365 Days at the Met

 May 29, 2023 Joan Miro and Paul Klee painted all but one of the works in gallery 912 . (The exception is a  geometric abstract by a Cuba-born painter, Carmen Herrera, who died at the improbable age of 106.) The Miro painting I' want to write about is a large work, measuring approximately 48 inches across and 40 inches high, executed in tempera on canvas and entitled "Circus Horse."  Against a brilliant blue background, a white horse appears in side view;  its curved body and long neck remind me of the elemental figures of horses I've seen in Cycladic art. The description of the painting states that the yellow line that curves across the painting evokes the horse trainer's whip, while "the polka-dot eyes and a wide smile [the red arc at the bottom, I suppose] create a playful arena for a dancing horse." Maybe that was Miro's intent. But my first association to the  "polka-dot eyes" set against a pentagonal white ground is, as with Soutine...

 May 25, 2023 Gallery 911's ten paintings represent a variety of styles. Some of the works are by painters I instantly recognize - Franz Marc, Mondrian, and Kandinsky, for example. But I've never heard of other artists: Horace Pippin, Alice Trumbull Mason, and a Brazilian painter named Vicente de Rego Monteiro. I quite like a small painting by Irene Rice Pereira that is composed of rectangles in various sizes and colors and with different textures. The room also contains busts by Modigliani and Calder; both reflect the  influence of the "discovery" of African sculpture during the opening years of the 20th century. A large painting (approximately 54 inches wide and 48 inches high)  that Kandinsky made in 1912,   entitled "Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II)," is the work that mosts baffles me.  At first glance it appears to be a collection of irregular splotches of various colors - red, peach, mustard, teal, blue - against thin washes of tan or bare canvas,...

 May 22, 2023 The paintings in Gallery 910 present examples of Cubism (Gris, Picasso), Surrealism (De Chirico, Chagall), and Futurism (Gino Severini, Joseph Stella).  It's also of interest to see an early (1915) Pointillist painting that Diego Rivera made in 1915, when he was a student in Paris. Several paintings again raise the problem of how to "read" a nonrepresentational painting to which the artist has affixed a name. Max Weber called his large 1915 canvas, which measures about 40 inches high and 66 inches across,  "Athletic Contest." I have to say that, had I not read the placard that accompanies the work, I would not have had the least idea what inspired Weber's title. Having read it, I suppose I can see a group of runners at the top right, but the placard also mentions a pole vaulter clad in a striped tee shirt; I have no idea where this is. I try to guess what qualities of an athletic contest Weber was trying to capture - strength, speed, for exampl...

May 15, 2023 I realize how inane and churlish it sounds when I report feeling somewhat disgruntled not to have visited my intended gallery because, it seemed, so many rooms in this wing were closed.  After all, there are many other things to see! And in fact, I could have gone to gallery 910, which was open, had I bothered to look at the museum map - I thought I knew where it was, but I was wrong.  The fact that I wasn't pleased to deviate from my intended route says something about my rigidity, I suppose.  Gallery 917 (the first open gallery I came across) is really a hallway at the top of a flight of stairs to the second floor. It holds just one painting, a 1952 abstract by Philip Guston entitled "Painting, Number 5."  Measuring about 60 inches high and 50 inches across, it is composed of dabs of color, a background of largely horizontal strokes in flesh tones and gray broken by small, largely vertical strokes of orange, brown, red, and green.  The canvas at t...

  May 9, 2023 Gallery 909 turns out to be spread over two rooms. The second, its four walls set up to display a group of paintings by Thomas Hart Benton entitled "America Now,"  is worth an entry in itself. The paintings, executed in 1930-31, were commissioned for the board room of the New School for Social Research. When that institution found their upkeep too expensive, they were acquired by what was then the Equitable Life Insurance Company, and when Equitable moved its headquarters out of New York City, the Met obtained the collection. The ten panels are crammed with detail and repay close attention. The imagery points to Benton's complex view of a country in transition, full of energy but also with elements of hardship and injustice. (I imagine that Benton had the social consciences of the New School board members, as well as his own, firmly in mind.)  The largest painting, entitled "Elements of Power,"depicts a locomotive whose diagonal form suggests that ...

May 7, 2023 I suspect that Gallery 909 may have been rehung relatively recently to call attention to artists who, in the opinion of the curators, deserve to be better known.  For example, it contains a painting and a sculpture by an artist I had never heard of,  Joaquin Torres-Garcia, who was born in Uruguay, worked largely in Europe,  and was a theorist as well as practitioner of art. He co-founded an association for furthering the development of abstraction that gathered together such artists as Jean Arp and Kandinsky and was an important influence on Picasso and Joan Miro.  The gallery also displays abstract paintings by, Niles Spencer and Esphyr Slobodkina, other artists previously unknown to me. Paintings by Arp and Slobodkina lead me to think more about the distinction between "representational" and "abstract" art. .I have thought of representational paintings as those that depict a readily recognizable reality, whatever the genre - still-lifes, portraits,...

 May 5,2023 Galleries 904 through 907 are currently closed (for renovation, as I later learn).  My first impression is that Gallery 908 is all about Cubism, and it contains several Cubist paintings by Picasso, Leger, Braque, and Gris. But as I look around, I think that the central concept uniting the objects on display is the different ways in which abstract artists created forms in  space, whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional.  And while I'm not overly fond of Cubist paintings, several works in the gallery intrigue me. I won't deviate from my plan of confronting what is for me the most problematic work in each gallery, and this is indisputably a rather small (about 24 inches wide and 16 inches high) 1920 painting by Man Ray.  To create the work, which he entitled "Flying Dutchman,"  Ray applied slashes and daubs of white, black, gray, and tan paint with a palette knife. I suppose the title is meant to evoke the tattered sails of the mythical Wagner...

 April 30, 2023 To my surprise, nine Georgia O'Keeffe oils line the walls of gallery 903.  I'm surprised not only because I didn't realize that the Met's collection of O'Keeffes is so extensive, but also because I know that at least one of the paintings was moved from another location. The works on display exemplify the subjects we tend to associate with O'Keeffe:  flowers, animal bones, and scenes of the Southwest. They include some of her most iconic creations, including "Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue" and "Black Iris." (I'm interested to read that Alfred Stieglitz was shocked by the latter work's sexual overtones.)  The nonrepresentational quality of today's work, which O'Keeffe painted in 1927,  makes it stand out from the others.  Entitled "Black Abstraction" and almost square in format (measuring perhaps 30 inches wide and 28 inches high),  it shows a number of curvilinear forms painted in various tones...