365 Days at the Met

March 30, 2023 Gallery 901 centers on surrealism. Its contents include canvases by Miro, Dali, Magritte, and Picasso, as well as one of the slender Brancusi sculptures meant to evoke a bird. None of it is easy for me, all enigmatic.  The most opaque is an enormous (perhaps 18 feet long and 9 feet high) 1946 painting by the Chilean artist Roberto Matta. I can’t figure out what’s going on.  The title - “Being With” - is no help either. The caption is somewhat informative.  It notes that the painting depicts “a labyrinth of architectural structures seen from various perspectives” Maybe so - I’m more inclined to see industrial tools: a hoist, perhaps, or a saw. The caption also describes “contorted humanoid figures engaged in sex acts.”  I recognize circles denoting breasts; perhaps the blade-like objects protruding from some of the figures represent penises? At first I had no idea what the artist was trying to say with the image. But I concluded that it's not a rational...

March 19, 2022 With gallery 900, I begin exploring the Met's collection of Modern and Contemporary Art.  This gallery, which was recently rehung, holds a rather odd assemblage of works, including portraits by Picasso (Gertrude Stein has been moved here), Max Beckmann, and Modigliani. It also contains three paintings by Harlem Renaissance artists with whom I'm unfamiliar - Archibald Motley, Jr., Aaron Douglas, and Hale Woodruff; I suspect that their inclusion was a major motivation for the rehanging. All the works are representational, although most contain elements of simplification and abstraction.   I decide that I should challenge myself by focusing on the most difficult work in each gallery, and here this is indisputably a 1924 oil by Chaim Soutine, measuring about 40 inches wide and 30 inches high. The foreground suggests a still life; it contains a dark green bottle, a white pitcher holding a paddle, and what initially looks like some unidentifiable red fruit, all laid o...

 The 19th and early 20th century  galleries, especially the Impressionist and post-Impressionist galleries,  always seem crowded - I suspect the Met could make a go of it on ticket sales if it consisted only of these  rooms and the Egyptian collection (which has the advantage of being on the ground floor and containing mummies). I know that these were my mother's favorite galleries.  It's worth asking why they are so popular. I suspect that the answer lies in the fact that many paintings display a combination of originality of technique (or at least what felt original 150 years ago) and of familiarity  We take pleasure in the free brushwork -  the broad swaths of color, but especially the small dabs that we see as leaves or flowers or as ripples or foam in a  body of water, and that give the paintings a shimmering quality.  The images are familiar in that they are representational - abstraction hasn't yet entered the picture. In all but a few...

 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...