Stuff Heard in Museums

Sargent's Portrait of Graham Robertson

During our recent (too long!) sojourn, we had the opportunity to visit many museums and see multiple shows.  Certainly the finest show of 2015 was the overview of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and now traveling around the country.  (Look for this show … it is among the most beautiful things you will ever see.)

Aside from Sargent’s mastery, however, my multiple visits garnered some of the most amusing comments I’ve heard in my nearly 40 years of museum going.  Here’s a sampling:

Upon looking at Sargent’s masterful portrait of Graham Robertson (covered elsewhere in these pages), one Upper East Side lady-who-lunches said to her companion, “Let’s go see some art that is not as pretentious.”  (I hasten to remind you that it is she and others like her that keeps the museum industry alive.  Dark days, indeed.)

Standing before Sargent’s dramatic picture of the great Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, one teenager bent to read the explanatory card and explained (in a voice that carried all the way to the lunch counter downstairs), “F—k, this sh-t is old!”  This is, perhaps, the most incisive example of art criticism coming from young people today.

Again, two middle-aged ladies standing in front of the magnificent portrait of Dr. Samuel Pozzi (perhaps the most striking piece in the show), exclaimed, “he was a gynecologist!  How crazy was that!”

Not that it was easy to see many of these masterpieces – one had to brush aside a forest of selfi-sticks, or stand aside from people having their pictures taken beside the paintings.  Indeed, we don’t seem to look a pictures any more, we merely record that we were in their presence.  A dear friend and knowing art critic once said that cameras should be banned from museums, but that each and every visitor should have access to paper and pencil so they could sketch their own impressions.  Since the greatest threat to art in museums today is not theft, but defacement from visitors, perhaps this is not such a good idea…

In another visit to the Met, I took a break from the Sargent exhibition and strolled through the medieval collection, where a couple nearby examined each and every piece of armor and wondered what the dollar value of the silver would be.  That same day, in the Chinese wing, I overheard someone say, “Those people sure were smart.”

If all of this sounds elitist or condescending, it is certainly not meant in that light and not my intention at all.  At heart, it is a call for more passionate, more engaged, more aware museum-going.  A museum is not a destination to be seen, but a place in which to see.  In the right museum, you are witnessing the triumph of the human spirit over barbarism, the evolution of artistic technique both intellectual and spiritual, and connecting with something more primal an elemental than ourselves.  Museums are sacred places … shouldn’t we behave differently inside of them?

Saint Michael, by Luca Giordano (1663)

We return to our look at some of the work by one of history’s most prolific painters, Luca Giordano (1634-1705). 

During his 10 year period in Spain (1692-1702), Giordano carried out major decorative commissions in Madrid, Toledo and the Escorial.  He grew to greatly admire the Spanish painter Velázquez, and painted A Homage to Velázquez (circa 1692, now in the National Gallery London).  Giordano had an incredible ability to mimic the work of other artists, and for some time his Homage was attributed to Velázquez himself.  Indeed, after a trip to Venice he painted an Annunciation (now in the collection at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art) in the manner of Titian, and Giordano’s ability as a mimic are clearly apparent.

Giordano was an incredibly active painter, prolific until the end of his life, and is currently credited with some 2000 paintings.  As such, some are quite wonderful and others, less so.  One of the great challenges with prolific genius is to separate the great from the near-great from the best-left-forgotten.

Giordano painted St. Michael several times.  One depiction, dating roughly to 1660-65, clearly owes its inspiration to the painter Raphael; and while that is certainly a beautiful picture (showing a profound understanding of the color blue), I much prefer the one here, from 1663, as it owes its greatest debt to Giordano’s first master and mentor, the painter Ribera.

St. Michael, along with Gabriel and Raphael, is one of only three angels liturgically venerated by the Church.  He appears twice in the Old Testament as a helper to the early Christian peoples; he appears twice in the New Testament, once first arguing Satan over Moses’ body, and again when he and his angels fought Satan and his dragons and hurled him and his followers from heaven. 

He appears repeatedly in apocryphal literature and was regarded by the early Church as the captain of the heavenly host, the protector of Christians against the devil (especially at the time of death, when the soul is most vulnerable), and the leader of Christian armies against the heathen. 

The cult of St. Michael started in Phrygia, but soon spread to the West, where it gained traction when it was recorded that Michael appeared at Mt. Garganus during the rein of Pope Gelasius.  He is always depicted with a sword or lance, and often standing over conquered devils and dragons.  He is the ultimate conception of the warrior angel in all his glamor and strength, valor and might.

Like much of Ribera’s work, there are hints of the dark, brooding genius of Caravaggio, as well as the influence of Spanish and Venetian masters.  The work is heavily reliant on the dramatic use of shadow, and a moody sense of coloration.  The picture is both … unsettling and startling; despite the heroic visitation of Michael, the overall image is somewhat horrific.

The triumphant Michael is perhaps somewhat fleshy and feminine to the contemporary eye, but the manly torso and powerful legs indicate the strength of a warrior of Christ.  The golden tresses of the angel, along with the girlish face perhaps still owe something to Raphael, as do the draping of his cape behind him. 

Curious about the cape: its pinkish color reflecting the lights of Hell seems as if the brighter, pinker side should be on the viewer’s right, rather than the left.  Also odd, too, is that on Michael’s left hip (or on the right side, to the viewer) the dragon-headed hilt of a sword is clearly visible, but the corresponding blade seems no where in evidence behind the angel.

No, the real triumphs here are the wonderfully bestial devils and the hellish landscape.  The fingers of our devils taper into wonderfully pointy fingernails, and the eyes register as dead black.  Also wonderful is the devil’s cavernous mouth, which seems genuinely otherworldly with its snake-like note of two teeth visible at the bottom.  His leathery, bat-like wings are in marked contrast to the feathery white clouds provided for Michael.  Curiously, the spear of St. Michael pieces the side of the devil almost exactly where the Roman spear pierced the side of the dying Christ.

The background has a sulfuric quality; one could almost choke on the red and brown mists.  Between the serpent wrapped around one unfortunate’s arm, a howling beast and the foot of a plummeting body, Giordano’s hell is truly a fearsome creation.

More Luca Giordano tomorrow.

The Chess Players by Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier (1853)

We finish would look at the works of Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891) with this treasure from 1853, The Chess Players.  This small scale painting (just 9.5x12.5 – slightly larger than the paper in your printer) is quite terrific.  One of the more interesting things about this picture, to my mind, is how Meissonier plays again and again with patterns.

A chessboard has a specific pattern – fair enough. But then see how he buffets this with square shapes representing the ornate room divider, the tapestries, and various pictures scattered about the room.  Also interesting is how he places his major players in the picture – the player on the left poised for attack, the player on the right hesitant, the sleeping dog and table with decanter standing off to the side like unused pieces in a game.  Here is composition as strategy, and it illustrates the keen eye Meissonier had for placement and his very conscious selection of components of a picture.

One of the other fascinating things about this work, when seen opposite some of his other pictures, is the lack of detail.  To be sure the chairs, the clothes, the tables and the dog are all depicted with a photographic sensibility, but Meissonier chooses to uncharacteristically wash-out some of the background detail.  We have only a sense of the tapestries, room divider and surrounding pictures.  I think, though, that this is in keeping with Meissonier’s overall approach to the picture: the “board” is less important than the psychology of the major “pieces.”

Unlike contemporary artists, Meissonier believed in that fine art helped make for a better citizenry.  He wanted art to be an elevating experience, filled with the grandeur of history and the lessons found in heroic deeds.  He consciously spent the later part of his life painting scenes of Napoleonic glory.  Executed with the same fine brushwork and acute attention to detail as his earlier subjects, these scenes from the great days of the French Empire eventually made Meissonier’s works the highest-grossing, most sought-after paintings of any living artist. The largest and most-ambitious of these works, finished in 1875, was Friedland (see below), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It sold for 380,000 francs, more than triple the highest price ever paid for a painting by a living artist.  Unlike his smaller works, Friedland was a large-scale picture which took the artist 14 years to complete.  It is considered by many to be his masterpiece, but I much prefer his smaller, more intimate pictures. 

It is interesting to contrast a picture like The Chess Players with Friedland.  Though both pictures are composition-as-strategy, and involve participation in a game of war, the smaller picture has a warmth, humanity and … sensitivity missing from the larger work.  Perhaps depictions of simple people, living their lives, is the most elevating artistic goal of all.

Portrait of Alessandro Vittoria at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Here is one of my favorite pictures at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art: the portrait of sculptor Alessandro Vittoria by Paolo Veronese (1528-1588).  Vittoria was one of the most celebrated sculptors of the Venetian Renaissance, and he is shown in the painting holding the model for his statue of St. Sebastian, carved in 1561-2 for the church of San Francesco dell Vigna in Venice.  Vittoria’s Sebastian was so successful that he later cast it as a bronze statuette, which can be seen at the Metropolitan.

 

Like many a great artist, Vittoria was not shy – he has multiple portraits of himself painted by the leading artists of the time, and five of them hung near the studio in his home where they could be seen by clients and visitors.  This portrait dates to c1580, when the sculptor was 55 years old.

The easy collaboration between sculptor and painter may be inferred not only by the sympathetic depiction, but also by the fact that Vittoria collaborated with Veronese on the decoration of Palladio’s Villa Barbaro at Maser some 20 years earlier.

Veronese ranks, alongside Titian and Tintoretto, as the greatest of Venetian Renaissance painters.  He is celebrated for his work as a colorist, and for his ability to create teeming, multi-figure canvases on a heroic scale.  His taste for ornamentation and excess got him into a bit of trouble with the Holy Inquisition, which was appalled at the excesses to be found in his representation of The Last Supper.  After questioning by the church, Veronese was ordered to fix the picture to something more decorous and within the austere teachings of the church over the next three months.  Instead of touching the picture, he simply renamed it The Feast in the House of Levi, sidestepping obsessive – and dangerous – ecclesiasticals.  (See below.)

Vitorria was born in Trent, son of a tailor.  He was heavily influenced by Michelangelo (who was, in turn, heavily influenced by antiquity and the Belvedere Torso); he was trained in the atelier of architect/sculptor Jacopo Sansovino. 

It must be remembered that the Renaissance was not just a reawakening of human potential and artistic and intellectual ideals, but a rediscovery of the ancient world.  The broken statue next to the sculptor represents a fragment of our Greco-Roman heritage, and serves as a bridge between the ancient world and the modern.

Why do I love this picture so?  On one hand, it is one of Veronese’s more quiet pictures.  A sense of serene and studied mastery pervades both the pose and the execution.  Vitorria’s delicately depicted hands (especially the strong and tapering fingers) are significant, of course, but not more so than the look of bland sophistication and … sprezzatura on the sculptor’s face.  One can well imagine Vitorria murmuring, “Oh this?  Yes, it’s a little something I put together.  Do you like it?”

Veronese’s love of decoration can be seen in the elaborate tablecloth and is barely hinted at in the faint traces of wall decoration over the sculptor’s right shoulder.  The expression on Vittoria’s face is much like the one the sculptor later used when depicting himself in three dimensions.

Bernini: Sculpting in Clay at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

There are perhaps few things more frustrating than missing something that will not return in the near future, if ever.  So, it’s with a heavy heart that I report that last Sunday (January 6) was the final day for Bernini: Sculpting in Clay at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Despite some real flaws in the presentation, it was an excellent show.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was the greatest sculptor of the Baroque era.  Perhaps the finest collections of Bernini sculptures are to be found in the Villa Borghese and the Vatican; look for upcoming articles on both in The Jade Sphinx.  We looked at Bernini in a previous post when examining representations of the Biblical David; his David is more determined, more fierce, more … scrappy than the confident, gorgeous youth of Michelangelo or the fey aristocrat of Donatello.

Bernini is often considered to be the successor of Michelangelo, as he married both the heroic monumentality of his predecessor to a greater realism and dramatic motion.  He was also, like Michelangelo, a multi-faceted genius, able to write plays, paint, design metalwork and create stage sets.  In addition, he too was possessed of that peculiar religious fever that consumed Michelangelo, believing that his art was a manifestation of his love for God.  (One has only to look at the disturbingly orgasmic Ecstasy of St. Teresa to see how deeply rooted were his religious beliefs.)

Like many sculptors (and, often, some painters), Bernini created mini-sketches in terracotta of what would be larger, more demanding works in marble.  It is a terrific boon to a sculptor to think out the challenges of movement and pose on a small scale before committing to the larger, less-forgiving work.

The three-dimensional sketches in the show detailed a magnificent creative mind at work.  There were drawings along with the three dimensional sketches – including a stunning self-portrait in chalk – and there was very much the sense of being inside of an artist’s workshop.  The text accompanying the exhibition was also usually clear, concise and informative.  The figures on hand were, to your correspondent, surprisingly large – the Renaissance mind did not think small.  Nor where the figures quick or rough in any way – these were superbly executed ‘first-runs’ and were beautiful works of art in-and-of-themselves.

Sadly, once again the Metropolitan used spectacularly poor judgment in lighting and positioning.  Many of the figures were too high for patrons to see the details, or behind plastic viewing walls that seemed to do nothing but reflect ambient light, making it near impossible to see the things within.  Why a multi-million dollar operation with a world-class reputation cannot do better is one of the deeper mysteries of the New York art world.

For those who missed the show, there is a fabulously illustrated catalogue, including not only articles on view, but interesting new research on Bernini and his working methods, as well.  It is a pricey $65, but of unusual interest because of the insight it reveals into this great artist.

Extravagant Inventions; The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of the highlights of my recent trip to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art was a splendid show, Extravagant Inventions; The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens.  If you are planning a trip to the Met in the next month and have only time for one thing, make it this.  The show is on view through January 27, and is located just beyond the Greco-Roman collection.  I stumbled into it by accident, and was loathe to leave it at all.

Big names always spring to mind when one thinks of “must-see” shows, so forgive me a few words while I enthuse about the Roentgens.  The workshop of Abraham Roentgen (1711-1793) and his son, David (1743-1807), was responsible for some of the most beautiful (and fantastic) furniture of the era.  Desks, automatons, grand clocks – all of these are on hand.  Aside from being exquisitely crafted works of great beauty, they are also intriguing puzzles: many of them unfold to reveal hidden compartments, secret drawers or games and mechanical devices. 

The key word to the Roentgen style is grandeur – these are pieces to savor.  The Roentgens were based in Herrnhaag, in the Wetterau region near Frankfurt.  He was soon recognized by the local nobility and he moved his shop to Neuwied-at-the-Rhine in 1750.  It was his son David, however, who was responsible for the greatest successes of the workshop.  His sophisticated designs and playful clockwork precisions resulted in his being appointed Ebéniste-Méchanicien du Roi et de la Reine at the court of Queen Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI at Versailles in 1779.  He also created furniture for Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, and she became his most important client/patron. 

Sadly, it was the very seeds of his success that also led to Roentgen’s downfall: with the French Revolution, his royals clients could not sustain a taste for royal appointments, and his workshop folded. 

Extravagant Inventions draws on works from the Metropolitan Museum’s own holdings, as well as pieces from Berlin’s Kunstgewerbe Museum that have never before traveled, most notably a mechanical Secretary Cabinet (1779) made for King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia that is one of the most complex and expensive pieces of royal furniture ever produced. When the exhibition ends, four objects from the Kunstgewerbe Museum—The Harlequin Table (ca. 1760-65), a pair of marquetry portraits depicting an elderly woman and an elderly man (1775-80), and the aforementioned Secretary Cabinet—will remain on loan to the Metropolitan Museum for an additional nine months and will be on view in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Galleries.

The show is superbly lit, and the pieces are comfortably spaced.  There are several monumental clocks on view, all of which are works of remarkable craftsmanship.  One of the real highlights of the show is a clockwork harpsichord player, which is both beautiful and tuneful.  The muted colors of the walls bring out the luster of the wood, and the feeling of being in such luxury is delicious.  Here is art and form unified; the spectacularly beautiful becomes the sublimely functional.  It is a show than designers and manufacturers should see and take to heart.

The Metropolitan also provides video supplements showing the many secret drawers and hiding places to be found in the furniture, as well as a video of the elaborate musical automaton.  There is also a fully illustrated catalogue edited by Wolfram Koeppe, the first appreciation of the Roentgens in English for more than 30 years.  It is a sumptuously designed book and comes highly recommended.

Greek and Roman Gallery at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gravestone from Ancient Greece

Though New York has often been considered an aesthete’s paradise, it boasts a great deal of dross along with the gold.  There are magnificent things in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection, as well as a few fine things in the Museum of Modern Art – and aficionados well-remember the past glories of the late, lamented Dahesh Museum.

However, New York is also home to the trashy post modernism found at the Whitney and the errant tushery store-housed in the Guggenheim, along with galleries aimed at the well-heeled sucker and crammed with all manner of pickled sharks, troughs of broken glass and other detritus peddled by a pandering and corrupt marketplace.

The great shame of all of this is that it often so hard to see the great things that are here; a thought which crossed my mind repeatedly this weekend while visiting the Greek and Roman Gallery at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Fully renovated and reopened in the Spring of 2007, the Greco-Roman wing now has some 57,000 square feet of exhibition space for classical antiquity – about as much space as all the Whitney Museum galleries combined.  And unlike the Whitney, here are treasures actually worth seeing, if one could.

The Greco-Roman wing houses some magnificent statuary, stunningly preserved bits of pottery and jewelry, and gravestones that left your correspondent deeply moved by our universal humanity and capacity for grief.  It is easy to see the deep and abiding debt the modern world owes the Greeks and the Romans: everything from the language of our art to the confines of our thought and the boundaries of our aesthetics.  We are the Greeks and Romans – no other ancient (or modern, for that matter) cultures have had so titanic an influence over us.

Considering the size of that debt – both aesthetic and intellectual – one would think that the Metropolitan would make it easier to see the work on display.  Good luck.  The grand halls housing the treasures are quite wonderful: lofty expanses with many windows, allowing a generous amount of sunlight.  However, many of the pieces are behind thick pieces of reflective glass, and I often found myself looking at my own reflection (or that of the window behind me) and not the art.

Museums in Rome have conquered this problem by leaving treasures in the open, surrounded by sensors which beep when one peers too closely.  It’s something that the Metropolitan might want to consider.

Many of the statues are placed so high that details are lost – which is a puzzlement, considering that many of them are on a human-scale and meant to be seen eye-to-eye.  It’s great for connoisseurs of thighs and the occasional ankle, but we big-picture types have nothing for but to look up.

More disturbing still is that it seems neither the curators nor the staff have bothered to proof-read the information cards near the exhibits.  When one statue is described as having a wound under the breast, when it is clearly bleeding beside the breast and near the armpit, it means that either the curators are sloppy or the staff negligent.

However, with all of that grumbling aside – New Yorkers and art historians with an interest in the ancient world will find that there is much to savor in the Greco-Roman wing of the Met.  It is a surprisingly comprehensive collection, tracing the evolution and decline of a mighty civilization.  We can only hope that millennia from now, we are treated as kindly by our successors.

Tomorrow:  Extravagant Inventions; The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens

In the Studio by Alfred Stevens

Though seldom considered today (thanks, mainly, to our intense interest in ‘artists’ like Jackson Pollack and David Hockney), Alfred Émile Léopold Stevens (1823 – 1906) painted too many magnificent pictures to be swept aside by the tide of contemporary art ‘criticism.’

Stevens was born in Brussels.  Both his older brother and son were painters, and another brother an art dealer and critic.  He came from talented parents – his father was something of a celebrated collector in his own right, and his mother ran the Café de l'Amitié in Brussels, a meeting place for politicians, writers, and artists.

Like many artists of the time, Stevens studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where he mixed with several Neo-Classical painters, and in 1843 he went to Paris where he studies at the École des Beaux-Arts.  He started to show his own work in 1851, and he quickly became a medalist at the Paris Salon. 

Stevens soon became known for his masterful pictures of women in contemporary dress. He became a glittering part of the Paris social scene, befriending such worthies as Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, and Eugène Delacroix (who was a witness at Stevens’ wedding to socialite Marie Blanc).

During the Franco-Prussian War, Stevens fought for the French before returning to Belgium with his wife and family before the Paris Commune.  They returned to Paris after the war and he continued to win acclaim and commissions.  However, Stevens did not successfully manage his income, and after outliving most of his friends and family, died alone in a Paris hotel.

In the Studio is a remarkable picture for a variety of reasons.  Socially, it is quite interesting for a painting of the period to depict female artists.  Though there were certainly women painters at the time, they were, at best, marginal figures.  But also look at the easy composition: the painter stands aside her easel, palette in hand, listening in a languid attitude.  The studio visitor, obviously a lady of substance, leans forward in concentration and engagement.  The model, on the other end of the room (and of the social spectrum) sits isolated on the couch, splendid in her ornate dressing gown (which, no doubt, belongs to the artist).  Despite her classical beauty, the face seems, in repose, sullen and care-worn.  She is indeed a woman apart.

The studio itself is rich with the props and details often found in studios of this era – and is particularly rich in bits of Orientalia, including fans and a golden Japanese screen.  Stevens was a key figure in creating an interest in Japanese art, which was exploited by many artists of the era, including Whistler.  This wonderful picture is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and my readers are urged to visit it.

Below, to provide an additional taste of Steven’s Oriental oeuvre, here is his delightful La Parisienne japonaise.