Do you ever feel like you’re the last person to know about something? On Tuesday I went to the Met. It was amazing. Have you heard of it? The Met?
I arrived before it opened. I had a vague idea that I would spend two hours in there then take the train uptown to the cloisters. I arrived just before it opened and walked around, gawking, with my mouth open and my London bumpkin’s goggle eyes out on stalks, for seven hours. They had to kick me out of the Asian galleries at 16:57. ‘I’ve been here since it opened’, I told the guy. He looked at me as though to say, what do you want, a medal? Which was ridiculous of him because of course I did, I always do.
Here are some things to know about the Met. It is very big and very full of beautiful things. It’s not so much a museum as a cluster of museums: you wander from an old master galleries with grey-blue walls into a vast neoclassical atrium, go through a doorway past an armoury and then round a corner into a maze-like set of reconstructed French interiors. You go up some stairs and arrive in a temple then turn around and walk into an ancient tomb. You think, ‘this is amazing’ and you are right to think it. Have you guys ever heard about the Met?
You pass from dynamically presented, involving displays to dusty rooms of beautiful old things in glass cases, pass through a renaissance Spanish courtyard into a modern sculpture hall, turn back and ultimately get lost in the enormous shop where half the books are things like HOW ART CAN STOP FASCISM (£$14.99, 125pp, pink and green cover, text double spaced with wide margins, ‘based on a viral essay’ etc.) and the other half are called Fashioning Civility: Domestic English Clothing 1750–1848 ($399, 425pp., ten years work for the author and eight copies sold). Of course what the gift shop mostly sells is terrible T-shirts.
To reiterate, the Met is almost exclusively full of very amazing and beautiful things, and even when the things are not so brilliant, like in the English rooms, the curators step up to the plate by lighting it like an 80s family blockbuster, so that the visit feels dazzlingly choreographed and engrossing. To reiterate again, the Met is very big and you cannot see it all in one go. But I tried my best.
Here are some things I saw at the Met.
Portrait of a Young Woman in Red. Egypt, AD 90-120. Encaustic on lime wood.
The neck might be by Hals or Manet. A delicate shadow to one side of her nose barely but beautifully evokes the sense of her head in absent-minded motion. The cheeks are heavily mottled by time, but the sensitive treatment of the nose is still visible – unless decay has done me dirty, to me it looks like quite deliberately different shades of highlight have been used for the bridge of her nose and it’s shiny tip, with the latter using the brightest available shade of white. The treatment of the hair looks formulaic and yet somehow you have a sense – as you so rarely do in European painting – of how the cool afternoon air must have circulated within those tightly budded curls. How they would have bounced when she laughed. The past tense is appropriate: this is a funerary portrait. She may have been a divinity, but it didn’t keep death at the door. We tend to idealise those who have left, as well as the manner of their leavetaking. In this portrait, the union of naturalism and idealism is so frank and peaceful you can easily believe she went of her own free will.
Georges de la Tour, The Penitent Magdalen. ca. 1640, oil on canvas.
Not a strand out of place. The neat sweep of her glossy brown hair is exact as a hemline against her waxy cheek: this must be early days for the penitent Magdalene then, who will go on to take her hair for a nun’s habit. Sitting at a desk in a dark setting—is this night or just a windowless room?—she has just lit a candle that stands in front of a mirror and burns with a tall, watery flame. Without that candle’s reflection, the mirror would be pure frame or window, a painting within a painting of shuttered darkness. The high contrasts of white and dark are balanced; the darkness doesn’t threaten or creep, but it claims everything wherever it falls. It consumes. A blackened mirror face—what’s that then? The darkness, the blindness of vanity? Magdalene appears to look slightly past the mirror, towards something we can’t see: a black quadrilateral that like the mirror, might, but doesn’t, give on to something else. The candle is in dialogue with the waxy sheen on her plump knuckles and the skull’s shiny cranium. Or rather, the candle mediates between the two, showing how the one becomes the other as the body burns itself through in a fit of heat.
Diego Velázquez, Juan de Pareja. 1650, oil on canvas.
There’s an economy and self-effacement to his style, as I see it here. He never luxuriates in a brushstroke for its own sake. Everything is being made to work. Velazquez only paints surface, but in a way that makes other painters’ attempts at insight and penetration look like a feeble attachment to a romantic metaphor of depth. What you see, he says, is all you will ever get; grasp instead the most comprehensive materialism and it will lead you towards whatever else there is. As to whether there is anything else, the paintings are entirely ambivalent. What they give you is the reality from which belief and doubt arise. I think this is what amazes me about Velazquez: he gives you the surface to make you think about everything else. Looking back at my notes today, I found I didn’t write anything down about the painting. Well that’s the thing. You don’t need to write anything down about the painting. It’s said everything there is to say already. It’s right there.
Louise Bourgeoise: Paintings, temporary exhibition. Untitled, 1946, oil on linen AND plate from He Disappeared into Complete Silence, 1947, illustrated book.
In the paintings, her sketchy figures are halfway between caricature and abstraction. They feel like cartoons or doodles by Munch. A leering head, perfectly happy and perfectly stupid, whizzes towards you out of vortices that might recall Munch’s Scream. There’s a painting of a gallows with a rope dangling towards an erased or fading stick figure. The painting is called Untitled. This is either a joke or not a joke and it’s hard to know which way round is funnier. These are easily the darkest paintings I saw in the Met, not because they despair but because they mock at their own suffering with a vicious, toothy humour. The punchlines stick. It’s like in the story when everything goes wrong and the little girl gets suddenly eaten alive. And everyone laughs, suddenly remembering that nothing is ever going to be alright.
Eduoard Manet, The Spanish Singer. 1860, oil on canvas.
So basically my thinking is that this guy Manet is a real punk. Maybe like a matinee-idol who became a satirist, someone who was so talented he felt it wasn’t fair or interesting to proceed without a bit of self-sabotage. So what he thinks is this: he’ll find some guy, the sort of guy you might meet in a depressing pub in Camden, just bumming a cigarette, decked out in crap grey jeans and knackered white converse knock-offs. Then he’ll give the guy a guitar and deck him out in a pastel pink bandana. Tell him to hold the instrument, doesn’t matter if he does it the wrong way round. Get him to hoist it up on one floating leg so he’s modelled as unbalanced. So he’s posed as someone posing. Then he do him like a prophet from Caravaggio. Sit him in that definite cast of one-way studio light. Give him forceful hands and those neat flat thumbnails that sit just-so in the cuticle. Get it down pat and rip the stuffing out of the whole thing at the same time. Won’t that be funny? Won’t that be fucking hilarious?
Edgar Degas, various paintings of dancers and bathing girls.
Bright and scratchy. The girl stretches, the dress rustles, the floor groans and flexes as the consummate pro enjoins his brush for the thousandth time to put down as much as he can – and no more – of the world’s daily ravishments. There’s no deliberateness, or rather his intention is working to disguise itself. They have a caught-momentness that makes them feel fleeting, as though they would disappear if you turned away. With the dancers, you can almost hear the sound of an orchestra tuning up, or a jobbing pianist playing himself in with a spread chord. With the bathing women – blurred, faceless, hard at work bending down to wash – you feel you might look back to find the canvas blocked by a curtain, or a slammed door.
Gustave Courbet, The Source of the Loue. 1863, oil on canvas.
I don’t think I'd ever knowingly seen a painting by Courbet before. My notes read: Love the water. So hard to write about these. If some artists get the thingness of things, he seems more interested in the ‘thing’ than the ‘-ness’. (Degas poss. the other way round). Berger says that what perspective towards the horizon is for Poussin, the force of gravity is for Courbet. I say that Courbet is fucking brilliant!
Paolo Veronese, The Marriage of Mars and Cupid. 1570s, oil on canvas.
I started writing about art because art doesn’t really come naturally to me. I kind of get writing a lot more naturally. For me, looking at paintings is like talking in another language. It doesn’t always come easily. I have to concentrate really hard and then, a lot of the time, to mediate the experience with language. I can look at paintings for long periods of time without seeing what’s in them. I'm basically not good at looking. Even so, I looked at this painting for about half an hour. I sat there with my mouth open, gawking at it. I would pay $20 to see this painting alone. But that’s really all I have to say about it.
To sum up, I recommend the Met.
J