The Golden Age, Joachim Wtewael, 1566-1638 - Metropolitan Museum of Art
Day
1.
Leaving
the tiny but expensive apartment on east 90th,
I walked west, glancing down the always impressive Park Avenue,
making my way to the Guggenheim on 5th
Avenue. A fairly short line and I was in, senior discount, $18.
Normally one stands at that point in the atrium, the spiral walkway
there to take you past whatever show is hanging. Or take the
elevators to start at the top - the last exhibit I saw here was
abstraction from the 50s, with stand-out, drop-dead DeKoonings.
This
time James Turrell has commandeered the space, masterly and
expensively sealing off the atrium with what appear to be six
unblemished slightly concave sections, resembling the inside of a
gigantic Japanese rice paper lantern. There is a specially
constructed circular area of seating, allowing you to lean back and
enjoy the subtle lighted surface overhead reaching up to the
skylight. For a long time it was a light yellow. When nothing
happened beyond my own perception (plenty, I know, the point of much
of Turrell's work) I moved on up the ramp. Before I had gotten far
the color changed dramatically to a rich blue violet. Now I realized
it had to be projected light. At the top of the third level there
seemed to be a scrim of some kind, filtering the upper levels but I
was never sure it wasn't just on my eyeball.
Going
up the spiral walkway I was soon behind the finely crafted temporary
walls of the installation, sort of backstage. I asked one of the
guards if I was looking at sheetrock but she didn't didn't know. I
was hesitant to touch it since touching the art always gets you
yelled at and it had that rice paper look of fragility. There were
other Turrell works, the first a tall narrow opening bright with
natural light in an otherwise unlit room. A security guard stationed
nearby seemed part of the exhibit, the whole long space being subdued
and otherwise empty. Along the way you could duck into an exhibit of
Kandinsky which I found as engaging as the Turrell. The alcoves along
the Frank Loyd Wright spiral were freshly painted a muted yellow and
since there were no paintings hanging where one expects Chagalls and
Frankenthallers, Raushenbergs or Johns, the space became charged with
the central focus of Turrell's art, the act of seeing. I haven't
heard the artist address this but the act of perception is not but a
step from the state of being, the focus of much art since the
Impressionists.
Many
of the Turrell works in this show could be illustrations for
psychology text books where perceptual set-ups trick you into seeing
what is not there, or the reverse of what is there. The Lichenstein
“house” outside the High Museum in Atlanta is a Pop Art version
that depends on the viewer moving to get the dynamic effect. Turrell
controls the light in a space, usually dimming it and projecting
bright shapes into a corner, which from a certain angle take on the
appearance of a floating cube. I heard Turrell speak at the High
Museum once. He was showing a slide of a piece he did in the Whitney
Museum and I was embarrassed to realize I had peeked into that room,
thought it empty and moved on. On another occasion I saw a piece that
appeared to be a rectangular opening in the wall. You were peering
into a very ambiguous space, no way to tell how deep or even if it
was really an opening. It was baffling how he achieved that effect.
The guy has one of those minds that can assimilate science and
utilize optical physics to create puzzling and complex pieces.
As
you ascend the spiral walkway you come upon a sign indicating a
wait-time of as much as 45 minutes. I spent twenty minutes waiting to
get in a darkened room that a guard allowed about 8 people to enter
at a time. On the far wall was a horizontal rectangle flanked by low
lights. An inside guard wouldn't allow me to get close to it so I
wasn't sure whether it was an opening or a mounted flat plane. I
stood there waiting for something to happen, aware that in staring at
the dark space I was automatically trying to interpret and there was
some movement I'm sure attributable to my eyes. In the main space I
kept thinking I was seeing a scrim of some kind across the top of the
third layer, giving a soft-focus to the further layers but I really
couldn't tell if this was on my eye or in the space. If in the space
it was very impressively done. That is a very large space to hang
something without creating folds or other imperfections that catch
the light and so reveal themselves. With the room experience I felt
rather let down. I wanted to mime yawning for those in line,
considerably longer now, when I left for I really wouldn't recommend
much waiting for that piece. But I shyly left it alone. The piece was
about perception but more interesting to me were the conversations I
heard around me in the line, the dynamics of strangers meeting that I
half attended to as I read out of the book I carry for just such
occasions. Many others of course “read” from their iPhones.
Someone from Arizona talked his way into cutting the line, saying his
son had gone in and hadn't come out. The couple behind me happened
also to be from Arizona so the three of them explored commonalities.
The line-cutter being not so skilled at listening as talking, kept
interrupting the woman who had a slight stutter which facilitated his
narcissism.
Being
a painter myself I found the Kandinsky show appealing. Turrell is a
sculptor and sculpture, according to one artist, is defined as, “what
you bump into when you back up to look at a painting”. I forget
what wit said that. For all of Turrell's genius with materials and
scientific understanding I found myself thinking that I've seen more
interesting light shows at Rock concerts on youtube, Phish for
example. Gorsch, what a Philistine!
I
ended my Guggenheim sojourn by finding a seat at the atrium base,
experiencing the meditative state one more time and then heading for
the Metropolitan Museum of Art just down the road. I made immediately
for the modern wing, walked into a room and looked to see who would
be first to catch my eye. Not surprisingly, Picasso. But there were
plenty of others before my legs started telling me to head on back to
my daughter's apartment. Paul Klee for example, more Kandinsky,
Matisse, the lush and wonderful Modigliani.
I
took a quick look at a current exhibit of Civil War photographs and
paintings. I was surprised to learn that the famous Brady actually
took very few of the photos he is known for. I was always frustrated
by my family's early photos. There were usually a few people posing
with great space all around, giving little sense of the people.
Whomever took the photos had no sense of composition or portraiture
and this is true of many of the civil war pictures. They were
documenting momentous historical events but seemed to think it was
enough to simple point and shoot. One notorious and macabre
shutter-bug though posed bodies into tableau, sometimes using the
same bodies in different scenes. I had just reviewed a Civil War book
called Shiloh (see the blogpost below this one) so was
expecting to see some of the horror I had read about. Aside from some
close ups of Lincoln, Sherman, Grant etc; it was easy to skim the
show. Well, photos do capture a moment in history but you have to
work to get to that when the photography is primitive. Not so the
paintings, Homer standing out here. Many of the works were
contemporary with rather than scenes of the war but, so claims the
curator, registered the ominous rumblings of war indirectly.
Passing
through the Egyptian section I was fascinated to see Klee-like
doodling on one of those bibs they put on their sarcophagi. Slowed
only briefly though I made it to the (north) American Wing, wanting
to see that huge Washington
Crossing the Delaware.
Speaking of sculpture I'm always interested in the way sculptors of
busts create an intriguing illusion. By making what look like
drilled holes with a little wedge for pupils, when you look at those
eyes and step slowly back the eyes, at a certain distance, spring
into an animated, “alive” state, that is quite impressive. I
never heard this referred to in all the Art History nor studio
courses I had in Art School but just stumbled upon it in the Boston
Museum in 2001. This was just a month after 911 when the plane was
eerily, scantily occupied and Logan Airport was still suffering the
malevolent stain of those confused and/or used “operatives”.
Anyway,
I spotted a room, just past the Gilbert Stuart Washington portrait,
with Sargent, Eakins, Chase and Whistler, a grouping of their full
length society portraits, each exquisite and individual in their
style. The full length portrait was almost always twice as high as
wide and noticing this led me to do a series of full length fictional
portraits that were three
times
high as wide that carried on, intermittently, from 1986 to about 2000
(see www.thinkspeak.net). But that's just an aside. I went on to see
Delaware
and in the same room, some grand George Inness paintings and a
spectacular view of an Indian village on a river below towering
majestic mountains. This painting by Bierstadt is full of presumably
authentic detail and supremely exaggerated terrain, a sort of
composite of grandeur to dazzle the eastern market of the time. And
this was about the time my legs started their complaining so, past
the Egyptian stuff again and I stepped outside into a pouring rain.
Day
2.
Some
productive writing in the morning then, after my shoes had dried, a
streets-of-New-York walk to the Met again. This time I inquire about
a Valesquez I saw promoted as on loan. I was given a map of an area
covering European Painting 1250-1800. On the way to the Valesquez I
got stopped by my old friend, Tiepolo. His drawing remains on the
painting in the form of a dancing arabesque line that has always
captivated me. The face in Valesquez's portrait is fine but the
figure seems hurried. Later I see some Valesquez in the permanent
collection that is way better, or consistent, not just excellent in
the face. I notice the area is divided between Spanish, Italian and
French on the one side and English, Dutch, German on the other. I go
pretty rapidly through the medieval stuff, though I do love those
landscape backgrounds and the portraits, both for their
historicity and painterliness. I think of Hockney's book that
claims that portrait painters of this period began to use projection
and lens and it is a convincing argument, the later stuff being quite
realistic, photo-like, not in color but in accuracy of depiction. I
float through, high on this stuff, lingering over whatever stops
me... two oval works by Tiepolo, figures on clouds surrounded by a
gold leaf sky; LaTour and Carravagio, Titian, a beautiful portrait of
Michelangelo by one of his students, very abstract, the head and hand
rendered precisely but the figure and background only suggested.
There's an impressive, large painting by an Italian woman i've never
heard of and whose name I misplaced. It depicts a woman fainting in
the act of petitioning royalty, quite an unheard of thing in the day,
not the fainting, the petitioning by a woman... just as the painting
by a woman of the time was quite rare.
I
slip off to find a cafe and coffee, write in the ol' journal and
return for the English, Dutch, German side. Knocked out immediately
by a Bruegel, one of the four-season works, then a follower of Bosch.
I took a course in grad school on 17th
Century Dutch Art so these are old buds here. There's a painting by
Michiel Sweerts called Clothing
the Naked,
of a remarkably rendered man compassionately handing a homeless and
clothesless person a white garment. The artist had a reputation as a
kind and caring individual and he, toward the end of his life,
traveled to India and served the poor. The work reminds me of a scene
I witnessed on North Avenue in Atlanta. I was driving by in heavy
traffic and only glimpsed it but a black man was ministering to a
homeless white man who was so touched he was sobbing. The black man
was holding him by the shoulders and gently comforting. It was
biblical tableau I tell ya.
Next
I came upon a painting I had noted in the past but still it happily
delighted me. By Joachim Wtewael it is oil on copper, about the size
of a piece of typing paper but filled with such painstaking detail
and sensitive skill it could make you cry. It's called The Golden
Age. Figures fill and cavort in about every space in an expertly lit
and composed landscape, all nude, genitals carefully covered except
in the case of a few children. There is nothing erotic or hedonistic
about the nudity, a utopia described in seductive color. The great
thing I discovered, the Met has just about every work on their
website. I wanted to show my daughter this painting and I found I
could call it up by searching the artist.
Other
artists of note in this collection are Van Dyke, Ruebens,
Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hals, Ruisdale, Vermeer and, pinnacle of
civilization for me that day, Rembrandt. I've never appreciated him
so much as with this visit, he just glows with incredible refinement
and depth. Oh, I was looking at a Ruebens and a man at the next
painting was so excited he had to drag me over to share it with him.
And it was worth sharing... a “sketch” of a swirling crowded
scene, a Rubens trademark, people, some mounted on masterly drawn
horses, sketchy and unfinished, the central area being colored so
that it faded off into the muted monochrome of the rest, It had that
potent feel that is so hard to describe and it resembled a shallow
relief in its dark and light treatment.
Noticing
it was 4pm, I still had maybe an hour so I headed over to see the
Cezannes, passing up the crowded Punk Fashion show with not much
hesitation. There are marvelous Van Goghs of course, and Picassos to
knock your socks off but Cezanne, another of those monumental
individuals who somehow seemed to see into the heart of things and
gave us a glimpse in the work they left.
Ah,
a breathtaking two days. And to top off my visit I wrote a song on
the bus to LaGuardia, Keep
It Goin,
the words tumbling into my notebook from the stop-motion reality
assembling for me out the window.
