365 Days at the Met

August 30, 2018 Today I finally arrived at the Ming Scholar's Garden (gallery 217). I have seen this space before, but I never appreciated just what a treasure it is. It is a place of infinite tranquility, where most adult visitors walk in silence or murmur quietly.  Only little children talk in their normal high-pitched voices.  A small pool in one corner, which contains four carp of various sizes and colors, recirculates its water, making a gurgling sound that only adds to the soothing atmosphere.   The space is covered by a skylight and is flooded with light. A portico runs along one wall of the garden; the wall behind it is broken by six windows, each covered by a lattice with a different design. The garden itself includes high fantastical limestone rocks, which were, according to the caption, meant to evoke mountains, along with low rock formations that enclose beds of greenery. I have to confess that I can't identify most of the plants, although I d...

August 28, 2018 Gallery 216, the last gallery devoted to the theme of landscape, focuses on the river landscape. My initial reaction was that devoting a gallery to this theme would be highly redundant, since rivers have been prominent in the landscapes on view in the previous galleries. The wall caption is, however, quite helpful in explaining that rivers came to symbolize both good government (since flood control and water management were such important responsibilities of government) and the good, simple life. The gallery also reflects an interesting curatorial decision: Cases on one side of the gallery present  two long Ming dynasty painted scrolls depicting the Yangzi River, while those on the other contain long scrolls showing the same river  that were made in 2015 by an American photographer, Michael Cherney. The juxtaposition necessarily contrasts the natural beauty of the river in the earlier images (romanticized as these may be) with the degradation of that ...

August 27, 2018 The theme of Gallery 215 is the "fantastic landscape." During the 17th century, a period coinciding with the transfer of power from the Ming to the Qing dynasty, artists grew less concerned with verisimilitude in painting and, according to the caption, relied more on their imaginations in depicting strangely bulbous mountains and other unusual landscape forms. This small gallery features eight sheets from an album of paintings and elegiac poems by the painter Gong Xian. Unfortunately, I had to photograph today's object, one of these paintings, at an angle to avoid distracting reflections in the glass. The painting measures perhaps 16 inches high and 24 inches across and at first strikes me as quite realistic. It shows a thatched cottage nestled in a grove of trees with denuded branches. Behind it, a stream flows down a rocky slope, creating several waterfalls, and then widening into a rock-strewn basin at the bottom. All this is fairly clear. What ...

August 9, 2018 Today's gallery (214) provides an object lesson in what it means to look carefully at a Chinese scroll. The theme of this small gallery is "The Landscape of the Garden." Its contents could for the most part be fitted into galleries with other themes, I think. What seems particular about the depictions of gardens is that they involve walled spaces that provide retreats from the commotion of the outside world. Otherwise, I see many of the motifs that I've come to recognize in other landscape paintings: fantastical rocks, waterfalls, bodies of water, stands of willow and bamboo, paths, arched bridges, pergolas, and small figures of humans. All these elements are found in today's work, a landscape scroll on paper perhaps 24 feet long. I don't look at the caption before I start to examine the scroll. From right to left, I walk down most of its length, recognizing the different landscape features but noting the absence of  human beings. I fi...

August 8, 2018 The theme of this gallery (213) is the "art-historical landscape," the way in which later painters emulated and sought to add their own interpretations to the works of earlier masters. While the preponderance of the gallery's contents are landscape paintings, my eye is also drawn to two very large wardrobes from the late 16th or early 17th century (the Ming dynasty). Made of wood, they are exquisitely adorned with flowers and birds made of inlays of mother-of-pearl, amber, colored glass, ivory, and other materials.  I would love to have one in my home, but my ceilings aren't nearly high enough! The space they originally occupied must have been grand indeed. Today's object is a fan-shaped woodblock print, perhaps 13 inches across at the top, by the painter Wang Gai (1645-1710) and based on earlier works by painters of the 11th and 16th centuries. It was a leaf from a 1679 book called the "Mustard Seed Garden of Painting," a manua...

August 2, 2018 Gallery 212 presented a unique challenge to me. In almost all of my previous visits, many works competed for my attention. In this small room, there are only three large works, none of which immediately spoke to me. The gallery's theme, as a wall placard explains,  is "The Landscape of Abstraction." The works are all by contemporary artists (the oldest was born in 1944, the youngest in 1964), and, as the sign notes, many modern-day artists  were trained as landscape painters or found the tradition useful as a springboard for their imaginations. The sign goes on to say that the works in the gallery seek to reconcile threads of landscape painting with those of abstraction.  Frankly, I am not sure what this is supposed to mean, since in only one of the works do I discern any elements of landscape at all.  (In this work, I also perceive anthropomorphic, sexual elements - buttocks, vulvas - but I readily acknowledge that this may indicate more a...

August 1, 2018 Gallery 211 contains works illustrating another theme, the "landscape of reclusion."  The works represent the idea of landscape as a retreat from the world's dangers and from the hurly-burly of politics and professional service. According to a wall sign, such works frequently depict retired gentlemen and scholars seated in pavilions sipping tea, surrounded by majestic mountains -- an altogether peaceful, meditative, and beautiful environment. (Of course,I suppose these scholars would have had to be men of means to afford such retreats.)  A poem by Lu Yin, a 3rd century C.E. poet, that is reproduced on a wall placard, expresses this notion perfectly:  Living in retirement beyond the world,  Silently enjoying isolation,  I pull the rope of my door tighter, And grip tight the wine jug. My spirit is tuned to the spring season; At the fall of the year there is autumn in my heart, Thus following the ways of heaven and earth. ...