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Points of Beauty #1
I’ve been a bit remiss in putting this together, but here is the first of what is intended to be a weekly-ish newsletter, Points of Beauty, featuring a few pieces in The Metropolitan Museum of Art that have caught my eye that week. I make no claims to comprehensiveness, nor to overall quality. These pieces are presented in no historical or geographic order, and with no particular logic behind them. Please enjoy them in the spirit with which they are intended.
That spirit, insofar as it has a definition, is this: that we learn about ourselves by learning what captures our attention – apart from, or independently of, what we think we should like, or what we think people like us like, or should like, or have historically liked (it took me nearly a decade to admit that, despite lionizing Oscar Wilde and fin de siècle Paris, I actually can’t stand the taste of absinthe). Furthermore, I think, stopping to pay attention to the things we innately hunger to pay attention to is probably a good way of helping untangle our inmost desires from our mimetic or distorted ones. I don’t think we necessarily have “authentic” or “innate” desires – it’s not like I was born with a particular orientation towards, say, nineteenth century paintings (or Chinese sculpture) – but my time at the Met has taught me that different objects affect or interest me in ways I don’t necessarily understand.
These two Manets, hanging on opposite sides of a doorway in Gallery 810, feature the same model, Victorine Meurent, who (I have later learned) can be found in a number of other Manet paintings, including Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia, as well as in paintings by Degas and (Wikipedia tells me) one Alfred Stevens. Nicknamed la crevette, “the shrimp,” due to her height, Meurent – once a professional can-can dancer – later became a painter in her own right, breaking with Manet shortly after taking art classes of her own. Her work was regularly exhibited at the Paris Salon. She was widely assumed by early Manet biographers to have died young – just another wayward grisette, if not a prostitute – but in fact lived to be 83, in what appears to have been a quiet domestic partnership with another woman.
I knew none of this when I first saw these paintings (and the Met plaques tell us nothing but Meurent’s name). I barely knew anything about Manet. I just liked her jaunty pose in the Spanish costume, and enjoyed seeing the same model in two different guises. It’s not just guises, either. Her face is itself slightly different – though recognizable – from piece to piece. It made me think about what it is to be an artist’s model (as opposed to, say, a famous subject of a portrait, or else a photographic model) – a face as an occasion for someone else’s imagination.
Another nineteenth-century piece (this one from Gallery 806), by a much less well-known expatriate painter François Marius Granet, who painted this scene from a monastery near his studio in Rome. I’m fascinated by post-Napoleonic Roman history (two separate Enlightenment-ish failed Republics in fifty years!), so this gentle French look at Roman religious orders – just a few years after Napoleon’s invasion – struck me. Granet seems genuinely mesmerized by the quiet nature of the monastic life – there’s something pleasantly quotidian about the scene. I have no idea what the little boy is doing (selling chestnuts?). I just like the idea of a painter hanging out in Rome, curious about the monastery next door, curious about its inhabitants. And his curiosity, about these mysterious denizens – these religious folks who have outlasted the mania for secularism – is what comes through here.
This painting is quite small, 19 1/2 x 15 3/8 in (apparently!); many of my favorite Met paintings are around this size, precisely because it’s possible to look at them close-up over a long period.
I know absolutely nothing about Chinese art, am rusty on Chinese history, and yet have found myself learning rudimentary amounts about it (and falling in love with the art) for the entirely accidental reason that the closest bathroom to the Members’ Lounge is located in the Arts of Ancient China section. It’s the sort of eucatastrophic encounter I love about the Met – I find myself drawn to parts of world history that I haven’t studied since primary school (if at all). I’ve spent so long thinking of myself as a “nineteenth century person” or a “theologian” or an “art nouveau person” that it’s liberating, but intimidating, to come up against areas of knowledge where my knowledge is rusty-middle-school at best.
I think I’d feel embarrassed or self-conscious if, say, I picked up my actual middle-school-geared history of Ancient China, which is still in my mother’s house, and which I’ve been tempted to do just to remind myself of the basics (I’m a serious academic! I should know all this already!). But somehow the Met signposting is both straightforward enough (for a non-specialist) and serious enough that I’m able to give myself permission to take a few moments with the plaques and display cases to learn without getting in my own way.
Not that I’m much good at not getting in my own way. While I was dutifully reading the descriptions of this piece, a ten year old child next to me asked his father why the figure was raising his pinky to fight. It’s the sort of thing I have trouble noticing – I often find myself going straight to the displays rather than spending time looking at the figures in question. I’m not, I’m learning, an inherently visual person – and I have trouble letting myself just look, blind, at a piece of art. (I was grateful earlier today when, at the Noguchi museum — look out for Noguchi in the next Points of Beauty! —Dhananjay challenged me to go through the first floor of the museum before reading anything about Noguchi, to experience art on its own merits.)
Anyway, a bit of information for those who do incline towards the reading in question. These Tomb guardians were created during the early part of Tang Dynasty (618–907). Designed to be placed in a grave, for the use of the deceased in the afterlife, these guardians were generally part of groups of four (one per corner of the tomb) and were understood to police the barrier between the living and the dead in two ways: by deterring tomb raiders and other intruders, and by keeping the spirits of the dead safely within their graves. The Met site doesn’t specify, but this appears to be a lokapala (as opposed to an earth spirit – Tang graves generally had two of each), or warrior king. He’s crushing a demon underneath his boots, which is pretty cool. I have a soft spot for “things placed in tombs” as a whole – there’s something about high-quality time-consuming craftsmanship that’s not meant to be seen, that literally goes straight down into the dark, that I find affecting.
This one’s a bit of a cheat, as I fell in love with it a couple of months ago, but I like it, and so should you. It’s part of a series by Florine Stettheimer of New York “Cathedrals of …” (others in the series featured next to it include Cathedrals of Art and Cathedrals of Broadway). I’m fascinated – aesthetically and intellectually speaking – by what I’ve called “columbianism”* or “American paganism” – late nineteenth and early twentieth/Deco treatments of American splendor and optimism that blend Roman revival themes, some uncanny Masonic images, with something, well, cathedral-like. Her paintings absolutely capture what New York – at least, my New York – feels like, and, in particular, what it felt like growing up here. The carnivalesque grandeur, the sense of vaguely religious mystery alongside civil structure – Stettheimer gets all that. It reminds me of the murals at Rockefeller Center, of the outside of Radio City Musical Hall.
*The name only in part derives from Bioshock, the only video game I’ve ever tried to play, which contained a dystopian-racist-Americana retro-futurist city-state of the same name. I can’t manage joystick controls so never finished the game, but found the imagery fascinating as a distillation of a certain American quasi-religious aesthetic.
"I think, stopping to pay attention to the things we innately hunger to pay attention to is probably a good way of helping untangle our inmost desires from our mimetic or distorted ones". That's the key! Perhaps our main earthly mission!
Loved this!