365 Days at the Met

 September 23, 2024 Today's visit brings me back to the galleries of European paintings dating between 1300 and 1800. These galleries were being remodeled and rehung during my earlier visits, and I was able to view only half of them. This is the last set of galleries of what has turned out to be a multi-year exploration of the museum; although other galleries are currently being redone - the whole Michael Rockefeller wing is a prominent example - I have to end this project at some point. The remodeling seems to be as much a cognitive  remodeling as a physical one. The introductory placard says that the goal is to "draw out the inconsistencies and tattered edges of long-dominant storylines" and to question old assumptions. One of these is that there is a "Western tradition" contrasted with the rest of the globe. Another, I suppose, is that of European superiority.  The principal works in Gallery 600, the introductory gallery,  have not changed - three immense Tie...

 A friend told me that when she was growing up, the period rooms were her favorite galleries at the Met. It's pretty obvious from the foregoing that they don't have the same appeal for me. One reason is that, for the most part, the rooms don't represent the way the homes' owners actually lived, but instead, how the museum's curators imagined that they lived (though the curators' judgments were based, of course, on expertise and research, not just imagination),  Most of the furniture and the decor isn't original to the homes; the pieces come from the same periods as the homes, but that's as far as authenticity goes. Moreover, as I understand it, these objects were selected because they appealed to the curators' sense of good taste. One can't possibly see the rooms as representative rooms of the period, but rather, as examples of the way that members of the landowning and mercantile elites might have lived.  This makes the educational scope of the ...

  August 29, 2024 Gallery 742,  the last of the American Wing galleries I've visited this second time around, is the dressing room from a house on West 54th Street that was owned by Arabella Worsham, the mistress and later wife of railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington and then purchased by John D. Rockefeller.  It's notable for its elaborately carved and inlaid cabinetry, which Worsham commissioned from a well-known New York cabinetmaker and which lines one whole wall and part of another. Worsham could check her outfit in two full-length mirrors; a third mirror is suspended over a marble-topped dresser. The dressing room measures, I'd estimate, 22 feet by 18 feet- considerably larger than my living room, much less bedroom. It has plenty of drawer space for folded garments. But I wonder if all my hanging garments would fit inside.  I have too many clothes!