History and beauty of the parks and gardens from Paris to Provence through the famous artworks on view March 12 – July 29, 2018
Claude Monet, The Parc Monceau, 1878 / Image courtesy of the Met Museum
Public Parks, Private Gardensexhibition at the Met is a perfect chance to see the magnificent green spaces of Paris through the eyes of the celebrated Impressionists from the Met Museum collection. And you don’t need to travel overseas to breeze the rest air of French parks! The Met brings the best of Paris to you.
The history behind the opening up of the parks and gardens to the public for its full enjoyment starts from the time of French revolution. The idea that the beauty of nature has to be enjoyed by all not only by the privileged, had brought us the beloved public gardens of Paris and accelerated their expansion and general interest in horticulture and urban landscaping. Vive la Revolution for letting us escape the hustle and bustle of the city in the stately designed allees!
Impressionists and their en pain air painting movement preserved the lush greenery of the places in their celebrated works. Streaming sunlight, fresh and potent vegetation with relaxed figures strolling the grounds or sitting on the benches is how the parks are memorialized for us by Monet, Pissarro, Rousseau, Pissarro, and others. The names of the celebrated Paris gardens, Jardin des Tuileries, Le Jardin du Luxembourg, Le Parc Monceau sound like a love song to the eternal beauty of the city. See the show and enjoy a short imaginary walk in the best urban parks at the best time of year. It’s a timeless gift that will make even the gloomiest day full of excitement and hope. Don’t miss your stroll in that gentle sunlight! Read More
History of Sculpture from 1300 until Now on view from March 21 – July 22, 2018
Tip Toland, The Whistlers, 2005, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Dale and Doug Anderson, 2011 / Image courtesy of The Met Breuer
This truly fascinating exhibition at The Met Breuer covers seven hundred years of history from 1300 till now of sculptures, casts, tableaus, masks and even automatons to illuminate the perfection of likeness and its distortion. Covering a vast time window and the diversity of the approaches, the show is organized into 8 thematic sections located on 2 floors of the museum. Each section includes works from various places and times connected by either similarity or extreme contrast in the concept. About 120 works by old and new masters are selected including Donatello, El Greco, Rodin, Degas, Kusama, Koons, Cattelan and many many other.
One may agree or disagree with the overarching thesis about the use of colors and the influence of religion and societal biases on how we perceive the body in its nakedness and likeness, but it all comes back to how we see ourself and how we are perceived by others. Allow yourself enough time to observe, compare and read. Read More
The Frick Collection, located in the heart of Manhattan, is presenting Francisco de Zurbaran’s incredible series of portraits of Jacob and his twelve sons from his two wives, Leah and Rachel, and two concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah, as is found in the Book of Genesis. While the depiction of these characters in the form of the life-size portraits is unusual for the time, Zurbaran followed very closely the prophecies and verses for the Old Testament to make each portrait easily recognizable by the details of the garments, or the attributes of trade, or background landscapes. The history of the portraits, which were created between 1641 and 1658, is also full of missing pages and lost provenance with the first record of it appearing only in 1722. In 1756 Richard Trevor, Bishop of Durhamhad acquired the series but the one portrait of Benjamin. The series was installed in the Long Dining Room at Auckland Palace in Durham, England as a political statement of religious tolerance and support of the Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753. The portrait of Benjamin hangs in Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire. Bishop Richard Trevor ordered a copy of the portrait of Benjamin done for his collection. It is remarkable that American public can see the series in full and appreciate Zurbaran’s original intentions. Read More
The Met Breuerexhibition of works by Edvard Munch (1861-1944), a Norwegian Expressionist artist, gives the viewers a chance to see the paintings from the Munch Museum in Oslo and other European and private collections. Some of the paintings are shown in New York for the first time.
The exhibition makes a moody and sobering impression as one would expect at a mention of the artist’s name. Munch is known for powerfully presenting the emotional moments of life repeating the same situations in multiple versions. Opening up with the self-portrait which gives the title to the exhibition, the show explores the themes dear to the artist to which he kept returning to at different stages of his life. The exhibition will run through February 4, 2018.
Edvard Munch was born in 1861 to the family of a medical officer. His mother and then his beloved sister Sophie had died from tuberculosis when he was 14. These tragic events made a very strong impression on the future artist and were later depicted in many of his works. Munch himself had suffered from many of diseases in childhood. Later he was haunted by depression and alcohol dependency. His personal life was stressful and unhappy. So, naturally his works are full of high tensions and despair.
Starting drawing from a young age, Munch had enrolled into the Royal School of Art and Design of Kristiania, Norway where he experimented with various expressionist styles. He visited Paris and Berlin and sampled the artistic scenes there coming under the influences of major artists of the early 90s. In that productive period, he sketched or created the first versions of many of the themes to which he kept returning, again and again, later in life.
While he came to fame rather early in his career in the late 1880s – early 1890s, Munch himself believed that he reached his breakthrough in art when he was fifty. By that time he already resettled back in Norway after a turbulent life on the move between France, Germany, and Denmark. In 1908-1909 he suffered a mental breakdown from which he recovered upon his return to his native Norway. The result of the emotional torments gave us his famously high-strung paintings.
This current exhibition at the Met Breuer presents about 50 of Munch’s works. Each gallery in the exhibition is dedicated to a theme: Self-Portraits, Nocturnes, Despair, Sickness and Death, Puberty and Passion, Attraction and Repulsion, and In the Studio. This thematic rather than a chronological arrangement allows the viewer to follow the artist’s maturity of style and the changes in technique. As Munch was coming back to the same subject repeatedly with years in between, the ascents of colors and the pace of strokes conveys his personal take on the same situation over time. The FT review points out that “these juxtapositions is at once stunning and depressing, a showcase of genius and delusion.” A group of works under the Despair theme includes a lithograph of “The Scream” from 1895.
Munch’s landscapes and life scenes en plain air are characteristically unsoothing and moody. The low skies, the broody sunsets and eery reflections of in the water are alarming. The tensions continue in the paintings of his studio. Even the tender embrace of “The Kiss” surrounded by the dark background while sensual and tender, doesn’t promise a happy ending. Munch’s great genius of catching the emotional dread and the pain of the soul is in full view here. “Who better to guide us through our own fatalistic age?” asks rhetorically the review of the exhibition in The New York Times.
Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950-1980 on view September 13, 2017 – January 14, 2018
In-Out Anthropophagy by Anna Maria Maiolino, Super-8 film 1973 / Image Courtesy of the Met Museum
The expansive show of the post-WWII art at the Met Breuerunder an ambitious title Delirious: Art at the Limit of Reason promises to spin your head. And it surely does! The exhibition includes the works of such luminaries of contemporary art as Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusama, Eva Hesse, and Sol LeWitt among others. In all, about 100 pieces of art primarily from Europe, Latin America, and the US are organized under 4 loose categories: Vertigo, Excess, Nonsense, and Twisted. The visitors will encounter the generous labels about the subject and countersubject depicted in a particular work. This gentle guidance by the experts helps to appreciate fully the points made by the artists with all the twists and eccentricity entailed.
Electric Chair by Andy Warhol, Screenprint 1971 / Image courtesy of the Met Museum
The curatorial introduction to the show gives the meaning of the word delirious in its medical sense and points to the turbulence of the post-wartime as a leading factor that either caused or led to stimulating that state of mind. As science and technology were accelerating its hold on everyday life and encroaching on one’s perception of reality, they got their place in the contemporary art as seemingly endless repetitive sequences of shapes, colors, and sounds. In fact, in some sense, the most delirious effect of the exhibition is from its soundtrack.
A review by Roberta Smith in the New York Timesnotes that given the pressure of the Cold War and the uncertainties of the time the “artists answered life’s absurdities with more of the same”.
It is curious to note the fluidity between the rational use of certain technical and mathematical concepts and their irrational derivations cleverly observed by the artists. Some examples of those effects are topographical representations of Steiner Surfaces by Ruth Vollmer, Study of Distortion by Agnes Denes, or Color Motion 4-64 by Edna Andrade. In other cases seemingly simple everyday actions are transformed by endless repetition to stunning visual and sound effects in Cycles of 3s and 7s by Tony Conrad and several works by Sol LeWitt.
Snap Roll by Dean Fleming, Acrylic on canvas 1965 / Image courtesy of the Met Museum
Another interesting aspect of the show is its focus on the influence of the writings by Samuel Beckett on the artists. It’s not a coincidence as the show had preceded by 5 years of research into the perception of Beckett’s plays by the experimental artists. The exhibition also highlights a connection between the artistic expression and the social and political environment of the moment.
While it may feel by some that the exhibition skipped some of the work that could clearly belong there, it helps to keep in mind how productive the sphere of art was in the post-war time. This carefully selected sample of works is only scratching the surface of the oeuvre in the category feeding the appetite to see more.
Jazzmen by Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé,Torn posters mounted on canvas,1961 / Image courtesy of the Met Museum
With the New York Pass your can enjoy a free visit to the Met Breuer!
