365 Days at the Met

January 16, 2023 Visiting the museum the day before a big trip seemed kind of crazy, but discovering that Gallery 826 is devoted to Cezanne erased all doubts about the wisdom of the excursion.  The room contains some of the artist's most famous works, including two portraits of his wife and one of his uncle (this time wearing a white jacket and a blue tasseled cap), "The Card Players" (a larger version of which is at the Barnes, I learn), a wonderful painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and several still lifes of apples. The introductory placard is helpful, pointing out that Cezanne created shapes by using different colors of paint.  My initial impulse was to write about the Mont Sainte-Victoire landscape, but then I saw his "View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph,"  Painted in the late 1880s and measuring about 30 inches wide and 24 inches high, the work depicts a Jesuit estate nestled on a tree-covered hill near Aix.  The contours of the land and the forms of the trees

 January 5, 2023 Gallery 825, which focuses on the Post-Impressionists, contains both familiar works and surprises. The former include van Gogh's painting of a bowl of irises and Gauguin's "La Orana Maria."  But three works that especially draw my attention are unfamiliar to me and challenge my thinking, albeit in very different ways. The first is a painting van Gogh completed in 1890,  while he was living in the asylum to which he had committed himself.  The placard notes that van Gogh greatly admired Millet and made copies of his works. This one, entitled "First Steps, after Millet" and measuring approximately 36 inches wide and 26 inches high, is instantly recognizable as a van Gogh on the basis of its style (the short brush strokes, the squiggly lines depicting  vegetation), but the scene, showing a toddler guided by its mother and advancing, presumably shakily, toward its kneeling father's outstretched arms, is tender,  loving, and absolutely antith

 January 2023 Auguste Renoir painted 10 of the 17 works in Gallery 824.  (Others are by Morisot, Sisley, Cassatt, and Caillebotte.)  The Renoir works on display include the grand portrait of Madame Georges Charpentier and her two children. In this day when gender fluidity is much discussed, it’s still rather shocking to realize that one of the two children - both of whom have long, curly blond hair and are dressed identically in short blue frocks with white bows at the shoulders -  is a boy. Apparently, dressing young boys in this way was the fashion of the times. It’s the large shaggy dog (a Saint Bernard?) lying outstretched in front of the divan that makes the painting irresistible to me:  Renoir has perfectly captured the animal's  placid nature and its fluffy black and white coat, whose colors echo the white frills at the hem of Madame Charpentier’s black dress.  I read that Madame Charpentier, whose husband was a prominent publisher, hosted a salon frequented by  Flaubert. Zo

December 30, 2022 Number 823 is another Annenberg gallery, this one hung with paintings by Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Vuillard, Braque, Picasso, and Matisse. The introductory placard states that "the works presented in this gallery invite consideration of artistic influences and dialogues that span two generations," with Picasso seen in conjunction with his early idols Cezanne and Lautrec and Matisse in connection with Seurat and Bonnard, whom he admired.  Maybe so, or maybe this is just a rationale for presenting disparate  works together.  I can't say I really took up the invitation. Two Vuillard oils that show the interiors of salons intrigue me,  not so much because of the paintings themselves as because these rooms belonged to  Thadee and Misia Natanson and to Jos and Lucie Hessel. Natanson,  I surmise, was Jewish, and I wonder if Hessel was as well. A quick check on the internet once I'm home confirms both suspicions. It's a reminder of how cosmopoli