HOLLAND COTTER ART REVIEW
Exhibitions come and go; they are what museums do. Collections are slowly built and stay; they are what museums are. “The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art plays both sides of this dynamic. It catches a monumental institution at a moment of major change.
As the title implies, the show is a tribute to Mr. de Montebello, who is leaving the Met after being its director for more than 30 years. For the occasion, curators in 17 of the museum’s departments have chosen objects in their fields of expertise from the permanent collection. These have been assembled and intermeshed under the coordinating eye of Helen C. Evans, curator of Byzantine art.
The 300 objects in the show represent a tiny fraction, and a madly eclectic one. Chinese scrolls, Greek vessels, Oceanic effigies and an 18th-century American pickle holder share the spotlight, with no object privileged as better - grander, rarer, prettier - than any other.
What’s most interesting about the show, politically, is the leveling process it represents. At the Met we are accustomed to seeing Greek art, seedbed of Western classicism, isolated from the rest of the museum in immaculate, lightflooded halls, a kind of sanitary zone. Here it’s thrown into the mix, and that changes our thinking about it.
Classicism begins to look like an impure, iffy proposition in an installation halfway through the show, where the marble head of a startled-looking Hellenistic goddess is sandwiched between Brancusi’s neo-Cycladic “Bird in Space (1923) and a Grecian evening gown designed, around 1965, by Madame Gres.
One of the Met’s most exquisite Gothic sculptures, a 15th-century Virgin and Child from the Met’s Cloisters Museum of medieval art in northern Manhattan, is in the same room. So is a Charles Rennie Mackintosh washstand, and a bust of the 18th-century Russian military leader Aleksandr Menshikov, who looks like a crazed scientist in a massive fright wig.
Under the circumstances, everything registers as both high and low art. Uplift means whatever excites you. Art assumes different meaning and value depending on how you view it: as a social historian, a finely attuned connoisseur or as a window-shopper.
Much of the work is just plain great no matter where you’re coming from. Almost everything in the first room is, beginning with a scroll painting of a horse named Night-Shining White from Tang-dynasty China, its surface swarming with seals left by admirers since the eighth century. The Met’s oldest African piece is here: a terra-cotta figure of a man, his back covered with boils or jewels - was he meant to record or ward off a plague? - from Djenne in Mali.
European painting was Mr. de Montebello’s original field of expertise, and he has made some amazing acquisitions. Vermeer’s extraterrestrial “Study of a Young Woman is one. It took up residence in the museum in 1979. And there is Duccio di Buoninsegna’s tiny, transporting “Madonna and Child.
The whole business ends with a flourish in a gallery of masterpiece drawings: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian, Raphael, Poussin and a smudgy, rare little two-sided scrap by the Netherlandish painter Gerard David that joined the allstar lineup just this year.
If late-20th-century names are scarce, that’s probably just as well. Despite the presence in the show of first-rank paintings by Mark Rothko and Jasper Johns, contemporary art has not been the museum’s strength. One hopes that Mr. de Montebello’s appointed successor, Thomas P. Campbell, a Met curator, will feel free to explore other paths.
Mr. Campbell, like Mr. de Montebello, is a European-art specialist. The two immense tapestry exhibitions he mounted at the Met were, to the surprise of many, among the museum’s strongest recent draws. Mr. de Montebello requested that his tribute exhibition open with a tapestry - 16th-century, Flemish - called “The Triumph of Fame.
It depicts the allegorical figure of Fame, tall and slender, surrounded by writers renowned for their praise of the past, all gathered together like expectant picnickers in a flowery field. A close look reveals that some of the flowers are in full bloom, others have gone to seed, some are still in bud: the cyclical story of art and life, institutions and collections. But while Fame and his friends seem to wait for a feast to arrive, ours is already here. Mr. de Montebello has been providing it, special delivery, for 30 years.
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