365 Days at the Met

  January 13, 2025 Gallery 620 is a long rectangle filled chock-a-block with late 16th century and 17th century Italian paintings, almost all on religious subjects. Many are by artists I've never heard of before, among them,  Carlo Saraceni, Alessandro Turchi, and Scipione Pulzone. A number show figures in highly dramatic poses, among them Artemisia Gentileschi's large canvas depicting Esther fainting away before Ahasuerus and Guido Cagnacci's Cleopatra gazing skyward as she holds the asp to her artfully exposed breast.  I prefer more naturalism, I guess, and that's reflected in the two works I chose to write about today. Indicative of that naturalism, none of the figures in these two religious paintings wears a halo. One is a Caravaggio oil dating from the early 1600s and entitled "The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist." Measuring about 48 inches high and 40 inches wide, the painting is tightly composed: The figures form a kind of V against t...

  January 10, 2025 Looking into gallery 619 through one doorway, I saw lots of El Grecos. But as I approached the space today from a different direction, two painntings from Picasso's Blue Period confronted me, and my first reaction was an irked "What the f___?"  Yes, I could see that the figure in Picasso's "The Blind Man's Meal" is gaunt and long-limbed, like those in many El Greco paintings. And yes, Picasso was a Spaniard and El Greco a Spaniard by adoption. But really? After I read the introductory wall sign, though, I better understood the rationale for the arrangement, and it made sense. Entitled "El Greco and European Modernism," the sign informs us that El Greco left few followers but was rediscovered at the turn of the 20th century and influenced such artists as Picasso, Cezanne and Max Beckmann. It was probably inevitable that I would write about El Greco's "View of Toledo"; it's a painting I've known and loved ...

  January 6, 2025 When I glanced earlier into gallery 618, my first thought was, "It's all about van Dyck." There are a number of van Dycks in the gallery, but the larger theme is that court portraiture in the 17th century tended to be flamboyant:  financiers, administrators, and others associated with royal courts wanted portraits that conveyed their wealth and power. The oh-so-politically-correct signage informs us that portraiture "bestowed a veneer of respectability on igures whose wealth often came from the exploitation of other individuals - including enslaved people - who rarely appear in portraits."  Well, yes - but doesn't wealth almost inevitably involve exploitation, and isn't high culture dependent on wealth for its existence?  Sometimes, the wall signs lay it on with a trowel. In describing Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's minister of finance and the subject of one of the portraits on display, the sign notes that Colbert promoted polic...

 January 5, 2025 Gallery 617 centers on still lifes, mostly works from the Netherlands but also some examples from Italy and other countries. (The Clara Peters painting discussed on Day 245 has been moved here.) Other than  Peters, I have heard of none of the painters whose works are on view, among them Willem Claes Heda, Sebastian Stoskopff, Balthasar van der Ast, Orsola Maddalena Caccia, Panfilo Nuvolone, and Antonio Leonelli.  I wonder if these painters specialized in painting still lifes. It also occurs to me that the still life genre, as it developed in the 17th century, was dependent on the emergence of a moneyed class of patrons who possessed luxury goods, appreciated the beauty of flowers, and enjoyed food delicacies on their tables and depicted on their walls. I wonder to what extent still lifes replaced religious imagery in the home decor of good burghers and nobles.  Yet these individuals must have felt a certain amount of anxiety about their delight in th...

  January 2, 2025 I've peered several times into gallery 616, where "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer" occupies pride of place. In truth, I thought the gallery was numbered 615 and would be a good place to finish up 2024. But I'm equally happy to start the new year with Rembrandt.  The gallery is home to 11 of his paintings, along with a terrific Frans Hals portrait and works by Nicolas Maes and Govert Flinck, Rembrandt's students. I was tempted to write about one of these latter paintings but in the end felt that it was only right to dedicate this entry to the master himself. Rembrandt painted "The Standard Bearer,"  as the work is popularly known, in 1654, when the artist was 48 and, it strikes me, in complete control of his craft.  His subject has been identified as Floris Soop, who belonged to one of Amsterdam's civic guard companies - hence his get-up- and also was an aesthete and bachelor (read: gay?) with  a large collection of painti...

  December 31, 2024 \Gallery 615 takes us outdoors again. The introductory signage points out that Dutch landscape painting of the mid-17th century reflected a new sense of nationhood that developed as part of the struggle for independence from Spain. I wonder if landscape painting, emphasizing as it did expanses of land and even more dramatic expanses of sky, also helped to forge that sense of national identity,  But I'm surprised that so many of the scenes show hillocks and rises in the land - quite different from my flat-as-a-pancake image of the Netherlands. At first, I thought I'd write about a van Ruisdael painting that immediately caught my eye because of its large size and prominent placement in the gallery, and because it exemplifies the scenes of immense, lowering skies that I associate with van Ruisdael.   But as I finish making my rounds of the gallery, I spot a small (perhaps 14 inches wide and 10 inches high) painting by an artist I've never heard of be...

  December 28, 2024 Gallery 613 dealt with the outdoors, so perhaps it's inevitable that Gallery 614 focuses on interiors.  Helpful introductory signage explains that during a period of economic prosperity,  wealthy burghers came to emulate the behavior of aristocrats. "High-life" genre paintings depicted amorous encounters and elevated pursuits,such as music-making. The gallery houses five Vermeers - that is, almost one-seventh of all the Vermeers known in the world! Some of these are famous, including "Young Woman with a Lute," "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher," and "Study of a Young Woman."  But two paintings were previously unknown to me. One, to my surprise, is an allegorical painting that depicts the Catholic faith as a young woman, her foot atop a globe to symbolize the religion's dominion over the entire world,  while in the foreground the cornerstone of a church crushes evil, represented, natch, as a snake. I never knew that Ver...