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Volume I
Issue 8
December 1999 |
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Memo from the World: Two Exhibitions at the Met by Jerrold Maddox On a recent visit to New York City I went to a lot of galleries and museums. There are presently so many excellent exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch and Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids among them, that I would like to recommend two exhibitions that might otherwise be overlooked - both wonderful to see, but for very different reasons. The first is Carleton Watkins: the Art of Perception. Carleton Watkins, an American photographer (1829 - 1916) created, more than any one else, the traditions of landscape photography of the American West, where he lived most of his adult life. His work usually took one of two forms, either very large photographs or stereographs (pair of photographs designed to see using a viewer to create a three-dimensional image). His photographs are remarkable both for their size - he traveled with 2,000 pounds of equipment, and used glass plates - and for the fact that he took them without a shutter on his camera (they were exposed by removing the lens cap and replacing it). For me though, what is most important are the formal qualities he mixes in the pictures. In many cases, the foreground has a full range of values, from near black to near white, while the background has areas of delicate, subtly and narrowly differentiated tones. Both are rich in detail. The Mariposa Trail (1865-66) and "Agissiz" Column, Yosemite (1876) are two good examples of how he combined the narrow with the wide range of values. Both also show how he would cut the images in radical ways - look how the pine tree is cropped in both. Watkins invented ways of seeing the wilderness landscape of the West, a tradition carried on by so many photographers who followed him. His work also engendered the desire to preserve the wilderness - his photographs were said to have helped convince Lincoln to sign the Yosemite Bill of 1864. He also found in the developments created by human industry - factories, farms, dams and the railroads - the geometry and abstraction that were to become so much a part of the modern movement in both painting and photography. One thing that was so modern in the nineteenth century and lasted well in to the twentieth - I used to check them out from a local branch library in the 1930's - were sterographs. In the exhibition, The Art of Perception, Watkin's sterographs are presented using computer technology, rather than a stereo viewer. There are twelve computer stations for viewing them. Using software developed for this purpose and eyeglasses with liquid crystal lenses, the images literally leap into three dimensions and the effect is even greater and more dramatic than what I remember from my childhood. I came away from the exhibit feeling that a way of seeing and an artist's vision had been opened up for me. The second exhibition is Only the Best: Masterpieces of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum. Calouste Gulbenkian was born in Istanbul in 1869 and spent his life organizing oil companies - which made him one of the world's richest men - and collecting art, now housed in the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. (The Museu Calouste Gulbenkian has a website where reproductions of works from the collection, some of which are in the exhibit at the Met and some of which are not, can be viewed.) Eighty pieces from that collection are now at the Met. The range of the work is great and the quality is remarkable. Each visitor will have his or her own favorites. One gentleman there kept coming up to me and any one else he could find there who would listen saying "Amazing, best show anywhere, why aren't there more people here?" I'd like to change that if I can. Some pieces that particularly impressed me were: Hours of
Alfonso I d'Este Two pages of the manuscript are on view, one of shaped calligraphic text on the left and image and medallions on the right. Ghirlandio
(1449 - 1494) It is illuminating to compare how the hair is painted in this portrait and that of M. Bertin, on loan from the Louvre to the Met exhibition Portraits by Ingres: Images of an Epoch. Note, too, the coral necklace. Volume of Iskandar
- Sultan Anthology Two pages on
view with calligraphic text on left, illustration of architectural
space on right. The calligraphy is especially beautiful in the way
it fills, so delicately, the whole page, a very different way of
working with words than the Hours of Alfonso I d'Este. Dürer One of Dürer's watercolors I didn't know first-hand. It is as good as the more famous violets and rabbit. Watteau A remarkable drawing. Look at it on the same day as you visit the Frick Collection where there are 45 of Watteau's drawing on exhibit until 9 January 2000. Compare it especially with Sheet of Studies: Four Faces and three figures, after Rubens‚ "Marie de Medicis" Cycle c.1715 Rubens The details of the collar and plume so delightfully set off the subject in this painting of a beautiful, confident young woman. Comparing her to The Princesse de Broglie brings out her apparent delight in life, and makes the figure in the Ingres look so depressed. Monet What a melon! A 17th Century Dutch subject painted in an Impressionist way, the vitality of his marks within the solid geometry of the melon is remarkable. René Lalique An atypical work by the great early 20th Century jeweler. I was dazzled by it, especially the lively little engraved cats. Suzuribako
(writing box) One of the last things in the exhibit: a very beautifully crafted object with the scene of an interior of a room. A fitting end to this exhibition in which every object is an example of the best of that particular art and craft.
This list doesn't even touch on the textiles, silver and ceramics in the collection - go and find those things that particularly move you, and come away richer for it.
Resources:
Also at the Met's website - Only the Best: Masterpieces of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (until 27 February 2000) http://www.metmuseum. org/htmlfile/newexhib/only.htm The website for Lisbon's Museu Calouste Gulbenkian includes works from the permanent collection, some of which are now in New York City at the Met. http://www.ip.pt/gulbenkian/ museu/index.html
About our correspondent: Jerrold Maddox is an artist and teacher who has spent most of his time for the last five years teaching on the Web and designing for it. He does the graphics and layout for this newsletter. You may email him at jxm22@psu.edu.
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