May 20, 2013
The Met’s New European Galleries
Something monumental has been happening, by stealthy stages, to art in New York. On May 23rd, it will stand fully revealed: the architectural renovation and wholesale rehanging of the Metropolitan Museum’s core collections of pre-modern European art, enlarged by the annexation of galleries formerly devoted to temporary exhibitions. The revamp has added or moved hundreds of paintings. New, subtle wall colors and enhanced lighting grace thoroughly rethought, cunningly dramatized histories. I had an eerie sense, while surveying the results the other day, that here was a brand new major institution which, somehow, had plundered the holdings of the Met.
The new order may eventually take on the encrusted familiarity that can
dull our repeated experience of museum collections. But, for now, it
amounts to a sparklingly fresh, re-educative crash course in the standby
and, often, the unjustly neglected glories of the Western tradition. It
will overwrite what you think you know of European art, from Giotto to
Goya. Surprises cascade. Go with a friend. You will want to jabber.
Start in the big room of the Italian Baroque, just beyond the uniquely unchanged Tiepolo gallery at the top of the grand staircase. The Italian Renaissance beckons from the two railroad ranks of galleries dead ahead, debouching in a great hall of the sixteenth-century Venetians. (Tintoretto especially—and at last—registers with fitting majesty.) To your right lies more Italian Baroque, with Caravaggio ascendant, and then the Italian eighteenth century and the unfolding heydays of French and Spanish genius. To your left, in the repurposed spaces, is a tremendously invigorated representation of Northern European art, from van Eyck to the eighteenth-century English and climaxing in sky-lighted splendors of Rembrandt and Hals.
A frisky museum press release terms the leftward itinerary the Beer Tour and those on the right the Chianti, Frascati, Burgundy, and Rioja Tours. I plan to forget that as soon as I can. But the twee taxonomy reflects a marvellous feat of storytelling installation. It will henceforth be possible, as it never was before, to close your eyes and picture, in your mind, a roughly accurate map of the layout’s forty-four galleries. Thematic groupings here and there—portraits, altarpieces, decorative arts—afford rhythmic relief to the masterpiece parade. Naturally, the Met’s aesthetic onslaught will still exhaust your powers of attention, but not nearly as fast as it used to.
In this world and time of so much going wrong, our local old-master franchise models how to get something, which matters, just about perfectly right.
Start in the big room of the Italian Baroque, just beyond the uniquely unchanged Tiepolo gallery at the top of the grand staircase. The Italian Renaissance beckons from the two railroad ranks of galleries dead ahead, debouching in a great hall of the sixteenth-century Venetians. (Tintoretto especially—and at last—registers with fitting majesty.) To your right lies more Italian Baroque, with Caravaggio ascendant, and then the Italian eighteenth century and the unfolding heydays of French and Spanish genius. To your left, in the repurposed spaces, is a tremendously invigorated representation of Northern European art, from van Eyck to the eighteenth-century English and climaxing in sky-lighted splendors of Rembrandt and Hals.
A frisky museum press release terms the leftward itinerary the Beer Tour and those on the right the Chianti, Frascati, Burgundy, and Rioja Tours. I plan to forget that as soon as I can. But the twee taxonomy reflects a marvellous feat of storytelling installation. It will henceforth be possible, as it never was before, to close your eyes and picture, in your mind, a roughly accurate map of the layout’s forty-four galleries. Thematic groupings here and there—portraits, altarpieces, decorative arts—afford rhythmic relief to the masterpiece parade. Naturally, the Met’s aesthetic onslaught will still exhaust your powers of attention, but not nearly as fast as it used to.
In this world and time of so much going wrong, our local old-master franchise models how to get something, which matters, just about perfectly right.
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