Art Review
Old Faces in New Places
New European Paintings Galleries, 1250-1800, at the Met
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
Italian Baroque works in the
Metropolitan Museum’s European paintings galleries, which have expanded
by nearly a third and undergone a reinstallation.
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: May 23, 2013
When a monument wakes up, you notice. It’s been more than 40 years since
the Metropolitan Museum of Art rethought what many considered its
raison d’être, its galleries of European paintings.
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
“Portrait of a Man” (around 1636-38), by Frans Hals, has been reframed. Below is the old frame.
The last reinstallation was in 1972 and encompassed a chronological span
from Giotto to Picasso. Later, 19th- and 20th-century art was cut loose
and sent elsewhere. The rest of the European collection, by then huge,
easily could have filled the freed-up space. But the Met decided to
reserve the emptied galleries for blockbuster shows. So five centuries
of old master painting stayed where it was and fell into a doze.
Now comes a change. The blockbuster spaces have been given back to the collection,
and all 45 European painting galleries cosmetically overhauled: new
floors, fresh paint, walls put up or brought down, etc. For the first
time that I can remember, pictures really have room to breathe. And
there are many more of them. A few months ago 450 paintings were on
view; now there are more than 700.
We are not talking revolution. Visitors familiar with the holdings will
see a lot of what they already know, but encounter old faces in new
places, which can produce revelations. There are novelties: items either
new, out of sight for decades or just never shown. Best of all, some
top-shelf private loans have been integrated, for a limited time, into
the galleries in celebration of the reopening.
Most important, the geography of the galleries has been recalibrated.
The old arrangement was eccentric. To get from Jan van Eyck in
15th-century Bruges to Rembrandt in 17th-century Amsterdam you had to go
through Italy. Italy itself was all over the map. Judging from their
Met locations, you might have thought that Caravaggio and Tiepolo came
from opposite ends of Europe. To trace a coherent historical path, audio
guides were useless; you needed GPS.
No more. Now painting from northern Europe, excluding France, is laid
out by date in the regained galleries. Italian painting is consolidated
in a two-pronged format, with early work from Florence and Siena running
in parallel streams that flow into Titian’s Venice.
France is now unitary, as is Spain (Goya used to be stuck out in
nowheresville), and all national blocs are broken up by thematic
displays. The keen-eyed may note a Met obsession with framing. The
subject is hot these days, as is the market. Vintage examples cost a
mint, and the Met is getting its share. Finally, certain much-loved
pictures have returned to view with a spa-toned glow, thanks to the
tender mercies of conservation.
But what makes the reinstallation most stimulating is a subtle feature,
what you might call a curator’s secret weapon: the power of placement. Keith Christiansen,
chairman of the European paintings department, has brilliantly
orchestrated the collection as a play of dramatic vistas, visual lineups
of images — seen around corners or over distances — that pull you
forward in time and immerse you in textured layers of European culture.
A simple example: stand just outside the entrance to the new northern
European galleries and look straight ahead. You see, centered in the
first room, van Eyck’s oil-painted diptych
of “The Crucifixion” and “Last Judgment,” dated around 1435-40. Then
look right, to the Italian Renaissance rooms, and you’ll find another
foundational picture, the “Madonna and Child” of Duccio di Buoninsegna, painted in tempera and gold roughly a century before the van Eyck.
Both pieces are compact, probably made for home altars. (The frame of
the Duccio has singe marks from candles.) Both illustrate the same
spiritual history: Duccio’s sad-eyed young mother contemplating her baby
will eventually be van Eyck’s grief-shrouded woman crumpled beneath a
cross.
Created at different times, in different places, in different styles and
mediums, these two images are the roots, here visually interwined, for
almost everything that lies beyond.
Inside the Netherlandish galleries, there’s another surprise. A party’s
in progress in a room lined with Flemish portraits. The celebrants are a
somber, tight-lipped lot. Basic black is the power look; cash, not
birth, the social arbiter. A stiff gentility reigns. Yet currents of
submerged emotion eddy around the figures. In Hans Memling’s matched
marriage portraits of the Bruges banker Tommaso di Folco Portinari and
his bride, Maria, the couple — he was almost 40, she was 14 — appear to
face each other with prayerfully folded hands, as if marriage were a
matter of mutual worship. It’s a sweet notion, but not the one intended.
In art, the truth often lies in what’s been lost. The portraits once
formed the wings of a small diptych with an image of the Virgin and
Child at its center. It was to that unearthly vision that the couple
originally gave their devoted attention.
We move on through changing concepts of spirituality. In 16th-century
Germany, Albrecht Dürer, who spent time in Venice and liked what he saw,
combines southern softness and northern intensity in his figure of a veil-swaddled, ember-eyed St. Anne, as does his pupil Hans Baldung Grien in a painting
of St. John taking dictation from on high. Baldung sets the ecstatic
scene in a pretty landscape, but his aesthetic is basically one of
enclosure and artifice. His Nature has vistas, but no air.
Then comes a pivot point, with two great paintings in one small room. In Joachim Patinir’s triptych “The Penitence of Saint Jerome,”
from around 1518, a panorama of mountain lakes stretching to the
lambent horizon dwarfs the religious dramas transpiring within it. Half a
century later, in “The Harvesters,”
by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, saints have been replaced by farmers, the
sacred by the secular, the gold of halos by the gold of ripe wheat.
A few steps more, and you’re in a salon full of sky. That’s what
17th-century Dutch landscapes by the likes of Aelbert Cuyp, Jacob van
Ruisdael and Paulus Potter are mostly made of. These are such curious
images, earthy but numinous, which can also be said of paintings by
Rembrandt when he’s in a soulful mood.
An old Met friend, Rembrandt presides over two big galleries. They hold
no surprises, but a connecting space does: a display of Dutch decorative
arts tucked away in a kind of alcove that was once a reading area for
special exhibitions. Forget basic black. We’re in a realm of
scintillation. A cabinet designed by the Amsterdam ebony-worker Herman
Doomer — Rembrandt’s portrait
of him is nearby — is a marvel of mirrors and exotic woods. The gilded
leather “wallpaper” lining the space must have once made a candlelit
canal house shine like a shrine.
The Dutch story draws to a hushed close with the sight of all five of the museum’s Vermeers. One, “A Maid Asleep,”
is technically on loan from within the museum itself. It belongs to the
Altman Collection, which by terms of a bequest is required to be kept
intact, with pieces allowed out only for a matter of months. Make a
visit while all the Vermeers, early and late, are together.
A painting in the rehung Goya gallery, this one from the Lehman
Collection, has a similar date stamp. The gallery is on the same axis as
the Vermeer room, though far away. And from some distance you can see
its central image, the 1787-88 portrait of Condesa de Altamira with her infant daughter.
The Altamira family was good to Goya, and he was good to them. In the
portrait he gave the countess the world’s most beautiful gown, of the
palest pink silk with embroidered roses at the hem. Mr. Christiansen has
further enhanced her charisma by flanking the gallery entrance with two
full-length Murillo male portraits, dark against her light, one
recently fitted with a snazzy period frame.
As if in tribute to her, the adjoining room, which brings us to France,
is devoted almost entirely to art by women, namely the handful of female
painters who in the late 18th and early 19th centuries gained admission
to the French Academy. They had a tough fight, but they fought it with
aplomb. When, in a 1785 self-portrait, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard includes two of her students, you feel the surge of solidarity.
A theme-based display in the Italian galleries is also worth tracking
down. Superbly calibrated sightlines will take you there: from Duccio,
to a gleaming Pietro Lorenzetti, to a space devoted almost entirely to
altarpieces and liturgical instruments. Here the Met makes an effort,
through video animations, to suggest the performative nature of church
art. The videos are a fairly radical step for a museum that generally
steers clear of such contexualization in its permanent galleries. But
their use is long overdue as a way to give an accurate and realistic
view of religious objects gathered here.
The scintillating ensemble is as far as the Met goes in suggesting the true nature of Renaissance church art.
To many worshipers, altarpieces and the figures in them were alive. They
did things: healed sickness, answered prayers, heard complaints, gave
advice. Sacred art didn’t just exist; it happened, continuously and interactively.
You can still get a personal sense of this dynamic when you encounter
single paintings in the Met’s grand sweep: Jusepe de Ribera’s “Saints
Peter and Paul,” for example, with its sensuous pas de deux of
outstretched hands; or Andrea del Sarto’s image of the Holy Family, freshly cleaned and as fragrant-looking as a bowl of fruit; or Poussin’s “Agony in the Garden,” smoldering like a banked fire; or Berlinghiero’s regal 13th-century Madonna.
She’s monumental, and like all monuments, if they’re vivacious, she
stops you in your tracks. And no matter how lost you are, or confused
about history, or uncertain about where to go next, she tells you the
most valuable thing art can tell you, loud and clear: You are here.
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