365 Days at the Met

June 26, 2023 Gallery 919 is a large space containing eight big canvases by prominent artists of the mid-20th century, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Cy Twombly. I very much like the simplicity and rich colors of a Rothko painting, which is composed of long rectangles of red, black, and brown against a dark blue ground. I also like a Pollock drip painting, with graceful swirling thick and thin lines and splatters and splashes of black and white on a tan ground. Its title, “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)," feels very much in keeping with its palette. But I’m totally at sea when it comes to a Helen Frankenthaler painting, perhaps seven feet long and six  feet high, entitled “Western Dream.” The accompanying placard describes it as “lyrical” and “hallucinatory” - terms that seem contradictory to me, and meaningless in this context. Perhaps the orange and tan and dull green colors are meant to evoke the Western landscape. - the placard says that it suggests "...

June 19, 2923  Gallery 917 holds the Philip Guston painting I wrote about earlier (day 341).  Gallery 918 is home to just one work: a huge (perhaps   16 feet long and   10 feet high) granite bas-relief by a contemporary American sculptor, Charles Ray, who was born in 1953. The bas-relief, sculpted in 2019, is entitled “Two Horses,” which are seen in full-body profile. But you have to look closely to see the second horse, whose head and neck are in much lower relief than the horse in the foreground, and whose torso is almost completely obscured. The main giveaway that more than one horse is depicted are the six hooves at the bottom of the image. The striations in the granite at the bottom of the relief suggest that the horses are fording a stream, with water  covering their lower legs. The sculptor has done a remarkable job of capturing the front horse’s bony legs, the musculature of its shoulder, the sinews of its neck, the feathery texture of its mane.   T...

June 15, 2022 Gallery 916 displays models and plans,  mostly two-dimensional drawings, for both public buildings and private homes.  Most of the designs are modernistic and seem - to me, anyway - more like exercises for the imagination than like structures that could actually be built. And most never were built. One of these is an entry for the design of a city hall executed in 1914 by Harry Sternfeld, an American architect whose dates are 1889-1976 and who was largely based in Philadelphia. The very large drawing (perhaps eight feet across and five feet high) depicts a long white (presumably marble) building that is distinctly traditional in style.  Neoclassical elements  - a long, porticoed entrance topped by a pediment - mark its highly symmetrical facade, and identical statues on pedestals flank the stairs that lead up to the doors. The design reminds me that Neoclassicism  was very much the accepted style for public buildings of the period - think the New Y...

 June 12, 2023 I spent an exhausting couple of hours in gallery 915, a huge space housing 23 contemporary oil paintings, many of them humongous,  along with five sculptures on pedestals. Many of the works are by artists of color or gay artists and have political overtones; a few are purely abstract, composed of squares and rectangles of various colors and sizes.  Most have descriptions attached, and I read these in order to better understand what's going on in these works. What a vain hope, in many cases! The texts too often read like parodies of art crit, overlaid with PC language. Who knew that the shacks thrown up by poor people are examples of "improvisational architecture"?  I look at a painting that appears to be a pure abstraction to me, with sharply defined straight lines and curves, and read that the artist, a lesbian activist, has "reclaimed these shapes for radical, feminist ends." Oh yeah? Just how? Yet another description of a large painting entitle...

June 5, 2023 Gallery 914 is devoted to what I assume is another temporary exhibition, this one featuring Maha Maamoun, an Egyptian photographer and videographer who was born in 1972. Six of her works - four photographs and two videos - are on display.  The photographs are all scenes of Cairo: a brightly lit night view of buildings and roads seen from on high, a felucca set against the shore,  adults and children cavorting in the Nile (only one woman, fully clothed and wearing a headscarf, appears among the bathers), and a park where several couples are seated on benches.  The caption notes that the photographs derive from postcards, but that Maamoun's "subtle manipulation of the digital images lends them a sinister note," conveying "a sense of discomfort, guardedness, insecurity, and lack of personal space that she feels is palpable in public places...." Sorry, but I just don't see it. Yes, Cairo is huge and teeming, and privacy is probably at a premium and ...

 June 2, 2023 I headed toward the stairs leading up to gallery 914,  aware that gallery 913 is home to a special  exhibition. I've not included such exhibitions in my entries, since they are by definition temporary. (Of course, now that I know that galleries are frequently rehung, this rationale seems less persuasive.) On an impulse, though,  I turned into gallery 913, and I'm glad I did. The works I saw there were interesting, in some cases compelling, and in at least one case troubling. The gallery houses a one-woman show featuring Cecily Brown, an English-born artist, now 54, who has lived and worked in New York since the 1990s. I gleaned two main ideas from the introductory signage. First, the history of Western art infuses Brown's work: for inspiration she draws on the masterpieces of Bruegel and the Dutch masters, on Hogarth and Fragonard, on Manet and Munch. At the same time, she is familiar with more recent popular illustrations.  And second, many of her...