365 Days at the Met

March 28, 2019 Gallery 372 is largely devoted to the weapons of 18th and 19th century America and their British  antecedents. The displays include some elaborately ornamented Colt revolvers, but of more interest to me are the swords. Again, I'm exposed to a new vocabulary. First, there are the different kinds of swords. Some terms are familiar to me, but I am not sure I could define them -- is it only its curved blade that distinguishes a saber, for instance? Other kinds of swords are are new to me (e.g.,  smallswords, hangers). And then there are the different parts of swords: the hilt, the pommel (handle), and the guard, for instance. I learn that the smallsword was the typical sidearm worn by civilians in Europe between 1650 and 1800.  It  served as both a weapon and (as the sign describes it) "a stylish costume accessory for the fashionable gentleman."  Silver sword hilts were produced not by arms makers but by silversmiths; like other silver...

March  26, 2019  It took me only a day to understand the allure of this stuff.  Gallery 371, which Mayor Bloomberg donated to the Met and named in honor of his daughters, is an enormous, light-filled space filled with display cases containing mannequins clad in suits of armor, along with a variety of weapons (axes, halberds, etc.).  Four huge model horses in the center of the room are also fully outfitted in armor.  A number of things impress. First is the fine workmanship and elaborate decoration of so many pieces; decorative motifs include, among other things, allegorical figures, putti, coats of arms, twining vines, and, in one case, the Madonna holding the Christ child on her lap. I don't think I'd ever paid much attention to the beauty of these objects before. Second, many of the signs tell the weight of the armor -- generally upwards of 45 pounds, and in one case 90 pounds! I can only imagine how strong men must have been to be able to wear thes...

March   22, 2019 Galley 370 is the first of eleven galleries devoted to arms and armor. While the topic is of limited interest to me (or at least so I think at this point, anyway), I see that the next gallery over has many visitors of all ages.  My first impression is that there are more young men there than elsewhere. And little kids seem fascinated, too. This introductory gallery, appropriately, contains the museum's earliest specimens of arms and armor, dating from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. The very oldest objects in the gallery are stone "bifaces" of flint and quartzite made between 700,000 and 200,000 B.C.E. and found in what is now France. Bifaces  (rocks shaped into thin triangles and chipped away at the sides) were, a placard informs me, useful for digging, chopping, and butchering. But these particular examples are so large, well-preserved, and carefully shaped to have symmetrical edges that they may have had other purposes. Yet again the question...

The works in these galleries seem more foreign, less familiar to me than just about anything else I've seen so far, and I am trying to figure out why.  At first I think that it's because I know so little about the spiritual beliefs underpinning so many of the objects. But on further reflection, some of these beliefs and traditions are not so different from those with which I'm better acquainted: the presence of the divine in figures and objects (think of bread and wine at the Mass!), the creation myths, etc. More likely, it's the different mode of representation of the human figure, so remote from the way that it is depicted in the classical and Western European traditions, as well as in Asian art. That said, I've seen enough of the abstracting quality of figural representations in 20th century sculpture and painting, which I know were heavily influenced by African art, that I should be used to it by now. Perhaps yet another reason is that I'm more accustomed to...

March 20, 2019 I realize that, both in my blog entries and in my further explorations of the Polynesian galleries (as well as the other galleries in this wing),  I have paid little attention to the spiritual content of the objects I've been looking at, perhaps because the spiritual beliefs of these peoples seem so remote to me. Gallery 359, which houses a temporary exhibition called "Atea," is a strong reminder of the need to look for the meaning of these objects to the people who made and saw them.  "Atea" refers to the moment when, in the belief system of the ancient Polynesians, light emerged from darkness, islands emerged from the sea, and the first gods were born.  It's not difficult to see parallels with the creation story in Genesis,  in which God creates the firmament, the sun and the moon, etc.  Nor is it hard to understand that the ruling chiefs were believed to descend from the gods: The ancient Egyptians held similar beliefs, and u...

March 18, 2019 Gallery 358 focuses on Mesoamerica; its contents come largely from Mexico and Guatemala, but there are also a handful of objects from the Caribbean. I am struck, first, by the age of some of the pieces: I had no idea that Olmec culture dates back to 1200 B.C.E.  I'm impressed, too, by the naturalism of some of the Olmec figures: There's a statuette of a man carved of obsidian (surely not the easiest medium in which to work) that clearly depicts the bags under his eyes, as well as what might be a harelip.  I also note that, in addition to Olmecs, Toltecs, Mayas, Aztecs,  there are many cultures I have barely heard of-- Nayarit, for example, or Veracruz.  For today's object, I'm irresistibly drawn to a ceramic Colima  dog,  both because it is familiar (I've seen Colima dogs before) and because this particular example is so charming. Dating from between 200 B.C.E. and 300 C.E. (quite a time range!) and roughly 12 inches long and 10...

March 14, 2019 The first thing that I see when I enter gallery 357, which houses the Nathan Cummings Collection of Precolumbian Art from South and Central America, is gold -- cases and cases of it. It is a stunning display. Many of the works come from Peru, and I can easily imagine the wonderment of Pizarro and his men when they came across these gleaming objects. But I also learn that gold was worked in Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Costa Rica; in fact, Columbus first saw gold pendants from this area when he sailed along the coasts of the latter two countries during his fourth voyage to the New World. The objects were largely made for the personal adornment of nobles: They include pendants, pectorals,  nose ornaments, headdress ornaments, cuffs, crowns, and tiaras. But I also see two beautiful gold tweezers, which I read were probably used to pluck facial hair -- Tweezerman, move over! -- and large beakers of hammered gold. Many of the objects were found in burials -- a ...

March 8, 2019 Gallery 356 unexpectedly brings me into Native North America; I had thought it would be another gallery devoted to Polynesia. The first objects I saw were canoe paddles painted with geometic fish-like designs. "Hmm," I thought to myself, "These Pacific Islander paddles look amazingly like works from the Pacific Northwest." Guess what? They are, in fact, from British Columbia. Many of the works are more familiar to me than those from Africa and Island Southeast Asia, but I  learn many new things. I see that there was a tradition of black-and-white pottery in Ancestral Puebloan culture -- it's not hard to draw the line between these works and Acoma pots. I learn that frogs, snakes, and lizards played a prominent role in Southwestern art because they emerged in greater numbers after the rainfalls that were so critical to Puebloan agriculture. I had never realized that the Mound Builder culture (at least I assume that that's what the capti...

March 7, 2019 In gallery 355, which is devoted to the art of Island Southeast Asia (Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, western New Guinea), I'm again struck by the ornamentation of everyday objects: beautifully carved spoons made of horn from Timor Island; a Sumatran lute on whose tip sits a carved human figure wearing a conical brass hat and clutching his bent knees; a wooden granary door, also from Sumatra, on which is carved a large lizard, a symbol of fertility; a baby carrier from Borneo adorned with fine white, black, red, green, and yellow beading. Certainly, the spoons, the lute, the granary door, and the baby carrier did  not require decoration to be functional. Yet through the ages, humans have chosen to add beauty and meaning to objects in common  use.   Today's object, a necklace of copper alloy and gold made on Nias Island in Indonesia in the late19th or early 20th century, could not have been in common use, but it is ...

March 6, 2019 Gallery 354 is an enormous space largely devoted to the art of New Guinea. It houses many very large objects, the most notable of which, suspended from the gallery's high ceiling, is a huge canoe with an elaborately carved keel. There are also any number of 15-foot-high poles, which, rather like totem poles, depict the lineage of deceased ancestors through the stacking of human figures (all nude, all male) one on top of another; many masks used in dance and other ceremonies; carved house posts; and many other kinds of objects. They are beautifully displayed, with lengthy ethnographic explanations, and I wonder, not for the first time, whether, if Nelson Rockefeller hadn't donated this collection to the Met, it would find a better home in the Museum of Natural History. The gallery raises for me some basic questions: How much does treating these objects as works of art depend on wresting them out of their cultural context? What is art, what is craft...

March 4, 2019 Gallery 353 is the first of several rooms devoted to the art of Oceania, an expanse that, as a placard tells me, covers one-third of the earth's surface. Again, the visit entails a lesson in geography, and I frequently walk back and forth between the display cases and a map of the region, to figure out where, exactly, the Marshall Islands, the Solomons, Fiji, Tonga, and many other places are located.  Maybe I knew this, but I'm reminded that, alhough they may have lived in a tropical paradise, these were not necessarily peaceful peoples. The objects on display include three Fijian clubs, and the sign infoms me that the highest status as a warrior was earned by clubbing one's enemy to death. The clubs on view, although elaborately carved and/or inlaid with whalebone ivory, look suitably lethal. I'm especially impressed by the decorative qualities of three objects, and I can't resist writing about all three of them. The first is a small...

  March 2, 2019 Gallery 352 is an absolutely enormous space filled with objects from all over sub-Saharan Africa. For the first time in my gallery explorations, I feel daunted by the prospect of looking at its contents in even a cursory, much less careful, way. These contents include innumerable wooden masks and headdresses, some adorned with grasses, human hair, animal fur, and other materials; elaborately carved ivories, including a couple of elephant tusks; ceremonial stools borne on the heads of kneeling female caryatids (how strange it is to apply that term to figures that I've exclusively associated with Greek sculpture up until now); and spectacular brass figures and plaques from Benin.  A stylistic element that cuts across many, although not all, of these objects is the radical abstraction  of the human face and form, reduced as these are to cylinders and ovals and ridges. This abstraction extends to animals as well: two brass leopards' heads are no...