TxAnne is right; the art at the Met exhibition will knock you down and sit on you. Not every single piece, of course. There were several artists included (e.g., Modigliani) whose work gives me the griping dyspepsia. But even with them included, there were times I had to stop cold and back away until I could stand to go forward again.
I had some fairly strong misgivings about whether I had any business even going to Houston so soon after getting my nose fixed, but L insisted we had to go without fail, and that this weekend would be less risky of selling out than next weekend, the last before the exhibition closed, and she herd-dogged all of us into the car and away. (About that time, we found that M had broken out with SOMEthing on both cheeks—we still don’t know what; she says it doesn’t itch and she hasn’t a fever—but by that point it was too late to turn round.)
We got to Houston in time to have lunch before our admission time of 1:30 PM, and we stopped at a barbecue place on Shepherd across from Bookstop for some VERY mediocre BBQ, I thought. Still, it was adequate enough for lunch and got us out again in good time to be back at the museum. We also got very lucky and found a parking space in the free lot just north of the Law Building, making for a very short walk that my legs appreciated. We ducked down through the disorientation tunnel to the Beck Building, were in our place in line a few minutes early, and got let in at 1:20.
I found myself the least engaged by the earliest pieces in the exhibition. I didn’t like the idealization so beloved of Ingres, David, and the Academicians. (Émile Zola nailed it solidly when he accused one painting, Cabanel’s Birth of Venus, of being “drowned in a river of milk, resembl[ing] a delicious courtesan, not made of flesh and bone – that would be indecent – but of a sort of pink and white marzipan.”) I didn’t take, for example, to Ingres’s insistence on idealization at the expense of truth, in the same way I don’t care for the purposeful distortions the Mannerists used in their pursuit of a stylized “elegance.”
I started liking the show a LOT more once we got into the Barbizons: Courbet, early Manet and Degas, and Corot. I adored Courbet’s Jo, la belle Irlandaise for his ability to suggest her freckled complexion without being so gross as actually to paint freckles. And his nudes look like by-God women, and not men with cones stuck on their chests. Corot’s pieces were accomplished, but the limited, damped-down palette left me feeling a bit distant from his subjects. But when we went into the next room with Manets . . . .
Oh. My. God.
THIS is what the exhibition was about. The incredible handling of light and color pushed me back and drew me in at the same time. I choked up standing in front of Manet’s Boating, held by the near-fluorescent light playing across the shoulder of the man’s shirt and the almost transparent texture of his companion’s dress. (I debated myself for a long time whether she was Mme. Manet, Mme. Monet, or someone else. In the end I voted for Mme. Manet.) Equally, his Dead Christ and the Angels looks backward to El Greco and forward to Dalí, with its hard, foreshortened perspective. Seeing the body sprawled forward out of the picture plane, there is no question in your mind: this man is dead.
After that, canvas after canvas left me with the same shaken-by-the-throat feeling from their intensity of light and color: Pissarro’s Garden of the Tuileries and Rue de l’Épicerie, Rouen, Renoir’s Waitress at Duval’s Restaurant and Portrait of Margot Berard, Sisley’s Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne. (One curious side point: the skies painted by Sisley, an Englishman, were much clearer and harder than any of the skies painted by any of his French contemporaries, and prefiguring the hard lights and shadows of the Wyeths. Was it just him, or did the English perceive the same sky in a different way?)
As every good dramatic work should do, the exhibition built up to its knockout punches: Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne, and the Cubists. Frankly, the one van Gogh piece included (Cypresses, painted during his time in the asylum at Saint-Rémy) made me very uncomfortable. L said her impression was that if van Gogh had changed his palette from greens to reds, that it would have been like a tower of flame, a literal “burning bush.”
Of course Monet’s works included the inevitable water lilies, a sunset view of the Houses of Parliament in London that reminded me of his paintings of the Rouen Cathedral ten years before, a loving portrait of his son, and a totally arctic Ice Floes, to which the online link doesn’t begin to do justice. Seeing the actual painting feels almost like standing in a white-out, it’s all so pale and cold.
But as astonishing as the Monets were, to my mind the Cézannes still knocked them back. I choked up again in front of The Gulf of Marseilles Seen from L’Estaque. I don’t know what he did, but I can’t ever doubt he did it, and it’s still there to see.
By this point I felt there were almost TOO many pieces to handle at once, but I tried it anyhow. The study for Seurat’s La Grande Jatte couldn’t help but almost jump off the wall and spin you around, shouting “Look at ME!!” L was even more taken with the tree trunks in his Forest at Aubert. At another extreme, I could feel the heat radiating off the buildings at Bonnard’s Saint-Tropez Harbor; I had to take a step back, the impression was so intense.
At the very end of the exhibition were two or three Picassos, a Braque, and the Modglianis I mentioned before. There’s practically nothing to say about Picasso that hasn’t been said, I thought the Braque was one of his less memorable ones, and I wouldn’t cry if every Modgliani that ever has been were to disappear. I would have liked better to end the show at the Post-Impressionists, or if they just HAD to include a Picasso, let it be the portrait of Gertrude Stein, which I love not only for itself but for its subject.
Once we left the Met exhibition gallery, L asked whether I wanted to go back and look at an exhibition of flower and fruit still-lifes by the Dutch artist Jan van Huysum and some of his contemporaries. I did, and am ever so glad I did so. Van Huysum, of whom I’d never heard before, had an absolutely unmatched technique with floral still-lifes. If you can, go find a coffee-table book of his work. It’ll keep you engrossed for hours—or it would me.
Cabbage the rose with a poppy ant. Fnord.
