In years past, my visits to the Met tended to be focused. I’d pass wide swaths of world culture in a glance and on a trot. Today everything stops me: the heads and feet, swords and shields; gossamer-thin stone draperies wrapping stone bodies fresh as flower buds; cups and chairs, scrolls and silks; tombs, animal emblems and more than a millennium of painting.
Unlike the Louvre, the Met is not an airport hangar where visitors seek the great amid wide stretches of less than. The stately architecture that can handle crowds without being crowded serves collections whose breath and depth are curated into singular experiences.
I do wish, however, that the Met would stop pairing Vuillard with Bonnard, or, rather, sticking a few Vuillards in a Bonnard gallery. Bonnard poured his colored light over everything. In his company, Vuillard comes across as timid, when he is actually a deeper and more complex painter, interested in domestic suppression: how his sister fades into the wallpaper in his mother’s presence, and how silence in a sitting room can fester, rattling the tea cups. I’d pair Vuillard with Munch: one scream choked, the other expressed.
Exhibits I might have missed in the old days include the drool Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photo Collage:
Kate Edith Gough (English, 1856-1948) Untitled page from the Gough Album, late 1870s Collage of watercolor and albumen silver prints; 14 5/8 x 11 5/8 in. (37 x 29.5 cm) V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London
I might not have seen Five Thousand Years of Japanese Art: Treasures from the Packard Collection. Five thousand is a discouraging time span. I tend to favor exhibits rooted in time and place, with artists who connect like balls ricocheting across pool tables: contact and motion. There’s nothing but connection here, from the Neolithic to the 19th century, economy as a path toward abundance.
Kano Sansetsu (1589-1651) The Old
Plum Edo period (1615-1868) 1645 Four
sliding door panels (fusuma); ink, color, and gold on gilded paper
Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy
From the French High Middle Ages come 37 16-inch monks (and two boys) in a mournful procession, carved in alabaster by Jean de La Huerta and Antoine Le
Moiturier. A lucky accident of a renovation of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in
Dijon pried them out of their oranate architectural settings and set them in high relief on a table in the Met. Too bad they’re going back. On their own, they are killer good: distinct individuals each in his own way awash in emotion, surely the model for Rodin’s Burghers of Calais.
Given everything there is to see, who has time for Highlights from the Modern Design Collection, 1900-2006? Not me, and yet I saw it with pleasure.
Who wouldn’t admire Otto Prustcher’s black/white checkerboard plant stand, zig-zagging across space, from 1903; Harold Van Doren’s ode to motion, his Snow-Place Sled, from 1934; Charles and Ray Eames’ Buffalo Chair, from 1946; Lucas Samaras’ plaster, falling-apart chair, from 1969-70, and Dale Chihuly’s Speckled Gold Venetian with Cobalt Leaves and Stems, from 2001.
There’s been a lot of talk in Seattle recently about a proposed Chihuly Museum at Seattle Center, much of it implying he’s some kind of lowest common denominator huckster, not a real artist at all. I looked in this show for anybody else from the Northwest who’d made the cut. Who else shared the honor? Nobody. Take it to the bank, nay-sayers. Your account is empty.
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