365 Days at the Met

 August 3, 2023 Over the next visits, my plan is to return to galleries I missed the first time around because they were closed. Gallery 136, today's destination, was being re-hung on my first go-round (five years ago!) and was then reopened with what I took to be a temporary exhibition. It turns out to be a semi-permanent display whose theme is "The African Origins of Civilization." I think I understand the purpose of the exhibition - to elevate the esteem in which sub-Saharan art is held - but for me, it raises many questions. The introductory signage makes the point that homo sapiens originated in Africa, as did the effort to express abstract ideas in visual terms and to add beauty to material creations. The signage further notes that from the Classical period onward, European artists adhered to the canon of human proportions developed by the ancient Egyptians. Western connoisseurs generally did not discern similar connections between the art of Egypt and that of sub-S...

 July 29, 2023 Galleries 904 through 907 are still closed, as are galleries 922-925, so this seems as good a time as any to think about the works I've been looking at for the past several months. If the reopening of these galleries leads me to reflect further on what I've seen, I can always return to this entry. The first thing to say is that these are unquestionably the most difficult and challenging galleries I've visited, and this would be true, I think, even if I hadn't given myself the task of writing about works that struck me as the most difficult and challenging. With representational art, you basically recognize what you're looking at, even when the work is highly stylized (think African sculptures or totem poles). The familiarity is comforting. You can pay attention to subject or composition or color or line or iconography or cultural influences without wondering "What is this?" The abstract works I've seen make very different demands Some th...

July 6, 2023 Gallery 921 displays nine large works. I can’t abide by my “rule” of choosing the most problematic canvas, because if I did, I suspect that my choice,  an abstraction by Clyfford Still (three are hanging side-by-side,  all characterized. by irregular swaths and slashes of paint), would say nothing to me no matter how long I looked at it. But neither will I take the easy way out and select the painting I immediately recognize and gravitate to,  one of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Blue Green Red “ paintings, whose clean lines and rich colors I find endlessly satisfying.   My choice is instead a 1970 acrylic  on canvas entitled "Whirlirama," by Sam Gilliam,  an artist I’ve never heard of before. Very large in format (perhaps nine feet across and only a little less high), it is composed of vertical streaks in various colors, predominantly teal, turquoise, and red-orange, but also yellows, a fleshy pink. and brown. Giving the painting visual interest are the ...

June 29, 2023 Gallery 920 is home to six large wall panels employing different media, as well as to a sculpture by David Smith. All merit and receive my attention, I decide - although I now wonder if I would have had the same reaction to many, many other works if I had taken care to look at them more closely.   One of the items that first grabs me is a relatively early (1961) work by Andy Warhol  called "Before and After 1" which juxtaposes two large profiles of a woman, drawn in comic-book fashion. In one profile, the woman has a hook nose, in the other a button nose, and you realize with a bit of shock that the event to which the title refers is the subject's nose job. A second Warhol work, "Nine Jackies," is a silkscreen showing, in a 3 X 3 matrix, nine images of Jackie Kennedy,  based on a photo clearly taken November 22,  1963, since Jackie is wearing that famous pillbox hat. It's interesting to see the way that President Kennedy's face moves into a...

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...