The Wall Street Journal-20080122-More Room for the Met-s 19th-Century Art
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More Room for the Met's 19th-Century Art
New York -- The Metropolitan Museum of Art has done it again -- expanded, refurbished and reinstalled an important part of its exhibition space with spectacular results. This time it's the second- floor galleries devoted to 19th- and early 20th-century European paintings and sculpture.
It's not exactly news that the work on view in this section of the museum has always been impressive, thanks to the generosity of such discerning, aggressive collectors as Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, Stephen C. Clark and Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, to name only a few of the Met's more notable benefactors. How could anyone fail to be dazzled by a collection that includes not only Gustave Courbet's voluptuous (temporarily absent) "Woman With a Parrot" but also Edouard Manet's version of the theme, that cool, standing figure in a shimmering pink silk robe; not only Vincent van Gogh's "L'Arlesienne," silhouetted against a glowing yellow ground, but also her counterpart, "La Berceuse," round and robust against a background of fantastic flowers?
There are incisive portraits by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres; muscular fantasies by Eugene Delacroix; a set of the first bronzes cast from Edgar Degas's wax sculptures; iconic Paul Cezannes and Claude Monets; ravishing Camille Corots; a fine representation of Camille Pissarros, Pierre Bonnards and Edouard Vuillards; and much, much more, including enough all-stops-out academic pot-boilers -- think Alexandre Cabanel's sleek "Birth of Venus" and Rosa Bonheur's thundering "Horse Fair" -- to give full weight to the daring of the early Modernist works hung nearby.
For the past 15 years or so, these splendid works have been housed in rather formal, elegant spaces conceived, we are told in the catalog accompanying the present renovation, to look as if McKim, Mead and White had designed them. Given the stellar quality of the collection and the fairly recent reconception of the galleries where it is installed, why the urgency to redo them once again? Because, good as the selection of works on view was, it was just that -- a selection -- and as such only hinted at the depth of the Met's holdings. More important to modern-day scholarship, the exhibited paintings and sculptures failed to tell the whole story of the period they proposed to illuminate.
The new Henry J. Heinz Galleries have added 8,000 square feet of exhibition space to the original galleries, an increase of about 25%, if the floor plan in the press kit is accurate, magically conjured from the void above the galleries for Oceanic Art -- which still look just fine, it should be noted. This dramatic increase allows the curators, Gary Tinterow and Rebecca Rabinow, to present the collection in ways that honor its strengths -- the rooms of Degas paintings, pastels and sculptures and what amount to Cezanne and Corot retrospectives themselves warrant a visit. It also allows them to create a much enlarged, informative context for well-known paintings and to make fresh, often illuminating, often surprising connections between familiar and less-familiar efforts. Works never before exhibited or seldom seen now enter into the conversation with old favorites. And that conversation is conducted in more languages than ever before. Italian, Scandinavian, Russian, German and British painters now make their voices heard in this recounting of the history of art from the dawn of Romanticism to the early years of radical Modernism.
Everybody gains from this inclusiveness. A cluster of modest Symbolist pastels seem more significant for being hung outside the miraculously complete Wisteria Dining Room, a paean to French Art Nouveau design -- furnishings, wall decorations, light fixtures and all. Silvery late Corot landscapes become even more eloquent when we can see their origins in a pair of early, light-struck studies done directly from the motif by the young Corot, in Italy, installed close by. These energetic little pictures, in turn, gain in importance among plein-air oil sketches by other young artists of the period as they attempted to come to terms with the landscape of the campagna; Corot makes most of them look pretty pedestrian.
The curators clearly had fun. Some newly included, rather silly Orientalist paintings are installed adjacent to a doorway to the Islamic galleries, currently under renovation. But most of the implied connections are serious and enlightening. Long sightlines permit comparisons between Van Gogh's astute "L'Arlesienne" and Picasso's imposing portrait of Gertrude Stein, both masterly emblems of mass and character -- the former all dazzling chromatic contrasts; the latter, as sober and boldly articulated as an archaic sculpture. Pairing Degas and Manet, in a long center gallery, is an inspired reminder that these ferociously inventive artists were both reluctant Modernists whose most innovative work was deeply rooted in the art of past. The placement of a surprisingly robust portrait by Henri Fantin-Latour near some Degas portraits makes us rethink the relationship of these contemporaries.
Many of the Courbets (including "Woman With a Parrot") are away, on loan to a retrospective that will be seen at the Met in 2008. Not that what's left is shabby -- we still have "Young Women of the Village," that vast, craggy landscape inhabited by Courbet's three sisters, a couple of cows, and a yappy black-and-white dog; a portrait of the red-haired Jo Hiffernan at her mirror; and an earthy nude, among other things. To make up for the missing works, a group of American expats and tourists have been added: John Singer Sargent, Courbet's friend James McNeill Whistler, and Thomas Eakins. They look right at home.
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Ms. Wilkin is the curator of "Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975," at the Denver Art Museum through Feb. 3.
