In 1923, Picasso observed: “To me there is no past or future
in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present,
it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of
the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other
times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive
today than it ever was.” And nowhere in New York this past
year has art’s life and breath been more apparent, more
revived, than at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Beginning
last April, with the reopening of the final rooms of the
Met’s astonishing new Greek and Roman Galleries, one
magnificent reinstallation or exhibition has followed
another.
In the Met’s Greek and Roman Galleries, brilliantly
redesigned by the architect Kevin Roche and impeccably
reinstalled by Carlos A. Picón, the art of the past is
reborn as an art of the present. The galleries do not feel
like a collection or a repository. They are not an art
history lesson or a mere glimpse into the beginnings of
Western Civilization. Nothing is dumbed down, and nothing is
embellished. The sculptures, paintings, and objects, bathed
in natural light, are placed with aplomb, but also with a
casual, pragmatic elegance. There is no agenda, no meddling
curatorial thesis—except, perhaps, a firm belief in
classicism and idealism and in the sheer power of art.
Walking through those creamy, dreamy, sun-drenched
galleries—among tombs, monuments, vases, nudes, a bubbling
fountain, emperors, athletes, gods, and goddesses—is to be
immersed in the art of antiquity and to experience art
responding to art. Here, classicism is not a label but an
ongoing tradition—an atmosphere, a state of mind. In the
Greek and Roman Galleries
the classicism of antiquity
reconnects with, jumpstarts even, more recent classicism—that of
Raphael, Poussin, Ingres, Puvis de Chavannes, Picasso, Arp,
and Brancusi. The fragments of the ancient world, we
discover, are not artifacts; they are as rich and fruitful
today as they were for the artists of the Renaissance. In
the Greek and Roman
Galleries, relationships among artworks,
attitudes, and ideals develop as naturally, as inevitably,
as if we and the artworks were all mingling together in a
town square. And those interactions are likely to tell us as
much about ourselves, our customs, and the art of our
present as they do about the people and the art of our past.
The success of the Greek and Roman Galleries reminds us just
how important are the selection, environment, and placement
of art objects. It reminds us that the best curatorial
decisions are often the ones in which the curator appears
not to have made any decisions at all. The artworks—left
alone, with plenty of breathing space, yet positioned in
order to spark playful, ever-deepening conversations—are
allowed to work their magic.
Museumgoers at the Met, overwhelmed by the sheer range of
unforgettable offerings at the museum these past twelve
months, may feel that the Metropolitan is moving with such
assured and boundless strides that it is incapable of a
misstep. The Greek and Roman Galleries and the beautiful
period rooms in the new Wrightsman Galleries for French
Decorative Arts—which have been artificially lit to
recreate the feel of actual candlelight and of certain times
of day—as well as shows of Dutch paintings, Baroque
tapestries, Abstract
Expressionism, African reliquary
figures, Poussin’s landscapes, and panels from Ghiberti’s
Gates of Paradise compose an unparalleled collection of
riches at the museum. But the beauty and authority of the
Greek and Roman Galleries, and of the Wrightsman Galleries,
stand in stark contrast to the relative failure of another
more recent renovation and reinstallation at the Met, that
of the new Galleries for Nineteenth- and Early
Twentieth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture, which
opened to the public in early December.[1]
The renovation and reinstallation was overseen by Gary
Tinterow, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Engelhard Curator
in Charge of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern,
and Contemporary Art, and Rebecca Rabinow, an associate
curator in the same department. Here, the curatorial
decisions are not only often blatantly obvious; at times
they actually marginalize certain artists and constrict or
interfere with the experience of certain works of art.
I presume that most viewers will not have many problems with
the Met’s new second-floor renovation and reinstallation of
their rich, deep collection of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century European paintings and sculpture. The
collection includes dozens and dozens of masterpieces,
textbook color plates, and crowd-pleasers. And the reviews I
have read so far have all been glowing. One might rightly
ask: What’s not to like?
Through the expansion, ten new galleries, or more than eight
thousand square feet, have been added to the south of the
nineteenth-century galleries, a grouping comprised of the
Annenberg, B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture, André Meyer, Janice
H. Levin, and Havemeyer Galleries. Named the Henry J. Heinz
II Galleries, in recognition of a major gift made by his
widow, the long-time Metropolitan Museum Trustee Drue Heinz,
the ten new rooms make for a grand total of thirty-two
galleries and more than thirty-five thousand square feet of
exhibition space. And all of the galleries, now built to
look as if they had been designed by McKim, Mead & White at
the turn of the twentieth century, are tasteful, classical,
and austere Beaux-Arts rooms that reflect the period of many
of the artworks they house. The expansion, which was
facilitated through the commandeering of unneeded air space
in the first-floor Oceanic Galleries below (the space is not
missed, by the way), was a strike of pure architectural
genius on behalf of the Met’s director, Philippe de
Montebello. The ten new rooms—as if by magic—were produced
literally out of thin air. And the galleries are better and
richer for the additional space, which, except for minor
problems, has been seamlessly orchestrated architecturally
by Mr. Roche. Add to this that 85 percent of the
Met’s entire collection of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century European paintings and sculpture are now on
view; add also that these works have been augmented by
numerous loans, including promised gifts, specifically a
large cache of small oil sketches and plein-air paintings
from private collectors. So, what’s not to like?
The first time I visited the Met’s new galleries for
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art, I was stunned
and seduced by the addition of artworks and exhibition
space. The new galleries, which now house an additional two
hundred works, or approximately six hundred paintings,
drawings, and sculptures, are familiar yet strangely
unfamiliar. Their experience is not unlike one of
those dreams—a dream, perhaps, unique to New Yorkers—in
which you are moving through your own small apartment, only
to discover that through the doors of what you had always
thought was a closet are ten well-needed extra rooms; the
rooms feel as if they had always been there; and you cannot
understand how you had never noticed or used them before.
I couldn’t get past my own surprise and joy over the
discovery of new works, such as a couple of small Corot oil
sketches, or my rediscovery of a small Cézanne watercolor,
The Bathers, from 1890, a masterpiece of wiggling line and
of shivering blues and greens, with touches of pink and red
on billowing cheek, elbow, and buttock; or by the fact
that
the complete Wisteria Dining Room, a well-heeled and
enchanting slice of French Art Nouveau—with its pointillist
murals depicting herons and peacocks, its book-matched
walnut paneling inlaid with wisteria blossoms, and its
one-of-a-kind furniture, door handles, drawer pulls, rug,
fireplace, and twisting, tree-like, bronze-and-alabaster
standing lamps—has been fully restored and gorgeously
installed, after forty years in storage; or by the fact that
a winding corridor of elegant, permanent vitrines was built
to house dozens of small bronze nudes, dancers, horses, and
riders by Degas.
But during subsequent visits, the honeymoon was over. I am
still overwhelmed by the additional galleries and charmed by
the Wisteria Dining Room; and certainly I have nothing
against more wall space for paintings and floor space for
sculpture. But we are talking about the Metropolitan Museum
of Art. We are also talking about the most popular
collections in the museum—those of Realism, Romanticism,
Neoclassicism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and early
Modernism—the bread-and-butter of the permanent collection,
the periods of art that have defined, and continue to
define, who we are today.
The Met is a museum that is supposedly setting the standard
for what is and what is not worthy of our attention from
every period of art—prehistoric to the present. The art of
the nineteenth century, or the beginnings of Modernism, is
the heart—the key—to all of the art that has come since.
The only way for us as a culture to comprehend the birth of
Modernism and everything that it has engendered (and we are
still reeling from Modernism’s impact) is to be very
well-acquainted with its roots. And why shouldn’t we be:
Ingres’s portraits, Corot’s landscapes, Renoir’s nudes,
Cézanne’s still lifes, and Redon’s bouquets are at the
height of artistic achievement. The art of the past is the
well of the present. The neoclassicism of Ingres relates to
that of Seurat, which relates to that of Mondrian, Calder,
and Ellsworth Kelly. The grays of Corot inspired the grays
of Braque and of Cubism, as well as the best of Pollock.
The mysticism of Redon fueled that of Klee. The heated,
violent color of Bonnard is the furnace of Rothko. The nudes
of Balthus are unthinkable without those of Courbet. And
Monet’s Water Lilies are a direct link to the abstractions
of Joan Mitchell.
The nineteenth-century art movements broke so much ground;
in doing so, they justified the very notion of
revolution against the lame and insipid, though enormously
popular, art of the Academy—official French Salon painting.
And those art movements also established many of the beliefs
concerning art and culture that we now hold dear. The very
notion of Impressionism’s rebellion, and of the public’s
subsequent hatred, rejection, and, later, acceptance and
love of the movement, has since become an accepted
cycle—for good and for ill—that is played out among the
art world, the public, and the marketplace every day. But
revolution for revolution’s sake is a merry-go-round that
can only lead to a dead end. To revolt, not only must you
have something worth fighting for, you must also have
something worth fighting against. And you must not leave
decisions to chance.
More and more, museums are allowing the public to decide
what is and is not worthy in art. Websites and notebooks
accompany galleries and exhibitions, so that visitors can
weigh in on issues concerning what they saw, didn’t see,
would like to see, or would like to see changed in museums.
I think there is a lot of value to be gained here, as long
as public opinion is taken for what it is—public, rather
than expert, opinion. The problem is that the experts and
policy makers (museum curators, directors, and trustees)
appear to be making decisions based on
public taste. It is public opinion—or, more correctly, the
desire to appeal to public, or populist, taste—that has
ruined the once-magnificent Brooklyn Museum of Art. And,
based on what is happening within certain areas of the Met,
including the Galleries for Nineteenth- and Early
Twentieth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture, there is
a sense that populist, crowd-pleasing taste—or at least an
appeal to that taste—is weakening the museum’s foundations.
Or, worse yet, there is a sense that populist taste is a
Trojan horse that is already inside the gates.
I do not mean to be beating the drums of doom here. And,
luckily, almost everything currently wrong with the new
installation—for instance, the fact that wall labels, perched
on the ledges of wainscoting, at times encroach too much on
the paintings—is reversible. (The fact that in
areas the beautiful wainscoting is too high, encroaches on
pictures, or forces certain pictures too far upward is not
reversible.)
But sometimes ideas, already entrenched, are more difficult
to uproot than the changes wrought by those ideas. The
Met’s
Galleries for Nineteenth- and Early
Twentieth-Century
European Paintings and Sculpture have been designed to be
fluid and malleable. And the installation has to be
understood as a work in progress. Things will be, and
already are, changing. (Less than two months after the
initial installation, paintings have already come and gone.)
American, as well as British, paintings completed while
those artists were in Europe are mixed in with European
pictures. The American works will remain in the European
Galleries until they can return to the American Wing, which
is under renovation until 2010. And artworks such as
paintings by J. M. W. Turner, as well as a handful of
Courbets, will return to the nineteenth-century European
galleries once their respective traveling exhibitions have
ended. Obviously, these additions and subtractions will
alter the hang of the galleries. But I sense that something
else is afoot. I sense that revisionism is at work.
Much of the problem with the reinstallation is that—in
treating every painting as though it were equally
weighted—it plays down the collection’s strengths, as it
exposes and amplifies its weaknesses. And it doesn’t help
that the pictures are often crowded so close together that
not only are they incapable of breathing, but groups of
small works also begin to read not as individual paintings
but as collage. Because of a pluralist, global, and
inclusive curatorial stance, everyone, regardless
of talent, must be heard, and the greatest voices are lost to
the din of the many.
In the reinstallation there is more space and more artworks
and more variety (a host of American, British, Italian,
German, Scandinavian, Russian, and Spanish artists have
moved in), but those works have weakened the French
stronghold. A lot of prime real estate has been given over
to second- and third-tier artists. I appreciate seeing
Turner, Constable, and Christen Købke among the French
here. But generally, French masterpieces must compete with a
whole horde of schlocky American, British, Italian, Spanish,
and Northern painting, as well as nearly a Salon’s worth of
bad Salon painting. And let’s be clear: Although these
galleries are dedicated to European art, it is the French
(and a very small group of French painters at that)—or the
school of Paris (in this case the Dutchman van Gogh and the
Spaniard Picasso are both French)—not the Europeans, who
define painting in the nineteenth century and well into the
twentieth century. True, official Salon painting of the
Academy may have been the art of choice among
a number of
the original patrons who donated their collections to the
Met. But no amount of Salon painting and mediocre European
work can change the fact that French painting—from
Delacroix and
Ingres up through Corot, Courbet, the
Impressionists, Symbolists, and Postimpressionists, to van
Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso—is the sun around which the
other artists represented in these galleries shine.
A friend of mine, after having visited the new nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century galleries, exclaimed: “Have you
ever seen a blinder hang?” I am not sure if “blind” is the
word I would use, but I would certainly call the
installation cavalier and insensitive, as well as populist
in appeal. The Met has a superb collection of Odilon Redons.
And the handling of his masterpieces is a case in point. The
Met had a chance to let Redon shine. Instead, his pictures
are broken into two groups. One group of oils and pastels,
ebullient bouquets of flowers, is positioned in the low-lit
entranceway (a narrow hallway) outside the Wisteria Dining
Room. Here, viewers, who spend most of their time with their
backs to his pictures, are crowded together and rarely give
Redon a second glance as they exit the gallery. Redon feels
put aside, and his genius is diluted by the likes of
Alphonse Mucha, Albert Bartholomé, and Fernand Khnopff. In
another gallery, which is hung like an afterthought, Redon’s
masterful Pandora and The Chariot of Apollo are
cornered and must compete with the colorless
outbursts of James Ensor, Maurice Denis, and Gustave Klimt.
I understand that the American painter John Singer Sargent
appeals to popular taste (so, too, did the
nineteenth-century effusions of Bouguereau, who is given
prime real estate at the Met), but that does not mean that
curators should lower their standards and appease that
taste; it does not mean that Sargent’s formless, cloying,
bravado brush-handling—what the late painter Leland Bell
once referred to as “bullshit with whipped cream”—has
anything whatsoever to do with the achievements of Ingres,
Delacroix, Courbet, Matisse, or Velázquez. Sargent’s
full-length aristocratic portrait Madame X
(Madame Pierre
Gautreau) (1883–1884) is now at the center, or heart, of the
nineteenth-century European galleries. Offering the longest
possible vantage point of any work in the collection (a
position once held by Courbet’s miraculous Woman with a
Parrot), Madame X can be seen from the top of the Met’s
grand staircase at Eighty-second Street, two blocks away. Could it be that
contemporary taste for the lifeless, sexed-up “Old Master”
effects of John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage—not to mention
the recent absurd reassessment, and the Guggenheim’s
subsequent coronation, of Norman Rockwell—is responsible
for Sargent’s ascendancy?
Another glaring problem with the reinstallation is wall color.
The galleries have been painted dark tan, cream, ashy gray,
chalky terracotta, or chalky eggplant. The warm, dull,
terracotta red, although it pulls out the reddish browns in
some of the oil sketches, competes with just about
everything it surrounds. And the Cézannes have to contend
with the walls of eggplant, a gray-violet that swallows and deadens Cézanne’s icy, vibrant greens
and blues. I felt as if the Cézannes had been pressed into
mud.
Some galleries, particularly a room of full-length
portraits, as well as a few of the early twentieth-century
galleries, are put together better than others. But what
happens in most of the galleries is that the paintings
become wallpaper. There is little sense that aesthetic
distinctions have been made; that the curators believe that
one Monet is better than another; or that Rosa Bonheur’s
massive The Horse Fair pales by comparison to the Courbets
it overshadows and ends up crowding out in the Realism
Gallery. Generally, there is little flow, pacing, or
surprise. Exceptions do exist, however, as when, for
instance, Braque’s painting The Studio (1939) shares a
room with Gauguin, Seurat, Picasso, and van Gogh. The
Studio, positioned across from Matisse’s Odalisque with
Gray Trousers and Bonnard’s Meadow in Bloom is a
tour-de-force, a powerful engine of pumping pistons that,
here, appears to have taken all of that high-keyed
turn-of-the-century color, reorganized it, turned it inside
out, and processed it through the Cubist machine.
But, as I said, the interaction inspired by Braque’s The
Studio is the exception rather than the rule. Along with
the gallery of Cézannes, one of the biggest disappointments
is the Corot room. The fact is, however, that the approach
to Corot is generally followed throughout most of the
installation: On nearly every wall the largest picture is
hung in the middle, and figures
always face inward, toward
one another. Pictures, hung symmetrically, are
alternated—horizontal, vertical, horizontal. Small
pictures, no matter how magnificent, are crammed into
corners. There is little sense of pacing to the Corot
gallery; little sense of call-and-response between artworks;
little sense that the curators are using their eyes.
The Met’s collection of Corots is stellar, but you really
have to work to get at what makes these pictures the
greatest single grouping of Corots outside of Europe. At the
Met, Corot’s paintings, evenly spaced, are divided into
groups by genre and size. This means that all portraits hang
on one wall and that a wall of masterful landscapes is
strung together into one long cinematic panorama—an
unfortunate comic-strip hang in which individual pictures
are cancelled out. How nice it would have been to see those
landscapes interspersed with Corot’s two small paintings of
reclining nudes in the landscape (both of which have been
stacked mercilessly in a corner) and with Corot’s A Woman
Reading—a picture in which the woman, like a mountain,
rises out of the landscape, and the landscape, like a river
or a daydream, flows out of the woman.
I doubt that Gary Tinterow and Rebecca Rabinow want anything
less for museumgoers than the highest possible experience of
Corot. But I also have to wonder if their approach to these
galleries isn’t one in which the museumgoer comes first and
the art comes second—an attitude that represents a clear
change at the museum. Mr. Tinterow has been responsible for
bringing some superb, innovative, and scholarly exhibitions
to the Met, including “Seurat” (1991), “Corot” (1996),
“Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch” (1999), “Matisse:
The Fabric of Dreams, His Art and His Textiles” (2005), and
“Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the
Avant-Garde” (2006). But I am beginning to wonder if lately
he has bitten off more than he can chew.
Since 2004, Mr. Tinterow’s responsibilities have increased
at the Metropolitan Museum from that of overseeing
nineteenth-century art to that of overseeing the art of the
nineteenth century to the present. In the last few years, he
has delved deeper into contemporary art—with disastrous
results. (I am referring not to box office receipts but to
curatorial daring and innovation, and to aesthetic merit.)
Mr. Tinterow has mounted shows that reflect a lowering of
standards, as well as an appeal to the contemporary art
world and to populist taste—that is, weak art and artists
who have already been lauded elsewhere.
During the last few years, Mr. Tinterow has brought us shows
of Kara Walker’s lifeless, browbeating silhouettes, Tony
Oursler’s animated video blobs, and Tara Donovan’s obsessive
trials with minutia. The most interesting of the bunch was
an exhibition devoted to the paintings of the contemporary
German artist Neo Rauch. But Mr. Rauch’s concoctions do not
represent the best that contemporary painting has to
offer—far from it. Mr. Rauch’s illustrative, narrative
ambiguities are little more than Neo-Dadaist brainteasers
and limpid Surrealist distortions, all packaged in
contemporary Social Realism. Mr. Tinterow’s latest Barnum &
Bailey act (which, in terms purely of contemporary
relevance, has arrived at the Met fifteen years after the
fact) is an installation centered on the loan of Damien
Hirst’s pickled shark in a tank of formaldehyde, The
Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone
Living (1991), which belongs to the billionaire art collector
Steven Cohen. And this spring he is bringing us the
sculpture of Jeff Koons. I am not the only one who has
wondered how and why the Met, which can consistently wow us
with such beautiful and groundbreaking exhibitions when it
comes to the art of the past, has to drop the ball so
completely regarding the art of the present.
Mr. Tinterow and Mr. de Montebello, as well as museum
trustees, perhaps betting that sideshow novelties will
appeal to the least tradition-conscious among us, may see
these decisions regarding contemporary art as short-term, as
well as long-term, gains. They may believe that they are
head-to-head with the Guggenheim and the Whitney, and that
they are tapping into a younger and hipper Chelsea crowd.
But the truth is that one of the reasons the Met is held in
such high regard is because it is the only major museum in
America, if not the world, that has, for the most part—up
until now, that is—refused to pander to public taste and to
the absurd rollercoaster of the contemporary art world. I
did not know I absolutely needed to see exhibitions of
Renaissance and Baroque Tapestries and of Matisse’s textiles
until I walked into those stellar shows at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. But if Mr. Tinterow cannot see
that Kara Walker, Damien Hirst, and Jeff Koons are artists
of negligible talent, what does that say about his judgment? And what does
that say about the future of the Met regarding not only
contemporary art but also the art of the permanent
collection?
Mr. Tinterow may have the best intentions. He may believe
that, in responding to contemporary taste, he is expanding
the treasures of the Metropolitan by exploring the best of what
contemporary art has to
offer. Maybe he just wants to rub shoulders with the Larry
Gagosians and Jeffrey Deitchs of the art world. The truth
is, however, that by showcasing the hottest art stars from
blue chip galleries, he is merely following the pack. He is
covering the same contemporary ground that the Whitney, the
Guggenheim, and MOMA—following the moneyed scent left
behind by the galleries and auction houses—have already
firmly tread.
And I have to wonder if Mr. Tinterow’s approach to
contemporary art has not altered his approach to the art of
the past. I have to wonder if Sargent has not been put at
the center of the nineteenth-century galleries because of a
belief that his slick,
effusive, power-ballad portraits will
bring in the crowds—and that Renoir’s sublime portrait
Tilla Durieux or Cézanne’s Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress
will not. Obviously, changes are in the air. The
Metropolitan Museum’s director, Philippe de Montebello, has
announced his retirement. And Mr.
Tinterow is on the short
list of possible
successors. And the new Galleries for
Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century European Paintings and
Sculpture may already reflect a new direction at the Met—a
changing of the guard. Their hanging reflects a revisionist
approach—one in which contemporary taste is being pandered
to, rather than being educated and guided. It suggests that,
consciously or unconsciously, the art of the past, rather
than being encouraged to breathe life into our present, is
being suffocated by the ignorance of the here-and-now.
Notes
Go to the top of the document.
The new Galleries for Nineteenth- and Early
Twentieth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture opened
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on December 4,
2007.
Go back to the text.