My old friend H is visiting from Japan, so I had an excuse to do one of my favorite things in New York - go to the Met (museum) on a Friday night. The museum's open until 9, chamber music plays in the great hall, and the atmosphere is completely different than during the day. It helps that the galleries are empty, and you can, for instance, discover a Van Gogh you don't know looking across an empty gallery (which happened to H). The two big exhibitions on right now are Gustave Courbet (this
self-portrait as a "desperate man" dates from 1844-5) and Poussin Landscapes. I'd already been to the Poussin and Courbet's one of H's favorites, so we went first to the 19th century scandal-monger, who took the insult "realist" and ran all over with it. We were sort of... well... underwhelmed. While he's able up to a point to work in any genre he chooses, his figures don't really inhabit the spaces they're supposed to be in, hovering above them, sometimes as if standing on a painted canvas. But the bigger problem was that his work kept looking 20th century, indeed like specific 20th works - Cezanne, Picasso, Magritte, etc. And that, we concluded, was because all these artists had seen and studied the paintings we were just seeing. (It was like when I saw the Australian Impressionists
exhibition at the NGV and saw through them 20th century paintings they had inspired.) I suppose this is one of the prices of success, but it left me confused - what becomes a virtue in the 20th century was, surely, a vice in the 19th century? Was he visionary or just unhinged, a painter who could do anything he wanted or someone whose weaknesses and blind spots turned out to be prophetic? (It could be both.) He was only "realist" when he chose to be, and behind every painting - or in front of it - is always Courbet himself making sure he's provoked us.
After a jaunt through ancient Babylon and a beer to chamber music and the gift shop, we made our way to Poussin, which was like seeing dear old friends. His world is entirely distinctive, but he's too modest (or ambitious) to insist on hitting us over the head with his own distinctiveness as an artist. H had seen a big Poussin exhibit a few years ago, but this somewhat unusual one - "Blind Orion searching for the rising sun" - was new to her because, well, it makes its home here, in the Met! Kind of changes the meaning of "on the shoulders of giants"...
self-portrait as a "desperate man" dates from 1844-5) and Poussin Landscapes. I'd already been to the Poussin and Courbet's one of H's favorites, so we went first to the 19th century scandal-monger, who took the insult "realist" and ran all over with it. We were sort of... well... underwhelmed. While he's able up to a point to work in any genre he chooses, his figures don't really inhabit the spaces they're supposed to be in, hovering above them, sometimes as if standing on a painted canvas. But the bigger problem was that his work kept looking 20th century, indeed like specific 20th works - Cezanne, Picasso, Magritte, etc. And that, we concluded, was because all these artists had seen and studied the paintings we were just seeing. (It was like when I saw the Australian Impressionists exhibition at the NGV and saw through them 20th century paintings they had inspired.) I suppose this is one of the prices of success, but it left me confused - what becomes a virtue in the 20th century was, surely, a vice in the 19th century? Was he visionary or just unhinged, a painter who could do anything he wanted or someone whose weaknesses and blind spots turned out to be prophetic? (It could be both.) He was only "realist" when he chose to be, and behind every painting - or in front of it - is always Courbet himself making sure he's provoked us.
After a jaunt through ancient Babylon and a beer to chamber music and the gift shop, we made our way to Poussin, which was like seeing dear old friends. His world is entirely distinctive, but he's too modest (or ambitious) to insist on hitting us over the head with his own distinctiveness as an artist. H had seen a big Poussin exhibit a few years ago, but this somewhat unusual one - "Blind Orion searching for the rising sun" - was new to her because, well, it makes its home here, in the Met! Kind of changes the meaning of "on the shoulders of giants"...
