365 Days at the Met

 August 26, 2022 Gallery 804 is all about the lure of the exotic. Its 15 paintings by French artists generally date from the middle decades of the 19th century and include cityscapes of Seville, Beirut, and Jerusalem, portraits of turban-clad men, a scene showing the interior of a mosque, and a highly seductive portrayal of Salome, whose disheveled hair and clothing suggest that she’s come not from dancing for Herod but from a tryst in bed. The introductory signage helpfully notes that interest in depicting foreign scenes was stirred by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, Greece's war for independence from Ottoman rule, and the French conquest of Algeria. While much has been made of the stereotyping and falsification associated with Orientalism, the paintings exhibited here seem pretty realistic to me, and respectful of their subjects. The work that most intrigues me is a small (approximately 14 inches wide and 17 inches high) depiction of the Great Pyramid of Giza, painted in 1830 by Ad...

 August 10, 2022 T he 25 oil paintings in Gallery 803 are all works by Camille Corot. (I'd speculate that Corot was very popular among art collectors for a while  but became less so over time; hence, the many donations to the Met.) Most of the paintings are small in format, but the selection also includes a large scene depicting Hagar in the wilderness lamenting over a supine Ishmael. Most of the scenes seem to me quite dark. Was this Corot’s standard palette, or would a good cleaning reveal different colors? Or is my vision going? I’m especially drawn to two works. The first is a small landscape (perhaps 20" wide and 24" high) entitled “ A Lane Through the Trees, " painted between 1870 and 1873, when Corot was between 74 and 77 years old (!). In the painting Corot was clearly playing with gradations of light. The scene depicts a footpath that proceeds on a slight diagonal from the foreground to the middle distance; the tall trees that line the path throw it almost c...

 August 12, 2022 Mirabile dictu, Gallery 802 is open! Again, I realize that the numerical order of the galleries has little to do with the chronological order of the works they contain. This gallery is devoted primarily to artists who painted the French rural landscape during the middle decades of the 19th century, when their attention shifted from Italy to  their own country. There are several paintings by Millet, and while he'll never be a favorite, I note the way he tried to give his peasant figures monumentality and dignity. On the other hand, I find I like the works of Theodore Rousseau (with whom I was previously almost completely unfamiliar, except that I knew that he was "the other " non-Douanier Rousseau). I learn that it was, in fact, a Rousseau oil sketch of a rocky landscape in the Auvergne, which the artist painted in 1830 at the age of 18, that helped to generate broad interest in depictions of the French countryside; I was interested in this work because I ...

August 4, 2022 Gallery 809 features nine portraits from the 1850s and 1860s. They are largely works by  Gustave Courbet, but also by Fantin-Latour and  Carolus-Duran, and by an artist I'd never heard of before, Francois-Auguste Biard, whose bust-length painting of a Black man, nude from the waist up, is a new Met acquisition.  Most of the portraits initially strike me as serious and somber, if not  lugubrious, with their subjects clad  in black against dark backgrounds. (One exception is a Courbet portrait of an opera singer of the period dressed in a bright red tunic for his role in Meyerbeer's opera "Robert le Diable.")  A man and woman look cursorily around the gallery, and I hear her say, "None of them look happy," to which her husband [?] comments, "They all look angry/ " So my response is not unique. The portraits of two women are especially notable.  The first, measuring about 40 inches high and 36 inches wide, is of Madame Frederic Breyer (...