Met Percent: Week Twenty-Five [by Alec Bernstein]

Drauen and Preindre

Inset: Phone, for Life Magazine, Anonymous, 1965.
Center: Design for a Desk with Decorations from A Midsummer Night's Dream, G. Clark Stanton, 1851.

It would be impossible to estimate, wandering around the few Drawings and Prints galleries (690-693), how many drawings, how many prints the Met Collection has. Most works on paper are vulnerable — not on view — isolated for their own protection (sound familiar?). 

Quarantined. And yet they could overwhelm — in a good way — isolation: 177,000 online entries and 1.2 million pieces in the department. If I would go to the Met, but I won’t yet, only about one hundred prints might be on display. And if I were an average viewer, and these days I feel average, I’d look at a single drawing for 27.2 seconds (including label reading, for those who do). But between the Covid time warp and the massive online entries, I look as long as I like, whenever I like, as if I myself were inside the light protective bubble with the vulnerable drawings, prints — our human scratches — expressed and preserved. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search#!?department=9.

But first a few definitions. 

Draw: "Give motion to by the act of pulling" — from drauen, alternate spelling of Old English dragan "to drag, to draw, protract". “Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence”. — Henri Matisse

Print: “A mark made by impression upon a surface" — past participle of French preindre "to press, crush," from Latin premere. Joan Miro slowly planned his prints in sketches; but at the crucial moment, when he came face to face with the plate or the stone, he never referred to them. He would take a deep breath and say, "Let's go".

So many gestures, such a range of responses — I would love to have the writing desk above, covered in midsummer night’s dreams, even as I would disrupt its “love-in-idleness” style with a “desk phone”. I have needs to “Dial the world direct. Every week”. 

Direct from the collection:

Top, left to right:

• Joan Blondell, Movie Star Cards, 1930.
• From Nineteen prints, Kikugawa Eizan, 19th c. 
• Red Eagle, Prussia, from the World's Decorations for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes, Lindner, Eddy & Claus, 1890.
• John Reilly, 1st Base, Cincinnati, Old Judge Cigarettes, Goodwin & Company, 1887.
• Two nude figures wearing veils, seen from behind, "Le Pitture di Pellegrino Tibaldi e di Niccolò Abbate esistentinell' Instituto di Bologna", 1756.

Center, left to right:

• Hab.ts de l'Isle Marquises from playing cards "Jeu d'Or", Anonymous, French, 18th c.
• Two Studies of a Seated Male Nude Seen from the Back, attributed to Cherubino Alberti ,1596–1602.
• Design for a Stage Set Opera, Paris, 1830-90.
• Silhouette of Cecil Brent, A. Brent, British, 19th c.
• Broadsheet, relating to a worker's strike in Orizaba, workers holding up the Mexican flag, flanked by soldiers, Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, 1920.

Bottom, left to right:

• Drawing 16, Jacoba van Heemskerck, ca. 1916.
• Two Tables, One Blond the Other Purple Lacquer, both with Vases and Objects, Anonymous, Chinese, 19th c.
• Six Stages of Marring a Face, Thomas Rowlandson, 1792.

William Ivins, the first curator of the Drawing and Print department, expanded the fine art collection to all works on paper, “to spread the butter thin on as much bread as possible.”

 

What you can do with acids 

Left: Bolinka and Marcolfus, Daniel Hopfer, late 15th–early 16th c.  
Center: Close Helmet for the Tourney, ornament copied from a design by Daniel Hopfer, 1552, gallery 371. 
Right: Moresca Dancers Surrounding a Sausage Seller, Daniel Hopfer, late 15th–early 16th c., Minnesota Museum of Art.

Hopfer was the first artist to adapt acid-etching on armor to printmaking on paper. He produced his own stock of populist, often irreverent prints.

Bolinka and Marcolfus is an illustration from the The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, a literary “best-seller” from about 1410 to 1550. There were 75 Latin versions, a dozen European language translations and it is still in print. The tale chronicles Marcolfus outwitting Solomon. It is full of humor and scatological riddles, trickster style: an anti-establishment one-upmanship saga.

The helmet’s designs are referred to by armor historians as “in the Hopfer style”: gothic vine tendrils, Italianate grotesques, line etching, and his unique dark ground dot patterns. He also published influential prints of armor patterns used by many German armorists. 

The sausage seller has seven boorish men doing a Morris dance (Medieval courting ritual) around a goitered old woman who holds up a jug of beer and a spit with seven sausages. 

These images and my college dorm life in the early seventies somehow connected: R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, Sabrett hot dogs with mustard and onions, campus beer parties, helmeted riot gear, and reading Rabelais. One Saturday, my friend Tom and I toured Ellis Island under the influence of small purple drops of acid. A couple of student discontents looking for our pasts. All lined up — Medieval peasants, striking students, literary irreverence in the halls of those huddled masses yearning to breathe free. 

Tom Henehan became the head of the Young Socialist Party in NY and ran its newspaper. “Printing changes everything”, he would say, “and read your Rabelais”, like “A certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune.” 

Wish I had a seven sausage spit and a jug of beer. 

“Turned slightly to the . . .”

Clockwise from top left: 
Self-Portrait, from The Iconography, Anthony van Dyck, ca. 1640. 
Portrait of Frans Snyders, from The Iconography, Anthony van Dyck, ca. 1600s. 
Aman-Jean (Portrait), Georges Seurat, 1882–83. 
Self-Portrait, turned slightly to the left, Käthe Kollwitz, gallery 690, ca. 1893.
Pieter Brueghel the Younger from The Iconography, Anthony van Dyck, 1627–35, The Frick Collection.

In design school, I had 8 terms of “Viscom” (visual communication) in which techniques of the Old Masters were systematically extracted from fine art, codified and taught for a new purpose. One of my favorites was vignetting. The vignette does not completely fill the frame; it lets an image fade, drift, or dissolve into the surface medium. 

Here are a few common terms, defined with a viscom spin, for types of vignetting. 

Soft blur: the edges of the subject lose focus. 
Torn paper: An edge or a part of a “complete” image appears torn off.  
Fade away: The contrast gradually recedes. 
Spillover: the background appears as a field of illumination.  
Sketchy edge: a highly rendered subject dissolves into sketchy lines.

So I reverse course and apply the contemporary taxonomy back to its roots: these portraits use a mix of “sketchy edge” and “fade away”, except the Seurat: it combines “soft blur” and a tad of “spillover”.

“Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.”
— Wallace Stevens

Self-portrait, Study of a Hand and a Pillow (recto); Six Studies of Pillows (verso), Albrecht Dürer, 1493 ( not on view).

Who wouldn’t want a pillow like that after so much self-observation?

“I have taken notice, as of an extraordinary thing, of some great men, who in the highest enterprises and most important affairs have kept themselves in so settled and serene a calm, as not at all to break their sleep.” — Montaigne, “On Sleep”.

After 56 Met screen/pages of 80 works each, one must rest one’s head!

Comments

[Peggy Rieseling]

Absolutely first-rate. Thank you so much.

[Jana Dodson]

The illustrations alone and the commentary upon them make this a compelling read.

[Ralph Nightingale]

Loved this piece.

[David Lehman]

Thank you for this very stimulating post. -- DL