“Here time becomes space.” A famously enigmatic line from Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” toyed with my mind during a recent visit, my first since last winter, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It chimed with my experience as I prowled the prodigious institution, which has been celebrating, in a pandemically muted manner, its hundred-and-fiftieth birthday as the world’s chief encyclopedic art museum. “Making the Met,” a huge show, roughly tracks the sequence of the museum’s acquisitions and policies since its founding, in 1870. A hundred and fifty is a lot of years, though a mere flicker compared with the five millennia’s worth of objects from the permanent collections that are sampled in the show.
If you’re so inclined, there’s much to think about when considering the successive mind-sets of patrician New York, from Eurocentric Victorian tastes to universalist ideals—an evolution that has rarely been rapid. Art that the Met deemed “primitive” was initially consigned to the American Museum of Natural History, across Central Park. This gaffe was remedied in the nineteen-seventies with spectacular gifts of African and Polynesian items that Nelson Rockefeller had amassed for his own Museum of Primitive Art. Photography, scorned for decades, arrived with a bang in the twenties and thirties, thanks to the indefatigable lobbying of Alfred Stieglitz. Three exquisite crepuscular prints of the Flatiron Building, by Edward Steichen, from 1904, heralded that breakthrough. But derelictions persist from the starchy conservatism that long retarded the museum’s engagement with twentieth-century art, when it lazily let the Museum of Modern Art get the best stuff while the getting was good. Complaints about chronic cluelessness at the Met were once common in the art world, unmitigated by such maladroit stabs at contemporaneity as “New York Painting and Sculpture,” a show in 1969 by the putatively hip curator Henry Geldzahler, which mistook abstract painting as the wave of the future and included just one woman, Helen Frankenthaler, and no Black artists. And the less that’s remembered the better of a patronizing debacle from the same year, “Harlem on My Mind,” which again excluded artists of color. The Met is endeavoring to counter its legacy of benightedness on this score, but, like the turning of a battleship, the process is gradual.
On the other hand, and meanwhile, c’mon. The Met is our Home Depot of the soul. It has just about whatever you want, and it has a lot of it, very largely the harvest of past donations, en masse, of the collections of major benefactors—a New York tradition that, per a bequest in 1969, entitled the banker Robert Lehman to require the construction of a whole new wing, devoted to his gifts. (That was annoying, but the art was worth it.) It needs to be said that recent scholarship has cast shade on the robber-baron and colonialist provenance of many Met treasures—a problem shared by other formerly piratical museums worldwide. But it’s hard to gainsay, to start with, the tremendous value of the museum’s foundational commitment to ancient Egyptian (hello, Temple of Dendur, 1978), Greek, and Roman treasures, from the Mediterranean cradles of Western tradition, even as it has extended its aegis to Asian, African, and other cultures, most recently with a wondrous refurbishment of the Islamic galleries, completed in 2011.
If there’s ever a hitch to enjoying the Met, it’s satiety: so much, so all at once. But that keeps us coming back—and the inability to do so for months during the COVID lockdown felt like a spell of localized brain damage. To return now exhilarated me—those marble halls, the noble stairs, the niche concentrations of thises and thats. Time becomes space, indeed, in stilled torrents of forms and epochs that engulf you, wherever you chance to stand. “Making the Met” magnifies the utter variousness of the place. If the effect is disorderly—with a time line cutting across departmental divisions and educational chronologies—so are we these days. I’m for rolling with it.
The show starts with a chapel-like room emphasizing the museum’s present collecting goals—a political statement, unavoidably. There’s a van Gogh painting, a Rodin sculpture, a sixteenth-century Nepalese mask, a wooden power figure from the Kongo Kingdom, a Greek marble stele, a Surrealist sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, and a Richard Avedon photograph of Marilyn Monroe. Do the juxtapositions disorient? Good. You’re primed for a panoply of incongruities with a cumulatively odd effect on aesthetic perception. Anachronism reigns. An early masterpiece by Édouard Manet, “Young Lady in 1866,” predates in the acquisition annals a set of carved stone fragments of an Aramaic palace in what is now Syria (circa the tenth or ninth century B.C.). I think I never looked at those before; they’re terrific.
Profiting greatly are items of craft and decoration—keenly selected ceramics, jewelry, armor, furniture, and whatnot—granted solo appearances away from their normally crowded shelves and vitrines. Some startle. A framed swatch of wallpaper, from 1922, by the tragically short-lived Wiener Werkstätte designer Dagobert Peche, ambushed me into rapture: bright leafy and floral accents scattered across a ground of depth-shaded vertical bands of ambrosial color. (I’ve been a Peche nut since a retrospective of his work at the Neue Galerie in 2002.) The design seemed to essentialize a human will to beauty as a matter of workaday routine: ordinary ecstasy. Come to think of it, almost everything on display in “Making the Met” crowned a good day for someone, craftsman or artist, who was charged with some specific purpose, generating for the viewer a parade of privileged encounters that bestir bygone forms to present-tense eloquence.
The show’s strangest effect, for me, was a relative deflation of major art, as a consequence of having been made to compete with a melee of minor but pestering charms. Paintings by Manet, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Chardin, and many another master, popping up unpredictably, felt almost apologetic for diverting toward profundity a general flow of enthusiasm for any and all instances of sufficiently motivated creativity. Those painters are gods to me, and I’ll want their works returned to suitably dignified hangings. But it’s valuable, as an antidote to excessive piety, to register the raw fact of physical existence that they share with innumerable other made things, each with something or other to say for itself and about the human appetite for betterment, whatever the occasion. The show induces a kind of therapeutic delirium. Aesthetic response rejoices as readily in the eye-catching as in the sublime. The vacation from serious judgment seemed to me serious in itself, a reminder that nothing possesses inherent qualities except by attribution, necessarily ratified in personal experience. (Beauty really is in the eye, among other faculties, of the beholder; that’s where it can do the most good.) Putting revered works to hard tests, as “Making the Met” does, disrupts and may thereby reground their wonted hold on us.
Roaming the museum apart from the show, I found the levelling effect hard to shake, tamping down my giddiness at being back in the great building and dispersing my promiscuous surrender to the show’s seductive bibelots. Regular stops for me, like “Bather (from a fountain group),” a fantastically poignant young figure in white marble from 1782 by Jean-Antoine Houdon, felt off duty, as if backstage awaiting a cue. I evaded disappointment by skipping the Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque demiurges—Bellini, Tintoretto, Velázquez—who normally rivet me. The reason was a mildly estranging reminder of how artificial the assumptions and protocols of museums tend to be. Like any learned behavior, museumgoing can slip the mind. I had a flash memory of being a bored kid, thrust into a mysterious jumble of things that grownups insisted I like. (I liked some, but sullenly.) That mood befits, I’ve decided, a thaw of sensibility after a period of benumbing house arrest. I keep noting that the objects are the same, but we who view them are different now: not resuming, rebeginning. Loving art always involves catching up to ourselves. I count on my Met touchstones to be more sociable, and myself to be less self-conscious, when next we meet.
There’s looking at art, and then there’s thinking about it, which can sprawl without limits across our apprehension of the ways of the world. The Met’s anniversary show affords stimulus for a great deal of both, rather bravely inviting skeptical scrutiny of the institution’s record of cardinal decisions. Every choice made during the museum’s century and a half—what to display, and how, and why—settled an in-house argument that can percolate anew, when confined to aesthetics, or that may run afoul of latter-day cultural and political realities. Most institutions tend to be clumsy beasts in this respect, on the back foot of critical and social changes that may either confirm or trash the wisdom that they presume to embody. I think of a section in the show that celebrates Met personnel who, as “monuments men,” rescued Nazi-looted art works during the late stages of the Second World War—a point of pride that touches on discomfiting issues, some not yet resolved, of the works’ proper ownership and disposition. (Rounding the stuff up was the easy part.) Most gravely, as an open wound, there’s the fact that, until the last two rooms, the show features hardly a Western work that isn’t by a white man. The behemoth museum details—and embarrasses—the moral character of what has been mirrored to us as the sum of a comprehensive civilization: a heritage to be lived with and, by the way, lived down.
It’s nice to see a painting by Romare Bearden, a consummate artist who was long burdened with token status in the art world. More satisfying still, there’s “Street Story Quilt” (1985), an array of three large sewn panels by Faith Ringgold. Formally commanding, the multicolored suite captures in sprightly imagery and describes in demotic words a host of Black citizens—real lives, really led—in windows of tenements along a city street that’s past due for intersecting with Fifth Avenue. ♦
