365 Days at the Met

 February 20, 2023 Gallery 830 brings us securely into the 20th century; the last-executed canvas on display is a 1923 Picasso from his so-called neoclassical period.  The works set me up for the “modern” paintings in the 900s galleries and raise the question: When does the modern period begin? All the paintings in this gallery are at least somewhat representational. They include well-know works by Picasso (among them his portrait of Gertrude Stein, “Seated Harlequin,”  and “The Actor”) but also paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Umberto Boccioni, and, to my surprise, Vanessa Bell. (The last, entitled “Duncan Grant With a Cold,” shows a man seated in front of a mirror, a towel draped over his head; was it intended for public perusal, I wonder, or as a private joke?) Today’s work is a Picasso painting I’ve never seen before, “La Coiffure.” Measuring about 64 inches high and 48 inches wide and painted in 1906, the painting reflects a traditional theme: a woma...

February 13, 2023 Gallery 829 contains 11 paintings and sculptures by 10 Northern and Central European artists working around 1900. Of these, Gustav Klimt is the only one I've ever heard of, and while this is no compliment to me,  I suspect I'm not atypical. The introductory placard notes that many of the works on display are recent acquisitions or long-term loans, a fact that may help to explain their unfamiliarity and perhaps suggests that the museum was slow to appreciate these artists (or perhaps that Ronald Lauder had already snapped up some of the best works for the Neue Galerie)  In any event, the room is a reminder that the art world did not entirely revolve around Paris, and that Brussels, Vienna, and Berlin were also centers of artistic innovation. Today's work is one of the largest canvases on view (perhaps seven feet long and 4 feet high) and the one I initially found most difficult and ugly. Entitled "Inferno," it was painted in 1908 by Franz von Stuc...

February 9, 2023 Gallery 828 brings me squarely back to the post-Impressionist world. The gallery is primarily devoted to paintings by Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, artists whose names have been known to me but whose works have largely been  unfamiliar.  Both were representational painters, but, by eschewing sharp lines and instead creating  forms through broad strokes of color, their images often have a dreamy quality and seem to verge on abstraction.  I especially like a large canvas (about six feet high and five feet wide) that Vuillard began in 1920 and reworked several times before completing it in 1936. Entitled "Garden at Vaucresson," it depicts the house and garden in a Paris suburb owned by Josse and Lucy Hessel,  Vuillard's Jewish art dealer and long-time lover, respectively.  (What did Josse know, and how did he feel, about this arrangement, I wonder?) The scene has three distinct zones. In the background is the three-story house, set amon...

  February 3, 2023 Walking into gallery 827 feels like walking into a pre-Impressionist past - conventional, realistic canvases characterized  by precise, tight brushwork and often displaying  romanticized images of peasants.  But in fact, many of these works are contemporaneous with the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings I've been looking at in other galleries. The introductory signage explains that the paintings in the gallery exemplify "salon painting" of the kind endorsed by the Academie des Beaux Arts, and that such paintings were profitable and were especially popular among the Met's early patrons.   One can imagine that the paintings' French provenance,  their prettified, uncontroversial subjects,  and their technical proficiency made them highly suitable decorative objects - and worthwhile investments -  for wealthy Americans of the Gilded Age.  The gallery also houses a number of paintings by non-French painters - ar...