memento mori – and that gentlemen prefer blondes
Points of Beauty #3
I don’t ever start these posts intending to link the pieces thematically, but for whatever reason, nearly all the pieces that caught my eye over the past week or so have dealt with death. Perhaps it’s fitting—the first thing in the Met that I fell in love with, and inspired me to start writing these, were the 1st century (ish) Han dynasty tomb watchtowers I kept passing on my way to the bathroom in the Chinese Art section.
Few of them, though, feel more hauntingly personal than this deathbed drawing of one Henry S. Mount, penned by his brother William in 1841.
The more time I spend at the Met, the more interested I’ve been at the potential art has for personal encounter: that looking at a piece of art (and, indeed, reading a book) is the ultimate form of asynchronous communication. It’s something that I vaguely held as a truism, but haven’t felt until recently: looking at the dead, painting the dead, wondering what it must have been like, in that moment, to be the person portrayed, or else the person portraying, or else, the person watching the sunlight on that particular bridge, at that particular time, or series of time.
I’ve been teaching a class on the philosophy and morality of literature at the Catholic University of America, and one of the questions that we are (and I personally am) wrestling with is—assuming we want to dispense with the idea of the artist as an illusionist or mage—what are we actually doing when we make art? Trying to make sense of these various self-disclosures, letting myself wonder about the people behind these creations, letting myself be in relationship to them, through the pieces—helps me think art about more reverentially. Or, maybe, think about people more reverentially, if indeed, art is how the dead speak.
There’s a double form of self-disclosure in this particular drawing, which is located in one of my favorite parts of the museum—an unassuming corridor of paper-work near the visible storage center in the American Wing, on a mezzanine nobody goes to. William Mount wants to memorialize his brother in a portrait. But the portrait isn’t for him. Rather, it’s part of a letter he sends to a writer, Benjamin Franklin Thompson, evidently in the hopes that he in turn will memorialize Henry in his social History of Long Island. Ultimately, Thompson does so, saying that Henry’s “temper [was] mild and amiable, and in all the relations of life [he was] scrupulously honest, faithful, and affectionate. The death of such a man, under such circumstances, was generally and deeply regretted, both by his family and a large circle of acquaintances.” Maybe the drawing helped.
Another death-work—albeit of a more conceptual kind. This haunting 1908 painting by German artist Franz von Stuck (who also has a moody relief of Beethoven in the 19th century decorative arts room just off the Petrie Court on the other side of the museum) struck me not only because I find the painting itself affecting, but because of its position in the layout of the nineteenth century galleries as a whole. By total chance (which is to say, I was coming from the elevators near the Islamic Art galleries because they’re closer to the members’ coat check), I entered the nineteenth-century section from the side, rather than (as most visitors do), from the grander front, which is closer to the main staircase. This meant that my walk started in the Beaux-Arts Rooms and “Salon” Rooms, dedicated to what was then the prevailing mainstream in nineteenth-century French art, what one slightly acerbic Met curator refers to as “Second Empire bourgeois populist realism” (the Met’s website more tactfully refers to “conservative tastes”). Painters like Salon favorite William-Adolphe Bouguereau produced work that upheld traditional notions of beauty and morality.
As someone who often finds myself defending traditional notions of beauty and morality, I’d like to say that I like these paintings more than I do. But they—compared to, say, Renaissance religious painting (or even the pre-Raphaelites, whom I love)—seem far less honest, far more kitsch.
But seeing them, and then wandering without fully realizing it into the adjacent “Fin de Siècle Avant-Garde” gallery where Stuck’s Inferno hangs, helps me to viscerally understand the excitement around these works—their attempt to portray something true, not necessarily about the world as it was, but about the intensity of the emotional reality of the viewer. These paintings do convey feeling—a feeling that isn’t quite literal or exact or quantifiable—and they do so in a way that, to me at least, does convey a kind of reality, or at at least an honesty, that I like. I think it’s fair to critique, on a societal scale, our collective contemporary focus on individual experience, but I don’t think these paintings are some kind of referendum on the absence of the existence of objective truth. To me, rather, they convey the dignity and intensity of the individual experiencer—and the recognition that whatever truth exists is deeply (as it were) colored by our own inability to get outside ourselves. I want to see the Inferno as Stuck sees it.
In general, the Met’s modern (and contemporary) art displays have made me far more sympathetic to—maybe even a devotee of—modernist and abstract art, precisely because they help me understand them in context.
Last week I spent a few hours in the Egyptian wing, which I hadn’t visited properly except as a child, in part because I remember almost nothing about Egyptian history. I’m delighted to report, though, that you don’t have to remember—even by Met standards, the Egyptian wing is particularly well designed for educational purposes: both the (chronological) layouts and displays help situate the objects in a wider historical story. The two Old Kingdom tombs at the museum’s entrance, though less elaborate than the showpiece Temple of Dendur (which is, in fact, a Roman era temple built under Augustus, as far removed from the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom as we are from Augustus—but that’s for another PoB), helped me better understand both the rough contours of Egyptian political and art history, but also better contextualize Egyptian religious practice. (It was, though, a bit chilling—after spending this past year mired in Egytophiliac Hermetic literature for my next nonfiction book, and spending a lot of time, specifically, with the passage in the Asclepius about the Egyptians bringing god-statues in life—to see one such statue illuminated through a narrow slit in the Pernab Temple.)
But what I love about the Raemkai temple (which was built around 2500 BCE for an official named Neferiretnes, then repurposed an indeterminate time later for a prince named Raemkai) isn’t just that it evokes that overall sense of reverence that both art and tombstones do. It’s, rather, just how much life we get on the walls—the awkwardly reimagined images of the figures to whom the tomb is dedicated (from the changing of the kilt size and positioning, we can guess that Raemkai and Neferiretnes were wildly different-sized men), the variety of the birds on display on the eastern wall (apparently Egyptian bird depictions were so accurate and nuanced that scholars today can still identify distinct species), and the tiny personal details in the figures displayed waiting on the tomb’s owner—like the one servant sharpening a knife from whom shavings flutter down. I like to imagine the people carving these tombs—hardly a consensual task—trying to put their own self, in there, somewhere.
And, as ever, a not-quite-as thematic bonus round. Another hidden corner of the Met —with rotating exhibitions—is the basement of the Textile Center (Gallery 599). Right now, the exhibit is on Deco fabric and, in particular, the fabric of the Stehli Silks Corporation, a Swedish company driven by tariffs to start a new factory on American shores. This 1926 futurist fabric design was made by Robert Barton, illustrator of the Anita Loos novel (turned Marilyn Monroe vehicle) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and portrays the titular blondes being, well, preferred by some chaotic top-hat-wearing men-about-town, rendered—as I imagine all of Art Deco New York—as a series of quick lines.
"...art is how the dead speak."
That's a thought worthy of further consideration.
Lovely essay. One comment: you wrote, “from the changing of the kilt size and positioning, we can guess that Raemkai and Neferiretnes were wildly different-sized men.”
—reading ancient Egyptian art as if it conveys realism is a common misconception. Although some details (like birds) show impressive realism, the primary function ancient Egyptian art was symbolic and functional: it was intended to DO something. In particular, size of people indicated the relative importance of the individuals, not their actual physical sizes. Similarly, kilt sizes indicate changes in artistic convention or magico-religious functions but are not an indicator of differences in literal size. The function and purpose of ancient Egyptian art making was quite different than modern western approaches and challenges many of our basic assumptions when viewing art.