365 Days at the Met

 November 28, 2022 Gallery 819 displays 11 oils from Monet’s middle and late periods. Occupying the wall opposite the entrance to the gallery and smacking you in the eye is a monumental  canvas measuring, I would guess, seven feet wide and three-and-a-half feet high. Its big splashes of green broken by occasional dabs of red are so abstract that it took a   more careful look - and more than a moment - for me to think “Monet, water lilies, Giverny."  I don't particularly like the artist's use of paint - it seems rather slapdash to me, although the placard says that it took him three years to complete the work!  But I have to admire the fact that, at age 76, Monet wanted to experiment with a bold new style.   I'm not enamored, either, of most of the gallery's other contents. It's as if the curator felt obliged to include at   least one example of each of Monet's major subjects - haystacks, the rock formations at Etretat, the facade of the Rouen...

 November 26. 2022 As I was walking down the long gallery toward today's destination, gallery 818, I glanced into gallery 809 and was surprised (okay, a little shocked) to see a number of paintings of male nudes,  most prominently, one  by Courbet of a lean young man, bent over with his backside toward the viewer and knee raised up on a stool.  I thought that surely I would have paid attention to this painting if I'd seen it before, but few of the paintings in the gallery looked familiar. (One that did was was the Degas male nude that I'd seen in gallery 815. )  I was curious, and slightly addled, enough to sit down and look at my blog entry about gallery 809,  and surmised that the gallery must have been completely rehung since I saw it three weeks ago.  I checked with a guard, who confirmed my suspicion, noting (a bit skeptically, I thought) that new curators have new and different ideas about what should go where.  (I can only speculate that th...

 November 17, 2022 Gallery 817 is devoted to pastels, mostly by Degas but also by Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec. Many of the Degas pastels depict women bathing. A placard notes that since these were first exhibited in 1886, they have been described as daring and revelatory or as voyeuristic and "shameless."  I would never characterize his "Woman Having Her Hair Combed" as shameless, but it is undoubtedly sensuous.  If the last entry was all about the composition, this one is all about the subject. The pastel, which measures roughly 30 inches high and 26 inches across,  shows a nude young woman with luxuriantly long auburn hair sitting on the edge of a settee.  Her hands are on her hips, her shoulders and elbows thrown  back so that her breasts are thrust forward. Her head is also tilted back, her eyes closed, apparently in pleasure.  The young woman is clearly fleshier than modern tastes would dictate: her upper arms are plump,  and she can pinch at ...

November 14, 2022 Gallery 816 contains a number of Degas works executed in oil and pastel. Today's selection is an 1879 pastel called "The Dance Lesson." Measuring, I would guess,  28 inches high and 25 inches wide, it contains only two figures, a young dancer standing at the barre and a seated violinist who presumably provided the music for the lesson.  Areas of the image seem to me curiously flat, as if the violinist had been cut out and superimposed over the dancer; indeed, his right shoulder seems to cut off her ballet slipper. The palette is simple: aside from the ivory tutu , a small red hair bow, and the flesh tones of the faces, the dancer's limbs, and the violinist's hands, it consists of various shades of brown.  But the work presents a striking contrast of horizontal lines and diagonals, and of lines in the two figures that echo each other. The barre, the wall paneling, and the dancer's outstretched and raised right leg lead the eye horizontally; at...

 November 8, 2022 Gallery 815, devoted to Degas, is another treasure trove.  His paintings line the walls, but at its center is a bronze statue called “The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer.”  First modeled in wax and exhibited in 1881, the statue, aat about three feet in height, is significantly larger than the bronzes in the previous gallery. The dancer stands at rest, her weight on her left foot, her right foot slightly flexed and raised, her head thrust back. and her eyes closed; her facial expression suggests that she is lost in an adolescent's dream of perfection and success. She wears a pale pink tutu (restored a few years ago).  But what I’d never noticed before, and what makes the work irresistible to me, is the back of the statue: her hands are clasped behind her back, palms facing up, and her tight braid is bound by a wide yellow ribbon tied in a bow.    The paintings cover a 30-year period from Degas’ student days in the early 1850s to the early 1...