365 Days at the Met

 May 3, 2025 Gallery 639 contains a number of small oil paintings, and its introductory wall sign bears the title "Oil Sketches." In fact, however, only some of the paintings are "sketches" - that is, preparatory works intended to guide larger treatments of the same subject. The remaining paintings are what I would term character studies - paintings of men and women meant not to capture a likeness, as a portrait would do,  but to convey a generalizable quality rather than one tied to a particular individual. Many works of both types are by well-known artists, including Rubens, Van Dyck, and Tintoretto. My choice for today, in contrast, is by a Roman painter I'd never heard of, Orazio Borgianni, whose dates are 1578-1616. It's a relatively small oil on canvas, about 20 inches high and 15 inches wide, showing the head of an old woman.  Her forehead is deeply wrinkled; lines, too, surround her cast-down eyes. The skin above her bodice  has a crepe-y consistency...

 May 1, 2025 The works on display in Gallery 638 represent not a country or a time period  - the artists are Dutch, French, Anglo-Irish, German, and American; the works range in date from 1665 to 2014 - but a theme. The introductory wall sign is entitled "The Artist's Studio.," and in general, the paintings show artists at work; either they are self-portraits or portraits painted by their friends. Since a couple of the paintings depict  artists in their living quarters rather than specifically in their studios, I might opt for a somewhat more inclusive label - say, “Artists and the Act of Creation" -  but I realize that’s a quibble. Today's work, Kerry James Marshall’s enormous painting (perhaps 13 feet wide and 8 feet high), which bears the name  “Untitled (Studio),” dominates the gallery. (Since it’s quite obviously. a studio, I have no idea where the “Untitled” comes from.) Painted in 2014 using acrylics on PVC boards, it stands out for any number of reasons:...

 April 29, 2025 The works in gallery 637 thrust me forward a hundred years or so into what feels like an entirely different world -  one that is secular, hedonistic, and marked by abundance. This is, of course, a simplification: The introductory wall sign notes that paintings of Biblical and mythological scenes continued to have the highest prestige in the Low Countries.  But the Reformation and a burgeoning middle class induced painters to take on different kinds of subjects, and specifically, to present scenes of everyday life - the theme of this gallery.  I hadn't really thought about the role of the Reformation in shaping art markets, but of course it makes sense that artists, with  fewer commissions to decorate churches or create private devotional images of saints, were incentivized to explore new themes. On first glance, I thought that all the paintings on display were the works of  Netherlandish artists, but the first painting I looked at closely tu...

 April 25, 2025 I'm going to start off by grousing about something different: the food at the Met. I arrived around 12:45, tired and hungry after a long walk to and a long wait at the doctor's office, and headed for the cafeteria ("The Eatery," as the Met likes to call it), only to find it was closed. There was a long line of people waiting to get into one of the cafes that backs onto Central Park, and a line, too, waiting to get through the self-service line at the Balcony Cafe. I pay an extra $100 a year for the level of membership that allows me to use the Members' Lounge, where I found that I could get seated at 2 (it was then 1:15), I was allowed to sit in a waiting area where I surreptitiously nibbled some almonds and a Fig Newton. But what a drag! I know the Met is remodeling to expand the Costume Institute - a money-maker, it seems; is the cafeteria closed for that reason? But it seems outrageous to me that anyone thinking to have lunch at the Met is going...

 April 21, 2025 Gallery 635 catapults me back into the 15th century and even earlier. It's another example of the unintelligible system for numbering galleries that the Met has adopted. But one could also say that my insistence on visiting galleries in numerical order is equally crazy. (I think that's the first time I've acknowledged this possibility!)  The gallery contains many small painted panels depicting religious scenes, along with small painted crosses and a remarkable small bronze plaque showing the entombment of Christ that was meant to be held in the hands. (That supremely ugly head of John the Baptist on a platter that I wrote about on Day 231 has found its way here as well.) "Oh, a gallery of objects for private devotion" is my immediate reaction, and I wonder if I would have had the same response when I began this project. I think not, and I realize how much I've learned. The works come from Italy, Burgundy, and the Low Countries, and many are by ...

 April 19, 2025 The paintings in Gallery 634 again present an array of genres - history painting, a scene from the Trojan War, numerous portraits - and I again wonder what organizing theme the curator has come up with. The title of the introductory wall sign is "Revolution." More correctly, if slightly more long-windedly, it might be "The French Revolution: Antecedents and Aftermath." Here is where Houdon's bust of Diderot, considered on Day 187, has come to rest, as has the sculptor's bust of Voltaire; I suppose one might see these writers' intellectual curiosity and rationalism as contributing to the spirit of revolution. The gallery also holds Bouilly's painting of the crowd assembled at the Louvre to view David's painting of Napoleon crowning Josephine, the subject of Day 233's entry,  so the subjects depicted extend beyond the Revolution itself.   (I do wonder why the museum has so many galleries of 18th century French paintings. Some ar...

 April 14, 2025 Gallery 633 displays portraits made of prominent political leaders and other French notables between about 1750 and 1830.  This is where David's portrait of Antoine Lavoisier and Mme. Lavoisier discussed on Day 233 now hangs; I'm glad I discovered this early, because otherwise I would have written about this painting a second time; it's definitely my favorite work in the gallery. The introductory wall sign notes the turbulent political conditions under which political figures lived. The gallery contains two portraits of Talleyrand. I confess that I know little about him, but I read that he served successively under Louis XVI, the Revolutionary government, Napoleon, and the restored kingdom of Philippe - and I'm impressed by his evident political acumen and ability to make himself  invaluable to so many different heads of state. The same introductory sign emphasizes that France's wealth before the Revolution derived largely from its colonial territori...