Another (Belated) Appraisal of the Morgan

Roberta, I feel your frustration.
One of my reasons for starting this blog (as discussed in my “LEE ROSENBAUM” profile, right) is that it gives me a place where I can put all my thoughts, insights and bad puns that the mainstream media can’t use. I have often felt I had things worth saying and no place to say them.
So must it have been with my favorite NY Times art critic, Roberta Smith, when she viewed Renzo Piano‘s expansion of the Morgan Library and Museum but had no assignment to write about it. Nicolai Ourousoff, Carol Vogel, Holland Cotter, Verlyn Klinkenborg and Anthony Tomassini all weighed in, leaving Roberta out. Obviously, six articles (but not five!) on the same subject within less than four weeks would have been just too much.
Finally, today, Roberta gets her chance, with her review of the Morgan’s Rembrandt show, which is as much of an appraisal of Piano’s addition as of Rembrandt’s prints:
Widely hailed as a triumph, Mr. Piano’s design may ultimately qualify as a classic itself….A box of glass and steel set on an expansive plane of oak, it centers the Morgan’s three existing buildings on a setting that feels, for all its crisp urban geometry, as natural as a forest clearing. This structure’s affirmation of light, space and solid ground is a bracing prelude to almost any kind of art, but especially to the brave new world of Rembrandt’s etchings. As with Mr. Piano’s cube, so with the prints: you look through them as much as at them….Even at their darkest, Rembrandt’s etchings, like Renzo Piano’s great glass cube, celebrate the ideal of transparency.
CultureGrrl readers know I have mixed feelings about The Atrium that Ate the Morgan. I’m also not sure I agree that Rembrandt’s dense, complicated, brooding etchings have anything to do with transparency. I think that assessment was a stretch, contrived to justify Roberta’s architectural digression by tenuously connecting it to the exhibition she was assigned to review.
Happily, blogs are just one big digression. Speaking of which: Wouldn’t it have been nice if during Rembrandt’s 400 birthday year, the Metropolitan Museum (which has also mounted a Rembrandt birthday-celebrating print show) could have managed to reunite all its paintings by that artist in the same room? It did so, a while back, when construction necessitated removing the Rembrandts from their usual haunts. The power of that concentrated display in the Lehman Wing bowled me over.