3.1.24 — Sailing to Byzantium

Late in the tenth century, a Nubian wall painting shows an imposing figure in priestly robes backed by a still taller one. It is Bishop Petros protected by Saint Peter, his namesake. No surprises there, but for one thing: the bishop is black, for Nubia spanned today’s southern Egypt and the Sudan. Peter, in turn, is white, for the Christianity of the Roman Empire had extended its reach to Africa, even as Rome had fallen long ago.

With “Africa and Byzantium,” the Met takes a fresh look at the Byzantine empire that emerged from the division of Rome’s in 395, but with the cracks showing at least two hundred years earlier. Here it no longer centers on Constantinople, or Byzantium (today’s Istanbul) on the Bosporus Strait connecting Europe and Asia. It looks south, to Syria, and then west across North Africa from Egypt to Algeria—Carthage, Preparations for a Feast (Musée du Louvre, late 2nd century)and further south to present-day Sudan and Ethiopia, through March 3. Nor is it the place where painting has gone to die, in the “dark ages” between classical art and the Renaissance. It is open-minded and eclectic, a model for diversity in art now. It is where at least four major religions met, fought, and reached an ever-changing agreement.

William Butler Yeats in “Sailing to Byzantium” had it wrong. This is a country for old men (and women), with a respect for authority and antiquity. More than a hundred years after Saint Peter, Jesus looks after a Nubian dignitary. The two wall paintings are so alike in style and dimensions that they could have been painted together. These really are “monuments of unaging intellect,” but an intellect that accommodates Christianity, Roman gods, the Coptic culture of Egypt, and Jewish scholars in Alexandria and Tunis. Nubian armies repelled Islamic invaders, but by all means throw the Koran into the mix.

To ask the Met, histories of Western art have had it wrong, too. Byzantine art may have you thinking of Madonnas, where the child gestures regally but stiffly and well-articulated folds in her black robe only bring out their flatness. Gilding makes them look that much more inert, and the harsh outlines of their features make them look as if they were squinting. And sure, many such icons appear here, but in an open, fluid history. Rather than a sudden turn from classicism to darkness and back, it presents a continuing narrative connecting and explaining them all. It has room for blackness, too, although the ultimate authorities are white.

The show opens with mosaics, in a firmly classical world. Their pale colors have all the brightness of ancient Rome, with well-articulated figures in wide-open spaces, stretching their limbs as they prepare for a feast. Then come small jugs in African red clay, in the shape of heads with whimsical faces, and bowls, a lion, and a dolphin in clear rock crystal. The sheer variety of media stands out, as does the debt at once to Rome and Africa. Jewelry, textiles, and carved boxes for precious possessions confirm the picture. The bronze bust of a crying child picks up where the red clay left off, but with the poignancy of being young, helpless, and black.

A textile shows Greek or Roman gods, but also black. Do not be surprised either if similar figures appear to either side of a Madonna and Child. What religion is this, and which myth is which? Here Christianity claims everything and anything for its own. The flattening comes soon enough, but its disrespect for naturalism allows other liberties. Why stop with an icon when you can throw in as many Biblical or folk anecdotes as you like? The heads of apostles as oil lamps run to further whimsy, even as the icons deny it.

How good is this history? I am well outside my expertise. As with shows of early Buddhism and women of Mesopotamia, I may not contribute something beyond a recommendation the way, I have argued, a critic should. I can only share my personal encounter, from the perspective of European and contemporary American art—including art that itself journeys to Africa. Bear in mind, too, the Met’s nasty habit of presenting a curator’s minority interpretation as law. In shifting the focus to North Africa, has it left both Byzantium and African art behind?

It is fascinating all the same, and the many languages on display make a strong case as well. The curators, led by Andrea Achi, get to ask if you knew that Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt. The last room throw in a few living artists who respond to tradition with pattern and decoration. Given museum trends toward making everything about contemporary art, I can only be grateful that there are not more of them. Think of the exhibition as not history alone, but also an ideal. I can live with that, a white lie, and a black Artemis.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

1.17.24 — The Oldest and the New

In October 1849, a smart young Parisian set out to see the world. Then twenty-seven, Maxime Du Camp got himself a camera and learned to use it from the best of the best, Gustave Le Gray.

Then he grabbed a close friend, Gustave Flaubert, and headed for Egypt and the Middle East. He returned after a year and a half with two hundred negatives of pyramids, ancient temples, mosques, and now and then signs of life. The oldest of the old and the newest of the new, Maxime Du Camp's Vue du Pronaos du Temple de Dandour (Tropique du Cancer) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1850)in technology and in art—what could better suit a man confident in his talents and eager for attention. He might not mind one bit to see it all again as “Proof: Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa,” at the Met through January 21, and I work this together with an upcoming report on the ancient Near East, Byzantine art, and Africa as a longer review and my latest upload.

What, though, was Du Camp after, civilizations or something larger than life? What, for that matter, was a camera to him, the latest art form or a tool of scientific clarity? He had no shortage of support for them all. He had the encouragement of France’s Minister of Public Instruction, who urged him to remember photography’s “uncontestable exactitude.” Once back home, he got to work with Blanquart-Evrard, France’s first commercial photographic press. Its crisp, cool shades of black and white echoed both that exactitude and a popular art form, lithography.

But then why choose? Just a generation after Napoleon’s aspirations to empire and so soon after the invention of photography, the pyramids and the camera alike still felt novel and still inspired awe. Critics dismissed the prints as “vaporous” or derivative of contemporary prints, but the public disagreed. A publisher selected more than half the images for a book, Egypte, Nubie, Palestine, et Syrie—the first in France with photographs as illustrations. Du Camp’s career as a writer and journalist was off to a good start, and he never looked back. He traded the camera for a decent sofa.

Not that everything went smoothly. Chemical salts on paper negatives could not stand up to a long journey and desert heat. Fortunately, the same wet treatment that produced those cool tones also revived the negatives. Fortunately, too, they did not stop Du Camp from making his own “proof prints,” possibly in conjunction with Le Gray. They have entered the Met’s collection, which naturally prefers them. It relishes the greater warmth of their pale yellow-gray.

You can decide for yourself, for the museum displays both versions of quite a few. I like both the sharpness of black and white and texture in yellow-gray skies—even while knowing that they may have come about in the darkroom by smearing more chemicals over the skies to remove signs of contemporary life. The exotic for its own sake was just too appealing for Du Camp to pass up. People appear only as props to set off the amazing scale of temples, pillars, statues, and windswept sands. Flaubert himself shows up just once, and he seems to have slouched onto the scene rather than posed for the camera. The novelist had his own uncontestable exactitude in prose, but Du Camp never so much as mentions him in an account of their journey.

Not that the Met withholds criticism. It sees the photos as condescending to a foreign culture, but I am not so sure. If anything, Du Camp seems largely indifferent to culture, whether ancient or Islamic. The show has just a few prints by others, and he just cannot match them. They bring their structures closer to the viewer, for a sense of art and life. He has something else in mind—density, detail, and mass.

He likes a residential neighborhood in Cairo for its balconies and box-like gardens, not its inhabitants at work, at prayer, or at play. He likes scenes divided between bulky structures and utter ruins, but without a moral. He likes to center a panorama on an ancient dome or minaret, but they pop out of nowhere, more as landmarks than signs of foolishness or faith. One might never know that anyone saw the Middle East as a holy land. As he travels down the Nile to what was then the Nubia, in present-day Egypt and Sudan, he finally gets fully into ancient ambitions, but he wants them all for himself. He alone holds the proof.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

1.12.24 — Beasts of Burden

Manet / Degas,” this past year’s blockbuster at The Met, shows two great artists learning from and struggling against each other. Even more, it shows their course from the Louvre to modern life.

What would it take to go the rest of the way, from Post-Impressionism to modern art? Could it have taken two more artists working side by side? “Vertigo of Color,” in the museum’s Lehman wing, follows Henri Matisse and André Derain to a fishing village in France for a single summer. It marked a powerful convergence, celebrated or derided as Fauvism, but just as interesting is what it leaves out, through January 21—and I work this in with my recent report on “Manet / Degas” as a longer review and my latest upload. Matisse's Self-Portrait (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, 1906)

Just who were the Fauvists, or wild beasts? That fishing village, Collioure in 1905, looks remarkably serene. Sailboats lie still at their berths, their masts dipping like bridges across white, untroubled waters. Fishermen go quietly about their work, leaving deep blue traces on the shore. One can see why Henri Matisse called his most ambitious painting back then Luxe, Calme et Volupté (after Charles Baudelaire), with an equal emphasis on all three terms. His wife, Amélie, sits in a blue and white kimono beside the water, as if the drama of life had come to a perfect rest.

Or were the beasts the artists themselves, and was the wildness their art or the light? “The nights are radiant,” Derain wrote, “the days potent, ferocious, and victorious. The light bears down on all sides with its immense shout of victory.” The show’s title puts Matisse first, because he will always come first, but the show itself opens with facing walls for André Derain. Daubs of red, yellow, and orange daylight cover the ground and a wild green enters the sky, like Pointillism for an artist too amazed to connect the dots. Yet he seeks stability as well, in the horizontals of the horizon, the shoreline, and the meeting between trees and earth. He finds it, too, in the detachment of a high point of view.

Yet things quickly intensify, as each artist paints the other. The shadow beneath Derain’s chin divides his face between flesh and pale green, while the shadow beneath the other man’s eye could have scarred him for life. Matisse himself is consistently the wilder beast, with color for its own sake in a deeper space with a logic all its own. Their titles alone draw a contrast—between Derain’s care for the everyday labor of sailing and fishing, and Matisse’s for landscape, mountains, and the joy of life. He has an instinct for generalization from this very moment. It may come as a surprise, in the show’s third section, to discover that he painted Amélie outdoors on the spot, but he did.

The show wraps up with an extended postscript, for still life and portraits. A young sailor by Matisse could not conceivably get back to work without tempting those around him with his colors and curves. The section also takes the artists, if only briefly, into 1906. Derain brought what he had discovered to the sobriety of London at dusk. Both exhibited in the fall of 1905 in Paris. The Salon d’Automne set that year aside for Fauvism.

Yet that, too, leaves something out: the Salon counted Maurice de Vlaminck and others as Fauvists, too, in what had become not a summer’s impulse but a movement. It leaves out as well Matisse’s major works, such as Luxe, Calme et Volupté and the still greater color clashes of Woman in a Hat. Both exhibited at the Salon, but one would never know it here. The Joy of Life was soon to follow, as was the most startling of all, the portrait called (with good reason) Green Stripe. So was his ultimate breakthrough, starting in 1909 with Red Studio, and so was a very different meeting of the minds, rivalry with Picasso.

The curators, Dita Amory with Ann Dumas of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, leave all that out for a reason: they seek a point of origin in a pairing and a place. Matisse, they note, had been to Collioure before and would come again. Derain may have loved the night, but he never returned. Origins, though, have a way of receding into myth. This is beautiful art, but it stops short of the origins of Fauvism—or of modern art.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

1.5.24 — Europe’s Theme Park

Back in museums with the new year? I, for one, had forgotten so much. Just for starters, I had forgotten the glorious yellow in Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder at the Met.

Rembrandt's Self-Portrait (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1660)Or had I? The Museum had closed its galleries for European painting for the Skylight Project, replacing the glass in each and every one. Half reopened in December 2020, and my experience of them began with just those fields of wheat. How much has the illumination improved, how much was I merely primed to look for light and color, and how much of the credit goes to Bruegel alone? Even now that the rest has reopened, I cannot say for sure, but the collection looks great all the same. It also looks at once classic, tendentious, illuminating, and confusing—and I pick up from where I left off in 2020, so by all means check out my longer report then as well as this one.

If you are expecting natural light flooding the galleries, you can only be disappointed to see thousands of bulbs behind the thousands of new panes of glass. But then, the Met is nothing if not controlling, and they seem just right for European painting. They bring out the depth and warmth of Bruegel’s yellow. They also bring out darker woods by Peter Paul Rubens in the same room and some startling curatorial choices. So why look up? Look around you—and not just for the mutual flattery of art and light.

As the leap ahead from Bruegel’s Mannerism to Rubens in the Baroque suggests, the rehanging in 2023 is more provocative than ever. The provocations have changed, to be sure, but not by much. The Met has had three years to rethink its choices, but it is telling the same story. Its account of the Renaissance now begins with “faces,” from both Italy and Northern Europe. One could almost forget how different the two were in style, purpose, and media. One might not so easily forget the double portrait by Filippo Lippi in Italy, with the solidity of his teacher, Masaccio, and a meeting of the sexes at a window ever so close to home.

More provocative still are the themes, again one to a room. As present times require, they describe art as instrumental. Not just one Madonna but two by Giovanni Bellini, early and late in his shift to painting in oil, fall under “Trade and Transformation in Venice—and so does the pain in a Lamentation by Vittore Carpaccio. “Faith and Love in Venice” has room for a more otherworldly love, in the eerie light of Savoldo. Even with Peter Paul Rubens, in “Flesh and the Spirit,” I leapt right to the spirit, for Saint Francis adoring a Holy Family so perfect that it excludes Joseph. I would have admired an independent Dutch nation in “The Patriotic Landscape,” but I was too busy with the variety of skies and worldly pursuits.

We are talking race, class, and power in a proper postmodern way. Does it matter that the prize portrait in “Portraits and Power” is not of wealth and power, but of Juan de Pareja, the slave whom Diego Velázquez set free to become a painter? Did Giambattista Tiepolo include blacks in his busy heavens? It is a game of Where’s Waldo to find out. It might be best to take all the rooms as a game, asking you to guess the theme. Please do not criticize yourself if you fail.

One last provocation is easier to ignore. Museums these days make a point of modern and contemporary art, like the Met itself with its new hanging for Korean art. Almost halfway through, I thought that these galleries had escaped that fate, but no. Pablo Picasso in his Blue Period turns up with El Greco, Salvador Dalí with Spain, and Max Beckmann with Francis Bacon on the way in. None look the better for it. A “focus gallery” for artists in their studio has room for Kerry James Marshall, Elaine de Kooning, and more.

Still, all is not lost, not with a collection like this. The Met has reined in the worst as well. It now as clearer divisions by time and place than in 2020. Just as much, the drawbacks can become advantages. Taking away separate wings for the Renaissance translates into a smooth arc from the origins of landscape and illumination to the real thing. The Baroque becomes not just a rebellion, but also an evolution. And the themes challenge you to retrace that evolution.

The return of European painting is not just a provocation. It is also a recovery and a relief. One may never feel close enough to Rembrandt in a room the size of a football field, but a full wall for Jan Vermeer is something else again. One can also appreciate the span of European art. It has room now for the Americas, in the eighteenth century, in a room that (surprise!) opens onto the Met’s American wing. A room later, both wings contain musical instruments, but each has a music of its own.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

12.26.23 — Is It Modernism Yet?

To continue my year-end review from last time, blockbusters always come with hype and hokum, and why not? Shows like these are costly to put on, while bringing in big money, and “van Gogh’s Cypresses” is no exception.

Does it really matter that some pictures include a certain tree? Maybe not, but the Met looked freshly at not just Starry Night, but the fatal last years of Vincent van Gogh. It also brought home his close connection to his brother, Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Cypresses (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1889)Theo, a dealer and his greatest supporter. Never mind that it came with an upbeat ending that no amount of great art can warrant.

And then in no time the lines were back for “Manet / Degas.” Can even a blockbuster sort out two creative minds and big egos? Maybe not, but it could still begin with Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas on their meeting in the Louvre and end with their envisioning Paris and politics through the lens of old masters and present-day ideas. It should have anyone continuing on to the Met’s galleries for European art, open again after the “Skylight Project.” It, too, comes with hokum, between loaded themes and forced interruptions for contemporary art. Still, this is the heart of a great museum.

Down in the Lehman wing, the Met jumps ahead to Fauvism and “Vertigo of Color.” It, too, has a dubious narrative, of just two artists and one summer—and it, too, is an all-male preserve. Still, if you never understood what brought Henri Matisse and André Derain together and how they differ, here you can. The show also returns to the role of painting out of doors in the creation of modern art. So, for that matter, did “Into the Woods,” French landscapes at the Morgan Library. Whose woods these are I only thought I knew.

Same goes for whose Modernism. Can Manet, who stood just outside Impressionism, and Degas, often seen as Post-Impressionist, point ahead to modern art and Pablo Picasso? As it happens, this was an anniversary year for Picasso, and museums all over the world competed to give him a really big show. So did at least one posh gallery, Gagosian, with documentation to match. The celebration included some lemons, like a comedian’s put-down of Picasso in Brooklyn, and revealing sidelights, like his early days in France at the Guggenheim. Yet they should already have one looking beyond the blockbusters.

My own favorite sidelights told of how Cubism never made it to a townhouse in Brooklyn—and how a stay in Fontainebleau led to two of Picasso’s most famous paintings. Like Matisse’s Red Studio last year, they suggest the importance of place—and a decent place to work. They also continue an exploration of when to declare art modern and what it took to get there. So did a show at the Morgan of Blaise Cendrars, a French poet, and his collaborations with modern artists. Oh, and how did America enter the picture, and when did Modernism become abstraction? MoMA looked for answers to both to Georgia O’Keeffe.

Is a return to so popular a painter just more of the same? Up to a point, although it stuck to her drawings. Besides flowers, it also held patterning for its own sake and views from an airplane window onto the earth, with its rivers, roads, and fissures. Like a true American, O’Keeffe took to the highway, only from above. I could not shake it out of my mind when I caught Chris Gallagher this fall at McKenzie on the Lower East Side. He does not need to look past the window itself for abstract art—and I continue next time with how to look beyond.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

12.22.23 — Cubism in Brooklyn

Pablo Picasso did not come easily to New York. He had a solo show in 1911 at its most innovative gallery, but it sold all of two drawings—one of them to the dealer himself.

Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer, had opened his gallery in Greenwich Village six years earlier, but for Americans, it seems, that was just not long enough to grow accustomed to modern art. Two years later, Pablo Picasso's The Scallop Shell: Notre Avenir Est dans l'Air (Leonard A. Lauder Collection/Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1912)Cubism made a sensation, but not with Pablo Picasso. Its appearance in the legendary Armory Show provoked outrage and enthusiasm, in the form of Nude Descending a Staircase, by Marcel Duchamp. Before both shows, though, Picasso found a buyer not on Fifth Avenue, but in Brooklyn. Now the Met tries to recreate the 1910 commission, through January 14.

Modernism’s shocks are easy to remember, but harder over time to explain. Picasso has become a fixture, loved and hated, and an earlier show looked at nothing but his impact on American art. For years before its repatriation to Spain, Guernica seemed inseparable from New York and the Museum of Modern Art. As for Nude Descending a Staircase, it was not even a nude. Maybe that is what shocked most. Yet it had nothing on the radicalism of the work destined for Brooklyn.

Hamilton Easter Field asked for eleven paintings, for the library of his townhouse in Columbia Heights. They never made it across the Atlantic. Field, who had met him not long before, died before the job was done. The Met claims to have identified six completed paintings, on view with eight drawings, but who is to say? It does not have much to go by, beyond the dimensions of the library. Field gave detailed specs for the room as a whole and where paintings would fit, at least two of them over doors. This was site-specific work, but not a mural or, for that matter, a single work.

Picasso had mixed feelings work on commission, if not America itself. In a letter to Gertrude Stein, he dismissed the whole project as mere decoration and something he just had to do. Yet he dug right into it. He began with sketches on vacation in Cadaquês, the coastal village just outside Barcelona. He was happy enough with the surviving paintings to have signed them, and why not? This was the very height of Analytic Cubism, and Field had given him the chance to push his limits.

Would the American (himself an artist, dealer, and critic) have known what he was getting? He was that second buyer for Stieglitz, and he bought an accomplished nude (on display here) from around 1905, in Picasso’s eminently accessible Pink Period. By 1910, Cubism was dismantling not just the human figure, but painting itself. Pen and oil hatching plays against the white of canvas and paper. It allows brown and blue to play against one another as well. Picasso would never work so densely or so close to abstraction again.

Two of the six paintings are nudes, standing or reclining in accord with the library’s available space. Two are still life, and two are women playing the mandolin or guitar (possibly Marie Laurencin, whose paintings stood out this fall at the New York art fairs, in the Independent)—but just try to envision their subject. Just last year the Met claimed Synthetic Cubism for trompe l’oeil painting, but this is a radical assault on illusion. Nor is it, in a clichéd view of Cubism, a compendium of optical points of view. It is a compendium of ways to look and ways to think about painting. That is why Modernism is still a challenge for Postmodernism and art today.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

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