365 Days at the Met

June 21, 2022 Gallery 800, the first in a series of galleries devoted to 19th and early 20th century European painting and sculpture, is a revelation to me - and today's visit is yet another humbling experience. The gallery is a long, wide corridor that leads to two sets of special exhibitions galleries, and over the years, I suspect I've walked its length at least 100 times. I'm sure I've noticed Rodin's standing bronze sculpture of Honore' de Balzac - it occupies the middle of the floor, so you can't miss it. And I've noticed a lot of paintings that didn't strike me as very interesting. Today's visit didn't change that assessment of the paintings, many of which depict classical subjects with lots of nudes.  Pretty ho-hum, when you consider that Chardin, Manet, and Degas were these artists' contemporaries. But somehow I had failed to notice the display cases that line the gallery's walls  and are filled with Rodin statuettes, along w

 Incredibly, it has been almost a full year since I began my exploration of the American Wing. Familiar as it now is to me, it was mostly terra incognita when I started out. It's an extraordinary collection, perhaps the world's finest, of American art, and I barely knew of its existence. I have learned so much, and especially how much I don't know. I wonder why the paintings on display here were, with a few exceptions, made  before 1930.  Later works by American painters are, I suppose, represented in the museum's collection of modern art. Is that to say that there is little distinctively American about modern  paintings, either in subject matter or in style? I can  imagine that abstract art readily crossed international borders, and that many native-born painters were influenced by the influx of European abstract and Expressionist artists who came to the U.S. as refugees in the 1930s and afterwards. That will be an interesting hypothesis to investigate. But then, throu

 June 10, 2022 Anyone who isn't intimidated by its size could easily spend an hour roaming around Gallery 774; scholars of American decorative arts could spend a lifetime there. As noted in an earlier entry, the gallery, known as Visible Storage, has dozens of glass cabinets with multiple shelves, making for hundreds of linear feet of display space, and it contains literally thousands of objects ranging in size from tiny salt dishes and shot glasses to imposing grandfather clocks and cabinets.  There are silver tankards, beakers, cups, bowls, trays, spoons, ladles, coffee pots and teapots, tongs, and salt cellars. There's a similar array of items in pewter. There are copper kettles and brass andirons, sconces, and hinges, along with gold-plated objects (I think) whose functions, other than decorative, I don't recognize. There is glass - molded, blown, cut, etched, clear and colored -  fashioned into drinking glasses, bottles, pitchers, bowls, and paperweights.   There are c

 June 6, 2022 With not a great deal of time allotted for this visit, I took the elevator to the second floor, only to learn  that the last gallery I visited is the last numbered gallery on the floor. The American art collection is enormous, but I am nearing its end! (I will, of course, have to return to the galleries that are currently closed ) I locate Gallery 773 on the mezzanine. The long rectangular room is home to a collection of American ceramics dating from 1876 to about 1940 that was given to the museum a couple of years ago by Martin Eidelberg, a professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers who is an expert on ceramics and Tiffany glass.  There must be a hundred or so objects on display, including some by the Vicksburg ceramist George Ohr, whose work I noted previously. None of the Ohr pieces in this gallery are as radical as the ones I'd seen earlier, however. I don't have the time - or the inclination - to look carefully at many pieces. I realize how little I know ab

 May 30, 2022 The title of the placard introducing Gallery 772  reads "The Ashcan School, The Eight, and Modern America"  (the Eight, as I learn, were a group of artists who exhibited together at a New York gallery in 1908) -- which is to say that the works on view represent something of a grab bag of styles, although they tend to deal with urban America.  These works include a Post-Impressionist painting of Central Park by Maurice Prendergast,  a charming winter scene in the park by William Glackens, and an odd painting, presumably freighted with psychological meaning, of a nude woman in a landscape by Arthur Davies.  I had always thought of the Ashcan artists as social reformers, but on the basis of the few examples in this gallery, I wonder whether their objective in portraying members of the working class was simply to broaden the range of subjects deemed worthy of painting, rather than to depict these subjects with a particular sympathy for their economic insecurity. Tod