Category Archives: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Watteau at the Met

Posted on by
“Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.” -Voltaire
Love in the Italian Theater (L’Amour au théâtre italien)
Watteau, Music, and Theater, on view at the Met through November 29, explores, in self-explanatory fashion, the place of music and theater in the work of the Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721). If you’ve seen some of his work, you know theater is his main subject matter. He paints lush and detailed scenes populated by characters who might be part of the drama or watching it. Costumes are elaborate, and artifice abounds. This small exhibition of paintings and drawings is supplemented by musical instruments and other objects relating to opera-ballet and theater early in the 18th century.
Mezzetin
Mezzetin, left, is one of his simpler compositions, and one of my favorite paintings in this exhibition. Mezzetin, whose name means “half-measure,” was one of the stock characters of Italian commedia dell’arte. He could be a deceived or a deceiving husband or servant. Here he appears wistful and lonely.
In a sense, it’s hard to account for the appeal of Watteau, who does charming fantasy scenes unpolluted by anything serious. ‘Charming’ seems too simple and small a word to explain his appeal. While they are charming, they can also be melancholy and ambiguous. Like in Mezzetin, a clown figure often appears isolated and melancholy. The scenes do not follow any known narrative, and we are unsure what the people feel.
Watteau was sickly, self-taught and died at 36 years of age, yet he managed to rise to prominence and further the development of Rococo art in France. Little is know about him, except that he was restless and utterly entranced by theater. Perhaps part of the appeal of Watteau’s paintings is the mystery around the artist as well as the ones he painted.

The Foursome (La Partie quarrée), ca. 1714

Roxy Paine at the Met

Posted on by

Roxy Paine is a) an awesome name, and b) a creator of a hell of a museum topper. Maelstorm, pictured above and below, is a steel thing that totally captivated me on this grey day when I made it up to the roof of the Met before it started raining.

It’s quite a tangle, and the silver surface reflects the sky and some of the green of Central Park. For such a large, invase, twisted sculpture, it is remarkable harmonious in its setting. The intertwined limbs sprawling out might seem chaotic, and they did, but in fact they suited the space and setting marvelously. This is the most recent in a series of Dendroid tree-like sculptures. He tries to merge varying sizes of piping together in a replication of natural growth patterns. The repetition of organic patterns in monochramatic and abstract forms reminds me of what I like best in Tara Donovan’s work (like her 2007 wall installation at the Met).

Maelstorm will be up through November 29, 2009, so you still have a chance to see it before it gets taken down. I have to say, it fills the space a hundred times better than previous works that have been up (Jeff Koon’s comes to mind.)

Robert Frank’s The Americans at the Met

Posted on by


Viewing Robert Frank’s photography collection The Americans is like taking a road trip through 1950s America, which, appropriately enough, was how the images were taken. Also appropriately, Jack Keroac wrote the introduction to the first published collection. This should be your first sign that these crisp black and white photos felt more counter-culture then than they do today. Even so, it’s hard to believe that there was a general outcry against Frank when this work was published, leading to charges of him being “anti-American.”

Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans , on view at the Met through January 3,2010, seems like Americana pure and simple. There are waitresses in diners, people walking down the street, and children playing at town fairs. The focus is on everyday life. Frank’s people do not smile at the camera though. If they realize there photograph is being taken, they are usually outraged. They are unguarded and so, like the waitress above, we learn about a part of their personality they might hide.

In that sense, Frank’s photographs show a side of American life that wasn’t often depicted. As in this photo of a political rally, below, Frank’s unusual emphasis on the speaker rather than the crowd creates a disquieting alternate view of what is happening.


I really enjoyed walking through this exhibition following Frank’s original ordering of the photographs. They were arranged to compliment or differentiate from the ones around it, and somehow walking through becomes a cinematic process just shy of narrative-building. These photographs appeared especially classic and traditional after seeing New Photography 2009 at MoMA and, in fact, Surface Tensions, a show across the hall from the Robert Frank exhibition at the Met that explores contemporary photography. I heard a docent leading a tour through Surface Tensions say that “for artists today, it was no longer good enough to produce a beautiful 8 by 10 print anymore.”

I’m not so sure.