Metropolitan Museum Wanderings Part 3

More wanderings...

I went to look at installation art at the Metropoltan Museum, which abounds there.   By that I mean the period rooms that can be found all over the museum, interior spaces that have been meticulously reconstructed to resemble the original spaces.   (Kind of the opposite of site specific art, if you will...)   The rooms range from the Damascus room to the bedroom of a Roman villa to my new favorite, a "studiolo" from a ducal palace in Urbino around 1500.   This room, intended as a small space for study and meditation, has walls entirely of wood inlay, with various trompe l'oeil effects, and lots of musical instruments.

Then there are all the period rooms, which attempt to display the kind of interior decoration used in various European palaces.   I get a very odd feeling from these rooms; an interior, without natural light, deprived of all context, inside of a large museum in contemporary New York City.  Where am I?    The oddness may also have something to do with bringing back memories of the innumerable European palaces and stately homes that I was dragged through in my youth on family vacations.   Did I really care what the interior of rich peoples houses from the past centuries looked like?   Though I do get some pleasure out seeing places with authentic historical resonance, like the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

But this bedroom looks very welcoming...

Later, I saw this as I was wandering through the Lehman collection, one of my favorite places in the Met.

You never know what you will find!

Metropolitan Museum Wanderings Part 2

More wanderings..
There was a wonderful show of Japanese paintings from the Edo period.   One of the things I enjoy about looking at most Asian art is my ignorance of what was done when; when I approach a painting, I really don't know whether it was done in the 17th century or the 19th century.  I don't see the same linear development of style that I see in European painting, though it may well exist to the trained eye.  It is also interesting to see how many of developments in 20th century painting exist in earlier Japanese art.   Consider these two detailed parts of a scroll painted around 1760:

And then here are some details from a painting  I saw at a show paintings by the abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell at a gallery in Chelsea later in the week:

Admittedly, this kind of comparison can be superficial, and I really shouldn't be venturing into this kind of reductive judgements.  

Wandering through the Chinese galleries...   Here is a detail from a Chinese enamel, created in the late 16th century.

There are so many cool red squiggles that it takes me a while to see the dragons.  And how would I ever be able to guess when this might have been done?

This has happened to me before, but I find that when I go look at European paintings from the Baroque to the mid 19th century periods after seeing Asian art, they look rather conventional, dull and lacking color, trapped by their need for verisimility.   On the other hand, the more I look at late Medieval and early Renaissance paintings, the more I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the colors and designs.  Perhaps someday in the far future people will look at the European paintings from the middle centuries of the last millenium as a temporary aberration from the true nature of painting....

Here are some colorful details from the early Renaissance paintings that I saw most recently:

  
It's also worth remembering in this context that these painters didn't just hop down to their corner art supply store to pick up their tubes of paint.  The amount of work involved  in creating these colors should not be underestimated; for example, the best blue pigments came from grinding lapis lazuli, which needed to be imported from Afghanistan.   Also worth remembering that these paintings were view either in natural light or by candle light or something like that. Not with electric light, needless to say.   (I would love it if some day an art museum would show all its older paintings with candle light only.  Not practical, of course.)