365 Days at the Met

 December 27, 2021 Gallery 748 is a treasure in itself. It houses five oil portraits by Copley, three of adults and two of children, and I find all but one of them quite wonderful.  He was clearly a master of technique,  but what strikes me is that he made no effort to prettify or glamorize his subjects, although the luxurious fabrics of their garments and the handsome furnishings of their homes - e.g., a gleaming mahogany table, a studded armchair - make their social status evident.  Instead, the portraits seem to capture something essential about the subjects' characters. One of the portraits is of Hannah Winthrop, who was 45 when she sat for the painting.  The caption notes that her husband, John, was a Harvard mathematician, and the couple was known for cultivating rare fruit (in the portrait she holds a nectarine). She is shown as plump and rather plain, but what shines through as she gazes out at the viewer is her intelligence; she looks like a truly inter...

December 20, 2021 Gallery 747 focuses primarily on colonial portraiture but also includes a mahogany high cabinet and card table and some silver objects, including a porringer made by Paul Revere. An introductory placard explains that commissioning portraits and purchasing luxury objects were ways in which wealthy people made their status manifest - an obvious point, perhaps, but a useful reminder nonetheless.  I've never heard of most of the portraitists whose works are on display, including John Smibert, Joseph Blackburn, John Wollaston, James Badger, and Peter Vanderlyn. Several of them were born in Britain and, I suppose, came to the colonies to seek their fortunes; a couple were self-taught, and it shows in the rather awkward proportions of the portraits' subjects and the plain backgrounds against which these subjects are set.  One interesting figure is Prince Demah, born Demah Barnes, an enslaved man who, when his Loyalist owner fled to England, declared himself to be fr...

 December 16, 2021 I'm more energized on my return to Gallery 746, and perhaps less intimidated by the size of the space, now that I've divided it in two.  In 746 North, I'm amazed to sees some carvings from the Bering Straits area that date from 100-300 C.E. - less than a thousand years after humans crossed the land bridge from Asia; I didn't know that artifacts that old could be found in North America.  I learn that an 1865 congressional report estimated that  some 1,500-3000  Navajo were enslaved by Hispanic Americans in the Rio Grande Valley and northern Mexico. And I note that the captions do not whitewash the intertribal warfare that existed. A  couple of watercolor paintings depict fierce combat between Sioux and Crow warriors; one of the latter is surprisingly abstract,  reminding me of a Kandinsky.  Today's object is a pair of  children's moccasins made in South Dakota between 1900 and 1920 of leather, antique glass beads, cotton, an...

December 13, 2021 Gallery 746 displays objects from the Diker Collection of Native American Art.  I know I've seen the collection at least twice before, but I don't recall many of the items currently on view, and there are others I distinctly remember that are not on exhibit. So I have to assume that pieces from the collection are periodically rotated - and that this is true in many other galleries housing the permanent collection as well. Were I to start my project all over again, I might see some very different things. The gallery itself is very large, with many items on display, often with detailed captions; in fact, the museum map shows it divided into two parts, called 746 South and 746 North. I'm feeling tired and decide to call it a day after looking at the objects in only the south part and to leave the rest for my next visit. The displays are sectioned off by geography and culture area, with objects from the Eastern Woodland, Pacific Northwest, Arctic, Plains, Sout...

 December 8, 2021 The walkway into Gallery 745, the living room of a Frank Lloyd Wright house, is roped off, but even so, the room is visible through thick glass windows  on both of its long sides, so I have a decent sense of it. The room seems to me to embody the key features of Wright's aesthetic: a strong sense of rectilinear design; the geometric simplicity of the tables, chairs, lamps, and other furnishings; the warmth imparted by the oak paneling that lines the walls and brings the outdoors into the room; and the emphasis on horizontals (for example, the stone and oak panels that extend beyond the width of the simple brick fireplace, the oak beams that cross the width of the gambrel-shaped ceiling).   The room, I read, was part of a summer home built for a businessman and lawyer, Francis Little, and his wife Mary in Wayzata, Minnesota, overlooking Lake Minnetonka.  It's gratifying to learn that the Littles, for whom Wright designed an earlier house in Peor...

December 2, 2021 Gallery 744 is the introductory gallery to a major collection of Native American art, a fairly recent gift of Charles and Valerie Diker. (That said, gallery 745 is a period room from a Frank Lloyd Wright house - so much for the coherence of my numerical ordering scheme, and of the Met's.)  Gallery 744 showcases just two objects: a textile art hanging entitled "Dream Catcher" made out of blankets of various colors that have been cut into hundreds of diamond shapes of different sizes and laboriously stitched together, and the Lakota woman's dance ceremony dress with accessories that is the subject of today's entry. Several things immediately strike me on seeing the garment. The first is that it must have taken ages to make. Most of the dress  layers beadwork over a leather base and employs thousands of tiny beads of various colors, including mauve, deep blue, crimson, yellow, and orange, arranged in different patterns.  I have no idea how such a dre...