Exhibitions 1
The mighty Met
Martin Gayford
Autumn in New York,' enquires the song, 'why does it seem so inviting?' Well, apart from the various attractions promised by the lyrics — 'glittering roof-tops at sun- down', 'jaded roués', 'gay divorcees', and, more surprising, 'pavement cafés' — of course the fall is one of the high points of the New York exhibition year. And in the Big Apple, art shows, like everything else — skyscrapers, for example — tend to be as massive and beautiful as they come.
This fall, the jewel in the Manhattan exhibition crown is Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art (until 2 February), a stunningly selected, and installed retro- spective of the painter who, as time goes on, looks more and more like the greatest of all American artists. But, as the same exhibition arrives at the Tate Gallery next March, when I shall write about it at length, I shall say no more, except, if you happen to be in New York before Febru- ary, go to see it.
Simultaneously, while I was in town, there was a monumental exhibition of work by Pollock's contemporary and near equal, Mark Rothko, 20 blocks uptown at the Whitney. It closes at the end of this week (29 November), but opens in Paris at the Musde d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris on 8 January (until 18 April), so again I shall not discuss it at present. In New York, however, the contest was not an equal one, the installation at the Whitney not being up architecturally, or in other ways, to MoMA.
Also, while Pollock's life and work follow a glorious parabola, burning out after a few years (after which he was visibly finished), Rothko's carried on far longer, until his suicide in 1970. Both painters illustrate Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. But, in com- parison, Rothko's first act took a lot longer, and artistically, in this sort of bulk, can seem a little drawn out. It will be inter- esting to see how it looks in Paris.
Another 15 blocks up and one across, we come to the mighty Metropolitan. The Met is not quite the biggest museum in the world. That honour currently belongs to the Grand Louvre, although the Hermitage has plans to overtake it. But the Met is cer- tainly one of the grandest. Someone once said that through the halls of old Penn Sta- tion, 'One entered the city like a god' (that was before it was torn down and replaced by something resembling a very large underground station, through which, he went on, one now creeps in 'like a rat). You enter the Met, if not like a god, then at least like a Roman emperor through the magnificent halls of Richard Morris Hunt (based, like the waiting-room at Penn sta- tion, on the Baths of Caracalla). It carries on like that, too, with the artistic wealth of the world spread out before you in mon after room. A demonstration of the migh.t of the Met's collections is the current all? bition From Van Eyck To Breughel: Ear4' Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (until 3 January), as this large and imposing show is drawn almost entirely from the museum's own holdings. As is customary at the Met, the installa- tion and lighting are beautiful, and on show there are a number of the finest of all early Flemish paintings. The Met's Van Eyck is not among them — Van Eyck being one of the museum's weak points, and their sole example, a diptych of the Crucifixion and Last Judgment a second-string work classi- fied as by 'Van Eyck and Assistant'. But the Merode Altarpiece by Van Eyck's con- temporary Robert Campin (aka the Master of Flemalle) more than makes up for that. Few paintings even by Van Eyck more clearly show the greedy cataloguing of the details of the physical world, the sheells and gleams of its textures and materials; that was the outstanding innovation 01 An encyclopaedia of everyday life: Robert Campin's Merode Altarpiece these 15th-century painters from the Southern Netherlands. Campin catalogues the minutest aspects of fixtures and fittings, the way Joseph's blinds are fastened, the precise wear and lustre of the tiles at the Virgin's feet, and outside Joseph's window there is a perfect, miniature Flemish town with passers-by strolling along. But this encyclopaedia of everyday life is presented in a space that has little to do with Ital- ianate perspective; it is more like a Cezanne in the way objects and people are pushed towards you out of the picture.
Realism comes in an infinite variety of ways. The contribution of the Northerners to the Renaissance was in the nuances of surface and atmosphere that the oil medi- urn allowed them. Thus Leonardo da Vinci, no less, seems to have learned from a por- trait by Petrus Christus in the Medici col- lection, a portrait similar to the lovely Carthusian in this exhibition, with a beard as wispy as dandelion fluff. An intense interest in human personality went along with the fascination for the shiny, sensuous material surfaces of things (and both may well result from the fact that Flanders, like Northern Italy, was an early centre of free market capitalism, with its attendant inter- est in individualism and shopping).
For whatever reason, the room devoted to portraits is one of the best in this show, the stars, apart from the Petrus Christus, being Memling's `Tommaso and Maria Pontinari' (the former was an oddly con- temporary figure, being the branch manag- er who sank the Medici bank due to imprudent loans to Charles the Bold of Burgundy). That these are praying figures, wings of a dismembered altarpiece, is a reminder, however, that for all their invest- ment banking and materialism, these peo- ple were devout mediaeval Christians. Indeed, it is precisely that combination, or balancing act, which gives this period of art its flavour.
The later rooms are on the whole less interesting, as was the next phase of Netherlandish art, except for remarkable landscapes by Pieter Breughel the Elder, Patinir and Gerhard David. The last, two leafy forest scenes, the wings of an altar- piece, on loan from The Hague, must be among the earliest pure landscapes in Western art, another Northern contribu- tion.
In the adjoining exhibition suite there is a large, pioneering, and when I was there completely deserted exhibition devoted to Heroic Arrnour of the Italian Renaissance: Filippo Negri°li and his Contemporaries (until 17 January). It's a fairly arcane sub- ject, I know, but, coming as I did fresh from the current Hayward exhibition about modernist art and clothes, it was interesting to note that the Italians of the Renais- sance, and the classical Greeks and Romans for that matter, were heavily into wearable art. Whether in the form of a magnificently muscled breast-plate, a metallic portrait to go in front of your real face, or a helmet adorned with dragons or bare-breasted sirens, these objects amount to high quality, made to measure sculpture. It is hard to imagine such a show — so eru- dite, so large, so potentially unpopular — on this side of the water. But, as I say, mighty is the Met.
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