inches wide) oil on canvas showing the head of an old woman.  Her forehead is deeply wrinkled; lines, too, surround her cast-down eyes. The skin above her bodice  has a crepe-y consistency I ...
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Day 415 -

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 May 1, 2025 The works on display in Gallery 638 represent not a country or a time period  - the artists are Dutch, French, Anglo-Irish, German, and American; the works range in date from 1665 to 2014 - but a theme. The introductory wall sign is entitled "The Artist's Studio.," and in general, the paintings show artists at work; either they are self-portraits or portraits painted by their friends. Since a couple of the paintings depict  artists in their living quarters rather than specifically in their studios, I might opt for a somewhat more inclusive label - say, “Artists and the Act of Creation" -  but I realize that’s a quibble. Today's work is one that dominates the gallery,  Kerry James Marshall’s enormous painting (perhaps 13 feet wide and 8 feet high), which bears the name  “Untitled (Studio).” (Since it’s quite obviously. a studio, I have no idea where the “Untitled” comes from.) Painted in 2014 using acrylics on PVC boards, it stands out for any n...
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Day 414 - "Everyday life"

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 April 29, 2025 The works in gallery 637 thrust me forward a hundred years or so into what feels like an entirely different world -  one that is secular, hedonistic, and marked by abundance. This is, of course, a simplification: The introductory wall sign notes that paintings of Biblical and mythological scenes continued to have the highest prestige in the Low Countries.  But the Reformation and a burgeoning middle class induced painters to take on different kinds of subjects, and specifically, to present scenes of everyday life - the theme of this gallery.  I hadn't really thought about the role of the Reformation in shaping art markets, but of course it makes sense that artists, with  fewer commissions to decorate churches or create private devotional images of saints, were incentivized to explore new themes. On first glance, I thought that all the paintings on display were the works of  Netherlandish artists, but the first painting I looked at closely tu...
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