European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum

I went to see the newly redone and expanded European paintings galleries at the Metropolitan Museum.   I was amused to see that they now have a similar organization to the Gemaldgalerie in Berlin. Upon entering you can turn one way to go through painting as it developed in the Northern European tradition, or the other way to go through through the similar history in the Italian tradition.   Broadly speaking, of course.
The galleries are wonderful, and for the most part, even in the crowded summer tourist season, relatively calm and peaceful.   After seeing Jem Cohen's intriguing film "Museum Hours", I was pleased to catch this view of a museum guard contemplating a wall of Rembrandts, with no one else around:

Aside from seeing all five of the Met's Vermeers temporarily in one room, the highlight for me was seeing the early Italian paintings.   What struck me was the vividness of the colors and designs; it seemed to me that the paintings were less about their ostensible religious subjects and more about the sheer beauty of color and line.   All those brightly colored robes!   There is one painting with a particularly striking blue robe, by Fillipino Lippi about which you learn that the wealthy commissioner of the painting paid extra money to have the finest quality blue.   All of which reminds you of the sheer inventiveness it took back in those days to create these colors.

There are some paintings that seem Klimt-like in their sheerly decorative surfaces, as in this part of a painting of Saint Ursula:

And there are things like the painting from the school of Valencia, which seem to exist in a different world than many of the traditional Italian paintings.

After spending a lot of time with these paintings in two separate visits, my eyes weren't good for much else.
I did see, though, a small exhibition from the Met's Klee holdings that exhibited Klee's development towards abstraction, which came early on in his career.  The blurbs noted that unlike painters like Kandinsky or Mondrian, whose move towards abstraction generally reflected some kind of spiritual or philosophical quest, Klee's turn towards abstraction was in order "to keep drab reality at bay".   While the point is certainly debatable, I like the notion, which sounds Nabokovian to me.