shadows, angles, and weathered stone
Points of Beauty #2
I’ve been trying to draw, lately. Blame it on the Met. For the first time since Middle school, I’ve gone off and gotten myself a set of drawing-pencils (I promptly misplaced the sharpener). Nobody has seen these drawings, and I don’t intend them to—not in the near future.
This is, in part, because I have little, if any, natural talent. But it is also because I don’t think of my work as creative—at least, not at this juncture. The sketches I’m doing now are, rather, attempts at meditation: attempts to work out, in my own mind, what attention to a piece of art looks like.
That said, if I’ve learned anything from sketching, so far, it’s precisely how little my sketching relates to what is actually there—whether we’re talking about actually in terms of that which the painting I’m sketching is attempting to portray (a Burne-Jones maiden, say), or actually in terms of the precise lines and globules of paint. I’m barely able to convey what I see, which, I’m learning rather brutally, has very little in common with what I think I see. Right now, sketching is largely an exercise in realizing how often I mentally “fill in” a painting or sculpture instead of looking at it properly.
This Point of Beauty, therefore, is a record of last Sunday’s ostensible “sketching trip” to the Met, during which I turned off all my devices for an afternoon and gave myself permission to go anywhere in the museum and sketch anything that caught my eye. I made two sketches—and stopped to look at a fair few other pieces on the way.
This was the first place I stopped—as much because there was a bench there as anywhere else. This is a sarcophagus cover from Ancient Rome, from the Severan dynasty (193–235 AD). The deceased couple is rendered as two divinities, a river-god and and earth-goddess, although he’s the only one who gets a face (probably, the plaque says, because he predeceased her, and there was nobody to carve in her face after she died). But I know my artistic limits, and so I constrained myself to trying to sketch the little headless Eros riding what the site calls a “lizard-like creature” (and which the actual on-site plaque calls a mammal—some kind of lizard-squirrel hybrid)? I spent most of my time sketching trying to work out what parts of the marble were naturally weathered, and what parts chiseled to creature musculature. I’ve found, both here and in Adam (below), what catches my eye in sculptures is not the sculpture itself—as an imitation of something real—but the relationship between stone as a natural phenomenon and stone as a creative material. (It’s also why I love the sculptures of Isamu Noguchi, which I’ll get around to writing about…eventually…). I like trying to work out which parts of the marble were weathered or mottled before carving, which parts by the carver, and which parts after.
I actually visited this piece at the very end of the Met visit, but I’m including it up top because it’s the only other one I sketched.
This Tullio Lombardo statue of Adam (Venetian, from about 1490) makes Adam look like a classical deity—a discomfitingly pagan perfection. The apple in his hand isn’t eaten (although, as the plaque notes, if you walk around the statue, it does vanish from his hand—and Adam viewed from such an angle also has a slightly archaic and frankly creepy smile), but when viewed from the front, Adam looks sufficiently existentially disturbed that it feels like sin has at least started to enter into his consciousness. (I see it as the moment Adam decides to eat the apple, personally). But I find this statue uncomfortable. I think Greco-Roman statuary, in general, makes me uncomfortable—there’s something about the idolization of a certain kind of strong, young, male body that feels numinously linked to paganism. And thinking of Adam as a proud Greco-Roman figure makes me wonder whether Tullio Lombardo means to think that this pride is part of what Adam was supposed to have, in Eden—a perfection that we lost—or whether it’s part of what led to his downfall. I think the latter, but I can’t tell how much of that is me and how much of that is Tullio.
This statue, for what it’s worth, is in Gallery 504, which is a gallery I particularly I love at the Met—tucked away virtually unmarked off a larger and more heralded hallway—roughly across from the Ca’ Sagredo Venetian period room. In general my favorite rooms at the Met are the quiet corners—the ones that feel less like a museum proper than like the back corner of a jumble-shop, the ones that don’t so much present you with things to look at as invite you to explore yourself.
When it comes to quiet rooms at the Met, though, there are few spots better than the Robert Lehman Collection at the back. Purely atmospherically, these galleries embody everything I love about the Met—an incredibly idiosyncratic curatorial personality (in this case, that of Lehman the collector—you get a room of Northern European Renaissance art, including one of my favorite Annunciations, alongside a room full of 18th century French lampworked glass dioramas alongside a room full of Renaissance ceramics, and then some Impressionists at the end just for fun); unexpected spots to perch (there’s an incredibly comfortable sofa in Gallery 958, which also happens to have purple damask wallpaper from the Lehmans’ original drawing room, and a great Rembrandt I’ll write about another time); art that, by virtue of being a little eclectically-placed, speaks unexpectedly to other pieces.
I’ll do an entire PoB about the Lehman Collection sometime, but for now here’s the Sienese Renaissance painter Giovanni di Paolo’s The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, which struck me because the concentric circles in “creation” reminded me of those Byzantine icons that have darkness within the mandala to signify the unknowability of God. I spent far too long trying to figure out their allegorical meaning (having spent most of the month working on Neoplatonic sources of Renaissance magic actually threw me off)—I got as far as the twelve somewhat smudged-looking Zodiac signs. But I love the part where God’s hand enters the created order, breaking the circle apart. I have no idea whether the dove-like smudge in the middle of the circle is meant to be the Holy Spirit or just a smudge.
And now for something completely different—a fun historical fact!
I love the boldness of the British teapot room—you basically stand inside a cylinder of teapots and learn about the British ceramic industry. A couple of these caught my eye—this one (the reverse says American Liberty Restord) and another featuring George Washington. I originally assumed these were American-made, but in fact they were British (this one from the 1760s, the Washington one after the Revolution), albeit produced for the American market. The popularity of tea (to say nothing of the whole tax thing) and low profit margins on ceramic-making meant that most porcelain-makers focused their efforts on churning out pieces and designs at high volume—attempting to sell novelty and, well, kitsch, in order to give consumers the chance to brand themselves (and their tea) with these virtue-signaling goods. God bless America!
Finally, I won’t say this painting by Roberto Matta (Being With / Être Avec, 1946, oil on canvas) was beautiful, but it definitely struck me (and scared me). As I’ve been drawing and doodling more, I’ve noticed that I respond with no small bit of horror whenever I inadvertently draw a particular abstract design—spiky lines, which make me think of monsters—they’re neither elegant, geometric lines nor organic curves. This piece, which turns spiky lines into a commentary on machinery and mechanized human beings (the plaque sees sex; I see the torture rack) helped me make sense of my visceral reaction—there’s something at once unnatural and imitation-organic to spiky lines, which seem to parody the human body while also recalling man-made structures. And it’s precisely that parodic sense that chills me.
I’ve become more interested in abstract art, recently. Or, to put it more specifically, I’m interested in our visceral responses to shapes, colors, lines, and curves—that we can see something in pieces that aren’t explicitly representational precisely because we respond to these elements, and what they signify. This piece may be horrific to look at, but I appreciated spending time trying to work out why I’m so distressed by spiky lines.
Love this. When do we get to see said sketches? :)