The Best American Poetry

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

“Faux tographe...”

Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (detail), Leonardo da Vinci, Musée du Louvre, 1510. 
The Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right, Leonardo da Vinci, 1510. 
Trilby Clark from Movie Stars Exhibit Cards series, 1920. 
NFT Art, Rick Carter, OMGDrops, 2021. 

The Met Museum galleries of Drawings and Prints are very near the Photography galleries. Three “Special Exhibition Galleries” (691, 692, and 693) display all three media. Categorization seems blurry, fluid or tentative.

We forget that painting on canvas was a radical change from painting on wood (see Leonardo’s chapter “how to paint on canvas”). As radical was the exhibition of drawings in museums and galleries. Photography was also inherently problematic. 

The Trilby Clark Card (of the once-renowned 1920s actor) is of course both a “photograph” and a “print” but is cataloged in the department of Drawings and Prints with Leonardo’s Head of the Virgin. Looking back on examples from the Met’s Prints online, I notice a surprising number are printed photographs. The Met Photography Department opened in 1928, but the mass-produced printed photographs remain in Drawings and Prints (founded 1916). What prompted the Met to keep printed photos in Prints? Is mass production an artistic marvel more marvelous than a single photo? Are printed photographs not photographic prints?

Oscar-winning art director Rick Carter’s NFT (Non Fungible Token, far right above) is a good example of what awaits the Met’s future Acquisitions Department. Initially the NFT was intended to protect the rights of image originators. It has gone full spec-capitalism and is presently entangled in our crypto-currency market dynamics. The data needs no physical printing of any kind.

But categorization is a minor skirmish in the larger “art / photography” battles.

Jean Renoir often quoted Edgar Degas’ comment to the photographer Nadar: “Faux peintre! faux artiste! faux. . . tographe!” (False painter! false artist! false-tographer!) (1873-74). 

In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz (1922), Marcel Duchamp wrote, "You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.”

In predictable over-simplifications, mainstream media regularly “exposes” pairs of “boundaries”: Weege—fine art and murder; Richard Avedon—art and fashion; Robert Mapplethorpe—art and pornography; Richard Prince—art and appropriation; Cindy Sherman—art and “post-everything”. 

George Bernard Shaw was an early experimental photographer, commenting on the field with his usual astuteness, “I would willingly exchange every single painting of Christ for one snapshot”.

Self-Portrait (detail), GB Shaw, c1907, Society of Authors, the National Trust and the London School of Economics.

 

Weltschmerz und Zeitgeist

Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., Diane Arbus, 1962. Top, print. Bottom: proof sheet.

Everyone I have ever known has seen me in this pose. I use it to this day. It seems also always to suggest a caption, a Komposita (a German compound term) . . . from Zietgeist to Weltschmerz to the recently coined German Coronaangst terms, like Maskentrottel (mask idiot) and Impfneid (envy of those who have been vaccinated).

For a while, I had a copy of the proof sheet hanging in the dining room. I called it Boygrenadeparken. Then driving to the office, an Ausländer working for a German corporation, I would mull over multisyllabic terms to prepare for the day. E.g., how to maintain das Fingerspitzengefühl (the fingertip feeling — tactfulness, intuitive flair or instinct) while having das Fernweh (distance pain — a longing for a place that isn’t where you are right now).

Somehow I find the idea of the Komposita apt for Arbus: Bittersweet? Glee-gloom? Mashed-up-solitude? And the happy-kinder on the proof? Just too long a shoot. . .

 

Happy Birthdays, Mr. Hockney

Top left: David Hockney working with his Polaroid, photograph by David Hockney Foundation, n.d.
Top right: Pearlblossom Hwy., 11 – 18th April 1986, #2, David Hockney, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 1986. 
Bottom: Hockney at the BMW Design Studio, Newbury Park, CA, photographs by BMW, 1995.

I saw Hockney lecture on his Polaroids in the 1970s. He spoke eloquently on the time his montage method gave him to stay with a work, compared to the speed of a single photograph. It reminded me of Ansel Adams: “If photography were difficult in the true sense of the term — meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching — there would be a vast improvement in total output.” (1943).

In 1995, Hockney was commissioned* to do an “art car” for BMW and assigned a BMW 850 CSi. The car, unfortunately, did not fit in his studio elevator, so he drove up to evaluate our design facilities. I was the designer assigned to support him, and I waited at the reception desk to give him a tour. He carried his dachshunds, one under each arm, and saw among the business cards one for “Frisbee, Corporate Dog.” He asked if it was true that we had a corporate dog.”Yes, he is in the accounting department.” “O.K. I don’t need to see anything else. This place will be fine.” He brought his long brush collection and spent two and a half days painting in and outside the studio.

One morning while viewing the car, we chatted over a cigarette break. He had heard on the radio that OJ Simpson received 7,000 birthday cards in jail. This was how I discovered that I share a birthday with both David Hockney and OJ Simpson. 

I remember his long brush work . . . And his words, “A line has time in it.”

*BMW gave Hockney his own 850 CSi, complete with a special custom seat raised up for his little dogs to see out of the window.

 

Marilyn @ The Met & The Money

Top left: Marilyn Monroe on the Set of "The Misfits": Leaning Out of Second Floor Window of Frame House, Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1960.  
Top right: Detail, Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1960.  
Top center: Marilyn Monroe and John Huston on the Set of "The Misfits": At the Craps Table, Eve Arnold, 1960.  
Bottom left: Andy Warhol’s cropping of: Niagara, Eugene Korman, 20th Century Fox, The University of Michigan Museums of Art and Archaeology, 1953. 
Bottom center: From Marilyn, Andy Warhol, 1967. 
Bottom center insert: Untitled (self-portrait, as Marilyn Monroe/Norma Jean), Cindy Sherman, 1982.  
Bottom right: Marilyn Monroe, Actress, New York City (Sad Marilyn), Richard Avedon, 1957.

The only Eve Arnold listed at the Met online is not shown. It is described as one of Arnold’s series of gambling table shots (above) on the set of “The Misfits”. The same holds for the Cartier-Bresson: another Met-owned image — catalogued, but not shown online.

The Eugene Korman publicity shot of Marilyn is only in the Met by way of the 51 prints of Warhol’s From Marilyn. While the Museum of Modern Art claims, “Richard Avedon was fiercely protective of Marilyn’s memory”, perhaps Cindy Sherman was not as concerned. 

These are all the listings of a search for Marilyn at the Met online. In or out of the Met’s collections, scores of photographers did “something” to or for Marilyn and her image, one of the most reproduced faces in photography. Lee Strasberg’s second wife Anna Mizrahi inherited the bulk of the Monroe estate which she sold to Authentic Brands Group for an estimated $20-30 million in 2011. The Warhol Marilyns go up and down, but in the millions. The Sherman fetched $25,000 at Christies in 2016. The Eve Arnold estate sells her Marilyn prints at £30.

“I would prefer photography to be a folk art – cheap and available to everybody, rather than elevated to mandarin proportions created through an artificial scarcity.” — Eve Arnold (https://www.evearnold.com/posters, prints shipped worldwide).

“The new art is really a business. . . We want to sell shares of our company on the Wall Street stock market. . . I’m a commercial person, I’ve got a lot of mouths to feed. I’ve gotta bring home the bacon.”— Andy Warhol, 1969.

 

Nice Horizons (pause)

Top left: Boden Sea, Utwill, Hiroshi Sugimoto, 1993. 
Top right: Coral Sea, Robert Mapplethorpe, 1983. 
Center: Untitled, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, 1960s.
Bottom: Cloud, Mexico, Edward Weston, 1926. 

“Hamm: And the horizon? Nothing on the horizon?  
Clov: (Lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, exasperated): What in God's name would there be on the horizon? (Pause.)” — Samuel Beckett, Endgame, 1957.

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!

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

Nize Baby!

Top: Épinette des Vosges, Amant Constant Lambert, late 19th c., not on view.
Bottom: Film credits, The Third Man, 1949; Album Cover, Soothing Sounds for Baby, 1962.

An épinettier (a player of the musical instrument; see above) followed Montaigne, along with his tutor, from room to room, playing tunes whenever he was tired or bored. This was a ritual he learned as a child.

“Being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the brains of children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch them violently and over-hastily from sleep (wherein they are much more profoundly involved than we), [my father] caused me to be wakened by the sound of some musical instrument, and was never unprovided of a musician for that purpose.” - Montaigne, Of the Education of Children.

Raymond Scott, mid-century composer and early electronic music inventor, felt the same way about children and sound and recorded several volumes of Soothing Sounds for Baby. His quiet drones remind me of the zither’s constant vibrations. When I was about 10 years old I got an “AM / FM clock-radio” and contemplated each night what station I should wake up to the next day. Today, we have apps like Mornify or Spotify, “with science-backed morning playlists . . .” in case you don’t know how to wake up properly.

The zither, the dulcimer, and the pedal steel guitar, all descend from the French épinette. If you can get to Vienna . . . and if you are willing to sit in a theatre (the Berg Kino Theater, to be exact), you can hear modern zither music featured over real rubble in real post-war Vienna in The Third Man. The title theme was a Billboard number-one hit from April-July, 1950 - unheard of for the zither!

Orson Welles’ character Harry Lime seems like the kind of guy who would have an épinettier following him around Vienna to play whenever he got tired or bored. And as his lover Anna (played by Alida Valli) said, “He never grew up. The world grew up around him”.

 

Trumpet and Verse

Left to right:
Parade Trumpet, 1700,  gallery 680. 
Natural Trumpet in D, 19th c., gallery 680.
Bass saxtuba in E-flat, 1855, Adolphe Sax, gallery 680. 
Over-the-Shoulder Soprano Horn in E-flat, ca. 1880, John F. Stratton, gallery 680. 
Coach Horn in C, ca. 1825–89, gallery 680. 
One of Evelyn Waugh‘s ear trumpets, Forum Auctions, 2017 (estimated value, £1000-1500).

Left to right: 
Jean Cocteau reciting through a megaphone in his production of Les mariés de la tour Eiffel, 1921. 
Evelyn Waugh with one of his ear trumpets. 

There is little casual about these horns. From the Old Testament to the hunt, to our ongoing battle cries, they announce — “forcible” — attention.

“Cleanthes said . . . the voice, forced through the narrow passage of a trumpet, comes out more forcible and shrill: so, methinks, a sentence pressed within the harmony of verse darts out more briskly upon the understanding, and strikes my ear and apprehension with a smarter and more pleasing effect.” - Montaigne

Cocteau needed force in his ballet, because his themes were outlandish: "Sunday vacuity; human beastliness, ready-made expressions, disassociation of ideas from flesh and bone, ferocity of childhood, the miraculous poetry of everyday life.” So he turned to a horn, an “over-the-head-voice-trumpet”, increasing the power of his delivery.

Waugh used silence against those who displeased or bored him. By middle age, he’d become a pantomime villain with his ear trumpet — removed mid-sentence and brandished with devastating effect.

“They think that good rules cannot be understood but by the sound of a trumpet.” - Montaigne

 

Bells and Whistles (and Rattles)

The Kagura Suzu is associated with Shinto rituals at shrines and at court. Kagura (神楽) translates "god-entertainment" and encompasses instrumental music, songs, and dances. 
The Mayan bird whistle has two chambers: one in its head and one deeper in the body. The blow holes are in the tail and crown.  
The Native American Tlingit whistle depicts a double-headed eagle, and this bird could represent contact between Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast and Russian explorers. 
The polished Kuba whistle is used for the arrival of a king or the delivery of messages during hunts.

The Pre-Columbian rattle wards off evil. The terracotta mother figure nurses, and her mouth, belly, and necklace make soothing sounds.  
The English “precious and protective” baby rattles have whistles, a piece of teething coral, and silver bells. They were thought to ward off enchantment and disease. I think of Neil Postman’s Prisoners of Childhood, where he argues that preciousness signals both protected childhood and class structure. 

I wish I’d had any of these fine instruments as a kid. . . . I just had a pink rubber elephant squeeze toy. Years later working as a composer, I layered tape recordings of it, slowed and enlarged in my first studio Musique concrète piece,   Elephantomachia,   (battle of the elephants). Perhaps attempting some overdue off-warding.

 

Twist it, Clap it, Rub it, Whack it, Strike it

Top left: Damaru, 19th c., Tibet, gallery 684.
Top center: Clapper, ca. 1850–1750 B.C., Egypt, Middle Kingdom. 
Top right: Friction Drum (Lunet) 19th– 20th c.,Papua New Guinea, New Ireland, gallery 684.  
Bottom left: Gamelan, Saron Panerus Slendro, 19th c., Java, Indonesia, gallery 681. 
Bottom right: Robotic player piano, roto tom drums, and vibraphone, Aesthetic Research, Alec Bernstein & Daniel Carney,  Baltimore, 1980s.

The thod-rnga, or damaru is made from two human skulls. The drum is played by twisting it back and forth with one hand so that the small pellets at the ends of the strings strike the two drumheads. Buddhist power-tools to fight evil.

Clappers are among the earliest percussion instruments in ancient Egypt. This clapper is shaped like forearms and hands “wearing” bracelets on each wrist. Musical clappers were used at banquets, funerary processions, and other rituals. Precursors to the secularized applause machines of 1950s television.

Lunets are "friction drums" with three sound-producing wedges or tongues on top. The musician moistens a hand with water and rubs the wedges. The tones echo the cry of the island bird for which the drum was named.

The structures of gamelan music share forms with Javanese poetry. The Macapat texts, especially Kinanthi, fit into their individual melodic patterns, which are sung with the percussive orchestras. Themed metric systems are marvelous: Kinanthi, love poems; Durma, violent passions or fighting; Mas kumambang, longing or homesickness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_poetry#Sekar_madya_and_tembang_macapat.
And love those hammers. Not so far from my performance art/sound poetry, back in the day, the 1970s.

By the 1980s, digital control of analogue instruments was in vogue. My partner and I constructed systems to extend pianistic technique — any note, chord or cluster of notes could be performed live by aligning it to keys on a computer keyboard. The system relayed strike information to solenoids which struck the piano keys at the desired moment and volume. This same technique was applied to drums and mallet instruments, like the rosewood marimba I had. Real instruments, natural acoustics, no finger limits. This we called Aesthetic Research. 

“John Zisca of Bohemia, a defender of John Wicliffe’s heresies [the influential dissident within the Roman Catholic priesthood], left order that they should flay him after his death, and of his skin make a drum to carry in the war against his enemies, fancying it would contribute to the continuation of the successes he had always obtained in the wars against them.” - Montaigne 

While viewing these instruments of the past (including my own), I felt more in than out of the tradition. Power tools go way back.

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

The Founder

Top left: The Adoration of the Magi, Giotto di Bondone, c. 1320, gallery 644. 
Top right: The Adoration of the Magi (detail), Giotto di Bondone,1305-06, Arena Chapel, Italy. 
Bottom right: Halley’s Comet, 1986, ESA’s Giotto Spacecraft photograph.
Bottom left: c. 1100, Fresco, The Cloisters, New York City. 
Center: The Virgin and Child (detail), Giotto di Bondone, 1320-30, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

As I wind up the galleries of European Painting, I must touch on a few last painters before proceeding on to Musical Instruments (680-684).

At least a nod to Giotto, the founder of European painting: “Real” space was his contribution. He created a sense of depth, by simply placing the figures in tiers, one behind another. Big steps to naturalism and perspective. Compare to the earlier fresco on a similar theme at the Cloisters.

Compare also his Halley's Comet — the model for his “Star of Bethlehem” — to a spacecraft photo of it.  The European Space Agency named its mission to Halley's Comet “Giotto”, because, although the comet was noted much earlier, he made the first “scientific'” drawing of it in recorded history.

And what a punim on that Madonna.

"For pictures formed by his brush follow nature’s outlines so closely . . .  so realistically that they appear to speak, weep, rejoice and do other things.” - Filippo Villani, De origine civitatis Florentiae et euisdem famosis civibus.

Trade, Tronies and DINKs

Left to right:
Study: Head of a Young Woman, Anthony van Dyck, 1618-20, not on view. 
Bearded Man with a Velvet Cap, Govert Flinck, 1645, gallery 964. 
Study of a Young Woman, Johannes Vermeer, 1665-67, gallery 964. 
Study of an African Man with a Turban, Peter Paul Rubens, 1608, present location unknown.

The four oils above are all technically tronies, not portraits. “Tronie” comes from an informal Dutch word for face, like “mug” in English (from the Old French troigne). Unlike the portrait — a commissioned piece with a known sitter — the tronie is an “intriguing” but anonymous face to be sold in the art market. First used as studies and as storehouses of expressions and facial types for history paintings, the tronie developed into its own genre.

Van Dyck was directed toward the genre by Rembrandt, who painted many tronies and used them to advance his reputation as a master of rugged human experience. Flinck, a pupil of Rembrandt’s, had so internalized his teacher’s method that, within a year, his paintings were sold as the master’s own. Here he captures the “sitter’s craggy physiognomy”. The Vermeer, in a 1696 auction, was described as “a tronie in antique dress, uncommonly artful”. Rubens painted Study of an African Man with a Turban (his earliest surviving Black tronie) while observing other artists making head studies in Rome. All tronies; no names, no stories.

The mercantile class wanted faces from their own societies on their walls, not Heracles, Aristotle, or Marie Antoinette. I was never particularly interested in the museum plaque hypotheses, such as “possible cousin of . . . likely the shopkeeper next to . . . ” But I was equally uninterested in the characters in most history paintings.

It’s sobering when one discovers the accuracy of one’s own market demographics; I do purchase as a DINK (dual income, no kids). And now I must accept my merchant class predilection for anonymous heads. I intend to enjoy many a craggy physiognomy, with no concern for origin, lineage or identification.

Advertising has modernized the tronie — “models that don’t exist” — anonymous “expressive” faces generated by algorithm. Cheap, no copyright fees, no model releases. Rembrandt kept 300 plus tronies  in his studio as virtual models.

Foot Notes

Left: Entries 298, Theologia, and 212, America, Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 1593.
Top Right: The Allegory of Faith, Johannes Vermeer, 1670-72, gallery 964. 
Bottom right: America, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, 1750s, gallery 600.

Vermeer and Tiepolo (two of my all-time favorites) reference Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia — a massive illustrated encyclopedia of allegorical “guidelines” for the arts. I recommend adding him to your library, https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/pdf/noh390b2714105.pdf.

“Ripa describes Faith as ‘having the world under her feet’, and Vermeer used the symbol quite literally, showing a globe of the earth under the woman's right foot”. — MetText. 

“Sitting upon the Globe fhews that Divinity repofes in no inferiour thing”. — Cesare Ripa.

“The monochrome allegorical figure of America is accompanied by her standard attributes . . . She wears a feathered headdress, while sitting on a crocodile and holding a palm branch”. — MetText. 

“The Lizard, they are fo big here, that they devour Men”. — Cesare Ripa.

“If music be the food of love, play on.” 

Top left: Venus and the Lute Player, Titian and Workshop, ca. 1565-70, gallery 638. 
Top center: Archlute, David Tecchler, 1725, Austria, gallery 684.
Top right: The Musicians, Caravaggio, 1597, not on view.  
Bottom left: Ūd, son of Gamil Georges, 1977, Egypt, gallery 681. 
Bottom center: Allegory of Music, Laurent de La Hyre, 1649, gallery 684. 
Bottom right: Lute, Sixtus Rauchwolff, 1596, gallery 684.

The de La Hyre painting explicitly follows Cesare Ripa’s allegory on Music and Love. The Caravaggio does not. His only concession to the conventional terms of allegory is the “winged cupid with grapes”, and the X-rays show he painted out his wings and quiver. This, despite the dedication of the Iconologia to Cardinal Del Monte who was Caravaggio’s patron and commissioned The Musicians. The controversy was part of the plan. 

The Titian alludes to a typical humanist debate between "seeing" and "hearing". Which is the better means of perceiving beauty? Classical hierarchy of the senses (Aristotle, Plato, etc.) deems "sight" the highest. Martin Luther goes for sound — because of the all-important “word”. Taking a stand on these topics was critical. For top dollar, paintings had to inspire intense discourse in the owners’ great rooms.

“There is no sense that has not a mighty dominion, and that does not by its power introduce an infinite number of knowledges. If we were defective in the intelligence of sounds, of harmony, and of the voice, it would cause an unimaginable confusion in all the rest of our science; for, besides what belongs to the proper effect of every sense, how many arguments, consequences, and conclusions do we draw to other things, by comparing one sense with another?” - Montaigne

My German meetings often ended auf Wiedersehen (literally, see you again). But phone calls ended (naturally) with auf Wiederhören (literally, hear you again), which I love and found myself using in English. I fear that logical extension auf Wiederzoom. For now, I say auf Wiederblog, LOL (Lots Of Lutes).

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

Still Life With . . .

Left: Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, Henri Fantin-Latour, 1866, gallery 824.
Top right: Still Life with a Glass and Oysters, Jan Davidsz de Heem, 1640, gallery 964.
Center right: Still Life: Fish, William Merritt Chase, 1908, gallery 774.  
Bottom right: Still Life with an Apple, Alberto Giacometti, 1937, not on view.

Inclined to try an “on-line tour”? Search the Met for “Still life” (https://www.metmuseum.org/search-results#!/search?q=Still%20life).  You will find 2,453  results, all relevant, with the exception of the painter Clyfford Still. A few to start:

Fantin-Latour always appealed, even in my anti-academic periods. Which is why it seems amusing that the Paris Academy was not a fan . . . and sad that Fantin-Latour himself loathed his own flowers. The Academy considered still lifes the lowest genre of painting, “even allowing woman to exhibit them”. Fantin-Latour said of his flowers, “Never have I had more ideas about Art in my head, and yet I am forced to do flowers. While painting them—standing before the peonies and roses—I think of Michelangelo. This cannot go on.” But many were captivated: Monet, Manet, Sergeant, Whistler, and over 150 years of collectors.

Part of the Met’s Founding Purchase of 1871, the de Heem is of the vanitas  sub-genre pronkstilleven. (Dutch for “ostentatious still life”), commenting on the “unrelenting lure of earthly pleasures and the sinful nature of humankind.” - MetText. Vanitas  usually has death images combined with luxury items but not these. These are filled with known symbols of opulence: lemon peels, oysters, and Roemer glasses (German crystal for white wine). Some art school should claim the motto “Lux et Vanitas”. Ja, natuurlijk!

Worried that he would be known to future generations only as “a painter of fish”, yet pleased by his success, Chase considered his fish paintings, "an uninteresting subject so inviting and entertaining by means of fine technique that people will be charmed at the way you've done it." His students wrote about his speed: “He went to the fish market, bought the fish, he painted it, and returned the fish before it went bad". Chase said, “It takes two to paint. One to paint, the other to stand by with an axe to kill him before he spoils it.”

Giacometti’s mature style evolved through his early struggle with scale. Until 1945, none of his figure sculptures were more than 2.5” high. “Often they became so tiny that with one touch of my knife they disappeared into dust.” His still lifes were no exception — “I was in [father’s] studio drawing some pears on a table, at the normal distance for a still life. And the pears kept getting tiny. I'd begin again, and they'd always go back to exactly the same size. My father got irritated and said, 'But just do them as they are, as you see them!' And he corrected them. I tried to do them as he wanted but I couldn't stop myself. . . . Half an hour later they were exactly the same size to the millimeter as the first ones."

 

Sisters on the Bridge Blues

Left: Nuns at Work, Follower of Alessandro Magnasco, 17th c. Gallery 539 (Jack and Belle Linsky Collection).
Right: Bacchanale,  Alessandro Magnasco, detail, 1720–1730, J. Paul Getty Museum.

When I saw Magnasco’s Nuns at Work, the palette grabbed me: dark monochromes, usually earth-tones with blue accents. His unusual subjects also intrigued: synagogue services, Quaker meetings, grave robbers' gatherings, catastrophes, and interrogations by the Inquisition. One blog added, “His sentiments regarding these subjects are generally unclear”. 

I was thrown back to my “generally unclear” student days, working as a parking lot guard in a Catholic hospital . . . in Baltimore in hard times (my own and city wide). 

“Unit 5, Unit 5, Sisters on the Bridge” . . . Apparently, I was Unit 5. My walkie-talkie instructed me to drive my golf cart to the bridge on level 4 and help the nuns. What exactly their fears were went without saying. I drove 20 feet behind them very slowly as they walked to their cars and followed them safely off the grounds. We never spoke. 

The only color to be seen in all 16 floors of exhaust-covered concrete and nuns’ habits was my blue J&L Parking Co. shirt and hat. The same blues, the same browns Magnasco used.

Years later, a friend sent me a news clipping of my old lot being demolished by explosives. All 16 levels dropped in a pile of rubble. That image fit well with Magnasco’s gothic visions of embattled nuns or grave robbers barricaded in institutional ruins. Would have been perfect for him. 

 

Naturalism (Hybrid and Faux)

The Organ Rehearsal, Henry Lerolle, 1885, gallery 684. 
Inset left, detail: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat 1884-86, Art Institute of Chicago. 
Inset right: The Organ Rehearsal, Henry Lerolle, 1885, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Both The Organ Rehearsal and Sunday on La Grande Jatte were painted and exhibited between 1884-86 in the same town. They are in opposing camps - Lerolle a naturalist and Seurat an impressionist/pointillist. The woman model with the red flower in her hat may have received two fees for one sitting.

The Swedes purchased a second version of the Lerolle to honor Naturalism - not Impressionism - as the major influence on Swedish art.  

Édouard Manet evolved from the naturalists but became the adopted father of the impressionists. He described his relationship with nature, “. . . And then you must cultivate your memory, because Nature will only provide you with references. Nature is like a warden in a lunatic asylum. It stops you from becoming banal.”

Joan of Arc, and detail, Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1879, gallery 800.

For a time, the Bastien-Lepage seemed to combine attributes of naturalism and impressionism. Naturalists demanded realistic subjects from daily life. Impressionists could admire the loose brush work. Instead, a barrage of criticism followed. Émile Zola felt that Bastien-Lepage had vilified his own work by including the three floating saints and abandoned his previous support. Joris-Karl Huysmans accused the artist of "false naturalism". Gustave Courbet added, “Show me an angel, and I’ll paint one”. 

Decades later, critics remained irked. One argued that the dreamy expression of the model was rendered "only by the aid of hypnotism", which fits, as long as hypnotism is accepted as an activity of daily life.

 

Hands-On

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1653, gallery 964.

“Aristotle compares two sets of values: on the one hand, everything that he admired in Homer—gravity, humility, unequalled diction and thought—and, on the other, wealth and worldly honor, as embodied by the gold chain and medallion bearing an image of Aristotle's royal pupil, Alexander the Great.” - MetText

All three characters in the painting appear in Montaigne’s essay, “Of the Most Outstanding Men”. Homer is the best of all, Alexander the Great just under Christ, and Aristotle is there, but with very mixed reviews. Montaigne greatly preferred Socrates the “know-thyself” “master of masters . . . who surpassed even Alexander the Great”.

I remember my favorite Greek professor’s lesson on a particularly difficult use of the men/de (point/counterpoint set) construction in a Socratic speech in Plato. A long phrase is introduced with O’men (on the one hand). At the very end of this tome was only O’de (on the other hand). That meant, “go back and re-read the phrase, reversing each positive with a negative, and each negative with a positive.” Very efficient, but not an easy read. On each end of his desk, he kept a little flag, one with O’men, the other O’de.

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

POV . . . LOP

Enlarged detail and inset painting: Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d'Ognes, Marie Denise Villers, 1801, gallery 629.

In my corporate days, I lived with many a LOP, a list of open points. This fine work, always considered exceptional, has one serious LOP.

1. Artist: First attributed to Jacques-Louis David, it was then assigned to Marie Denise Villers, Constance Marie Charpentier, Marie du Val d’Ognes (self-portrait of the sitter), or even her sister.
2. Scene: Whoever made the portrait depicts a woman in one of the studios available in the Louvre to qualified artists. Professional women . . . with private lives . . . in radical outfits? Much is proposed, little is certain.
3. Details: The broken window pane can be read as a subtle reference to the chaos and violence of the French revolution. The pink of her ribbon was “the color” of 1801.
4. Technique: “Perspective is represented by sight lines that cross through matter. Is this why the pane of glass is broken in the Met portrait? Are perspective rays powerful enough to break glass?” - Anne Higonnet “Through a Louvre Window,” Journal18, 2016.

But Montaigne would say, “The soul which has no established viewpoint gets lost; for, as they say, he who is everywhere, is nowhere.”

 

Three Knaves and a Diversion

Top:The Fortune-Teller, Georges de La Tour, 1630s, gallery 634.
Bottom left: The Cardsharps, Caravaggio, 1595, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.     
Bottom right: The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs, Georges de La Tour, 1630s, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.    

Quatremère de Quincy coined the term petit genre in 1792 . . . and ranked landscape painting at the bottom, because observation from nature supposedly required little imagination. At the top were grande genre (history paintings), because history required a great deal of imagination. Petit genre (ordinary people in common activities) was in the middle, requiring only some imagination. And of course they were priced and sized for the new bourgeois collectors.

The card playing scenes are a mix of diversion and isolation. Modern criticism sees the minimal eye contact of the subjects “as aloneness”. Other readings are possible. 

The Caravaggio could be titled Maesh, Louie and Babe, after my great uncles. Once, after taking my 10-year-old cousins’ allowance money in crazy eights, Uncle Maesh (a Chicago mob lawyer in the 1920s-30s) advised, “don't bet more than you can afford to lose, and never play cards with strangers”. I asked Uncle Babe (day manager at Caesar’s Palace) why they had Evil Knievel jump the casino fountain. “There will be an extra million dollars of private bets - how many bones he will break, will his bike catch on fire . . . and half of those betting will be ‘ahead’ at our door. That money will not leave the property.” Uncle Louie (a bail bondsman and pawn shop owner) had a standard greeting: “You got two tens for a five and I’ll owe you five?”

These petit genre paintings feel like a reunion . . . familial slights of hand. I am retroactively surprised that Aunt Edna, who re-knitted my favorite sweater out of the same yarn each year as I grew, did not take up fortune telling. She would have been great. My favorite detail is the glove, “the fingertips exposed, the better to feel marked cards” (MetText) which I'm sure Edna would have re-sized as needed.

 

Madonna of the Plaga Magna

Top: Madonna and Child with Saints, Giovanni Bellini, c. 1510, not on view.
Bottom left: Madonna della Misericordia, Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, 1308-10, Pinacoteca, Siena.  
Bottom center: Madonna and Child with Saints Francis and Clare, Cima da Conegliano, 1510, not on view.  
Bottom right: Madonna della Misericordia, Piero della Francesca, 1460–1462, Pinacoteca Comunale, Sansepolcro.

Of all the Madonna taxonomies, and there a lot, I only knew a few, like Our Lady of the Flowers and the Madonna of the Rocks. There are many categories, such as religious purpose (humility, misery, childbirth) and place (garden, stairs), but my favorite remains “of the___” (quail, cherries, harpies). 

I found no compositional categories. Both the Bellini and the Cima (and many others) have these wonderful centered stripes. They are found in the purpose category of “sacred conversations” (Mary “interacting” with assorted saints). Why not call it what it is?

The big stripe behind the Madonna is a cloth of honor, derived from the Baldachin (a pattern from Bagdad), resembling the thrones which were common in sacred conversations. The cloth creates a boundary line between the sacred space and the profane landscape. Its Byzantine effect takes a path away from Florentine perspective toward a very abstract spacial plane. 

If I could add a category it would be the Madonna of the Plaga Magna - L. Big Stripe. It would include the Misericordia Madonnas, in which an oversized Mary not only defines the sacred space, but she herself is the big stripe.

Catchlights and Cropped Skulls

Top left: Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. Top right: detail, Albrecht Dürer, 1519, gallery 640.  
Center right: Merle Oberon in Hitchcock’s The Lodger, 1944.  
Bottom right: Carpenter, Vincent van Gogh, 1880, Rijksmuseum KrollerMuller, Otterio.  
Bottom center: Cropped skull drawing lessons, Betty Edwards, The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, 1999.  
Bottom left: Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, A Place in the Sun, 1951.

The catchlight used in film/photography goes way back; we see it as early as Dürer. Those tiny reflections that bring life to the eye. “Saint Anne’s eyes show Dürer’s typical placement of catchlights opposite a minute, crisp reflection along the inner rim of the iris.” - MetText. After Merle Oberon’s car accident, cinematographer Lucian Ballard hid his wife’s scars by slightly washing them out with a small lamp - dubbed an “Obie” after Oberon. The lamp, so close to the axis of the lens, created a catchlight in Oberon’s eyes. 

Betty Edwards found a systematic drawing error in her students; they consistently reduced the size of the forehead. Even when pointed out, they had difficulty “seeing” it. Van Gogh had the same issue in his early drawings. He was self-taught but observant enough to identify and correct the error. The perception that the forehead doesn't have enough information to be valuable somehow suggests the use of skull cropping in the close up. Remove the forehead if it’s a blank slate.

“. . . no one can do what he really wants in the beginning.” (January 1873). “I am trying now to exaggerate the essential, and purposely leave the obvious things vague.” (May 1888). - Vincent van Gogh.

Met Percent: Week Twenty [by Alec Bernstein]

Bellini, Raw Pork and Opium

Left: Madonna Adoring the Sleeping Child, Giovanni Bellini, 1460s, not on view.
Top: The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches, Henry Fuseli, 1796, gallery 633.
Bottom: The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781, Detroit Institute of Arts.
Right: The sleep of reason produces monsters, Francisco de Goya, 1799, not on view. 

Getting the gestalt of gallery 633, titled Goya and the Eighteenth Century in Italy, was tough. Tiepolos, Goya's portraits from his “black period” - when he almost died from illness - and Fuseli’s Night-Hag. 

The influences on Fuseli are noted: Bellini’s infant on a stone slab; classical pyramid compositions; masterful chiaroscuro. And his utterly personal vision not based on typical themes of the canon.

The Nightmare became a mark of Romanticism. “She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair.” - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818.

The narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) compares one of the paintings in the Usher House with Fuseli’s painting: “irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm.”

Freud had a copy of The Nightmare in his study, enamored of Fuseli’s aphorism, “One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams.” Ernest Jones used the image for the frontispiece in his On The Nightmare. 

Although rumors would attribute Fuseli’s visions to consuming raw pork and opium, the results were horrific, but not diseased. Somehow the Enlightenment brought fantasies floating in clouds, winged beasts, and  demonic imagination.

Five Ways To Conjugate an Oil Sketch

Allegory of the Planets and Continents, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1752, gallery 633.
Top left: Madame Théodore Gobillard, Edgar Degas, 1869, gallery 815.

Top right: Woman with a Dog, painting and riccordo (14 fantasy portraits), Jean Honoré Fragonard, 1769, gallery 630.

Bottom left: Fontainebleau: Oak Trees at Bas-Bréau, Camille Corot, 1832, gallery 803.
Bottom right: Sketch for The Haywain, John Constable, 1820, not on view. 

The general term “oil sketch” comes long after the creation of these rapid intuitive paintings. Earlier, more specific names were derived from the function of the work. The modello, for example, was made for clients and was a business task in ateliers. All of these forms were seen only as stages toward finished works and not considered worthy of public exhibition.

Modello: A finished presentation sketch specifically for “patron approval”.  (Tiepolo’s proposal included this sketch for the Residenz Palace fresco in Würzburg, Germany.)

Ébauche: Unfinished (for any reason). (Degas, after several dry media studies, left the oil sketch unfinished. It was a favorite of Mary Cassatt.)

Riccordo: A reduced version of a large work for the artist’s records. (Fragonard, after completing his 14 fantasy portraits, copied each oil sketch as a thumb-nail for himself. Although not in oil, they are “riccordos of oil sketches”.)

Esquisse: Smaller than final. (Corot enlarged the small landscape (shown above) in his large biblical canvas Hagar in the Wilderness. Interesting to see a French Oak in the Palestine desert scene.) Met gallery 803. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435962

Étude: Study (often fragmentary). (Constable, understandably proud of his “skying” period, studied the physics of the sky. “You can never be nubilous,” he told a friend, because “I am the man of clouds.”)

The French Academy battled over the oil sketch for 40 years. The Poussinistes denounced the rough gestures of the oil-sketching Rubénistes. “The loaded brush” won. I would have been a proud Rubéniste. Et vous?

 

“(The/A) (God/Devil) (is) in the Detail(s)”

Residenz at Würzburg, Germany:  Stucco work, Antonio Bossi, White Hall, 1744-45; Insert: Allegory of the Planets and  Continents detail, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, grand staircase ceiling fresco, 1752-53.

I travelled to Germany a great many times (205 trips, 543 hotel nights, 530,000 + Lufthansa miles). When business trips spanned weekends, I kept regular company with three of the Pinakothek museums (Alte, Neue, der Moderne) in Munich. In a deep Tiepolo period, I visited his ceiling frescos at the Residenz, Würzburg.

The Residenz is an astonishing assemblage of European Arts: German, French, and Austrian architects; a Bohemian garden artist; Italian sculptors; and one lone Italian painter Tiepolo — who was brought in to create the largest fresco (600 square meters) in the world.

I had come for Tiepolo’s The Continents, especially the giant crocodile in The Americas - A rococo fantasy of our supposed wilderness. 

But then I was stopped on the stairs, looking off to the left, at the walls; the hallucinatory surfaces with floating dragons. I had not known Antonio Bossi or his stucco work in the White Hall: What a room! An explosion of detail. Excess as ecstasy.

“Der liebe Gott steckt im detail”. - Early German proverb, commonly falsely attributed to Mies van der Rohe.

"Le bon Dieu est dans le detail." - Gustave Flaubert.

“If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they ‘artialize’ nature.” - Montaigne

 

Woods Half Empty?

I had a note to follow up on a description I found, when studying Brueghel’s landscape The Harvesters: “Peace and agriculture in a pre-Romantic ideal landscape, without sublime terrors.” I didn't think much on it until Cosimo. Here was terror; how is it ideal?

So I hunted . . . back to Edmund Burke on the sublime: "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger . . . Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror . . . and know there is an inherent pleasure in this emotion.” - A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757.

After these immersions, in Burke and Breugel, beauty, Cosimo, and the sublime, I had a Met dream: “By a winged something, arrived six everything I write(s)”. These writings appeared as volumes of “Iberian ancient poetry”. Likely memories of the Arms and Armor galleries: Moorish verses engraved on chivalric weapons foretelling “a barbarous pandemic”. It felt just like A Hunting Scene.

“A Culture Is No Better Than Its Woods”

 

 

Met Percent: Week Nineteen [by Alec Bernstein]

Couple Politics 

Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement, Fra Filippo Lippi, ca. 1440, gallery 644; Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and His Wife (Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze), Jacques Louis David, French, 1788, not on view; Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes, John Singer Sargent, 1897, gallery 771.

The Filippo Lippi caught my eye, even online, while simulating my Met visits. This inconvenience is certainly a petty annoyance compared to our viral trauma. Covid-19.  If history is a model, the plague that devastated medieval Europe did lay the foundations for humanism and the Renaissance. May we be half as lucky.

So . . . I go to the Met map . . . pick a gallery, find its title (e.g. 603, Filippo Lippi to Botticelli) . . . search by gallery number and title . . . hope to find the works in that room. Be wary . . . the search lists every 603, including, for example, the 19th century horse carriage drawing, Design for Coupé, no. 603 ("Medium Size Clarence on C Springs"). 

The Filippo Lippi is the earliest surviving double portrait. It demonstrates the Italian preference for the profile over the three-quarter view. Her sleeve is embroidered with letters spelling "lealta" (faithful). The scale and pose of the couple invite a lot of discussion in the blog world. . . . They are on separate planes. . . . His hand is on an ownership crest . . . his to share? his to gain? And of course the male’s shadow refers to Pliny’s origin of painting; “a lover traces the contours of the shadow cast by his beloved” (my italics). Does this mean she is the inventor of painting? Robert Burton in his 17th-century bestseller The Anatomy of Melancholy claims the action is by the woman, tracing her man’s shadow, to comfort her while he is off in the wars.

Lavoisier was a research chemist, analyzing gunpowder, oxygen, and the chemical composition of water. In 1789 he published a chemistry textbook illustrated by his wife. Because of his politics, Lavoisier’s portrait was withdrawn from the 1789 Paris Salon and not exhibited for a century. Madame Lavoisier sits unusually higher than her husband in the painting and is looking directly outwards . . . at David with whom she had studied. Lavoisier was guillotined, David died in exile, not allowed burial in France. And Marie Anne? She remarried “badly” and kept the portrait in her rooms for the rest of her life. 

Sargent decided to portray Edith Minturn Stokes in sporty daywear with a Great Dane at her side. Her husband had "a sudden inspiration," he later recalled, when the dog became unavailable, and "offered to assume the role of the Great Dane in the picture." - MetText

 

Blackboard My-Opia 

Left: Mrs. Welch’s class photo; Right: Monet’s Haystacks, Art Institute of Chicago.

Mrs. Welch, my 1st grade teacher, discovered I was myopic. The blackboard was interesting, but I was unaware of anything written on it. Or aware of maybe a pattern. A few marks. Impressionism was the first painting genre that - I remember feeling relieved when viewing the Haystacks at the Art Institute in Chicago. They made sense. 

Much later, I read Trevor-Roper’s The World through Blunted Sight. He argued that, compared to the general population, “most of the Impressionists” were myopic. And most refused to wear glasses while painting, if they wore them at all.

“Take those vulgar things away!” - Cezanne, when offered glasses.

“Bon Dieu, je vois comme Bouguereau.” - Monet, rejecting both glasses and the conservative painter.

Left: Study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat, 1884, not on view; Right: Rapids on the Petite Creuse at Fresselines, Claude Monet, 1889, gallery 800.

I still prefer Seurat’s studies to his final paintings. I draw with my specs on - more so the view from each eye is similar - but I view art without them.

 

Speaking of Bouguereau

Left: Tobias Saying Good-Bye to his Father, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1860, Hermitage. 
Right: Tobias Curing His Father's Blindness, 1630–35, gallery 637; Healing of Tobit, 1630-40, Hermitage; Tobias curing his father's blindness, 1640, San Zaccaria, Venice; Bernardo Strozzi.

The Bouguereau is a lovely Pre-Raphaelite work and clearly illustrates Monet’s fear and loathing. 

The three Strozzi canvases all have vibrant brushwork. The apocryphal Book of Tobit is the subject: archangel Raphael directs Tobias to cure his father’s blindness with the gall of a fish. Bile, irritating as it is to the eye, was evidently a traditional trachoma remedy. It must have had some success, as it remained in use for two thousand years.

Tobit, father of Tobias, earned the cure by paying the debts of the unburied dead. Only then could they be legally buried. Strozzi painted this theme at least eight times. The theme also inspired Rembrandt, Jan Massys, de Vos, van Hemessen, Carracci, Carlone, Assereto, Feti, and Guardi. There is a lot of Tobit Art.

In Funk and Wagnalls’ Folklore Dictionary, the spirits of the rescued deceased - often in animal form (the attentive dog) - are known as The Grateful Dead. This entry did not go unnoticed by Jerry Garcia, who came upon it while playing a game of Fictionary.

There is something about paintings of the blind . . . It would have been interesting to see the myopics interpret the subject. 

 

Gallery 638: “The Most Perfect Style”

Left to right: Michelangelo, Attributed to Daniele da Volterra, gallery 638; Raphael self-portrait, Uffizi, Florence; Leonardo (assumed) self portrait, Uffizi, Florence; Titian self portrait, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

Frames left to right:  Pierced-Acanthus frame, not on view; 603 gallery frame; Reverse frame, 1640, gallery 958.

The Most Perfect Style: Finding out what is in Gallery 638 online is a challenge. Who’s in there is most clear: Masters and Influencers. “The sixteenth century in Rome, Florence, and Venice mark a high point in the history of art. Artists as different as Caravaggio and Ingres, Rubens and Reynolds, defined their achievement vis-à-vis the legacy of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian.” - MetText

Goethe recounts how, when in Rome in 1787, he and a companion “argued about the rival merits of Michelangelo and Raphael . . . and we ended up in joint praise of Leonardo da Vinci.”

Left to right: The Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist, Andrea del Sarto, 1528; Venus and the Lute Player, Titian, 1565–70; Mars and Venus United by Love, 1570s, Paulo Veronese. Gallery 638.

There are as many “top Renaissance master” rankings as there are rankers. The Met rank, noted above, is made “vis-à-vis” its superlative modifier of an absolute adjective:  “most perfect”.

Del Sarto has been in and out of the canon for five hundred years. Sometimes “out” because of character (an opinion of character, usually Vasari’s), or because of innovations (by, for example, Tintoretto) - adamantly painting religious subjects in contemporary dress. Then again one could be “in” by impact: “Veronese was the happiest of painters and produced the happiest pictures in the world." - Henry James

My father always cautioned me, “De gustibus!” - so often, that the “non es disputandem” was not needed. No need to be distracted by the taste of others . . . perfect, more perfect, or most perfect.

Met Percent: Week Eighteen [by Alec Bernstein]

Met Absent(e) %

^{Met floor plan: Yellow highlighted galleries have been viewed, 3/14/2020. Inset: Dans un café, L'absinthe, Edgar Degas, Musée d'Orsay, 1875; Van Gogh Absente Poster; Photo of Toulous-Lautrec drinking Absenthe, 1910.}

I have visited ~55 times and viewed all galleries up to 599, 55% complete. As Absenthe is 55% alcohol and often depicted in paintings, it seems to be an auspicious metric for entering “European Paintings”.

But now I have an absent Met. Closed due to Corona Virus. Memories of viewings, Met online musings, and modified methods will follow. After all, Montaigne “sheltered in place” with 1,500 books in self-imposed reclusion for almost 10 years. 

“In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.” -  Montaigne, inscription on his bookshelves, 1571.

The Shape of Labor

The Harvesters, detail, and analysis, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565, gallery 642.

Shape: “If Bruegel’s peasants give the landscape its function, their tool gives it its form. Here, an entire world is constructed around the shape of its most essential unit; the shape of the scythe borne by the figure in the lower left corner.” Labor: “Each scythe-arc reveals the stages of the economic system: harvested wheat to the road; a cart to the village; a distant town to the ships; to the centers of manufacture and trade. The painting connects the dots of a newly expanding economy, depicting the peasants as the heart of a system that profits only those at the far end.” Extracts from On Bruegel's The Harvesters, Henry McMahon, The Painter’s Table (blog), 2016.

In college I had a neighbor, previously a second-tier official British Royal portrait painter, who’d fallen on hard times. His family trust kept him out of England, quietly in Baltimore when not institutionalized. He gave me a signed copy of a Salvador Dali book in exchange for my K&L Feeds hat with “I eat eggs” on one side and “I drink milk” on the other.  His exit came with an alcohol binge: hands painted red, displaying the shapes of labor in the local bar; hammer in one hand, sickle in the other.

 

Halves: Hip Gables and Basement Windows

Left: Two Cottages, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1636, not on view. 
Right: The Anderson’s Half-Hip Home, Alec Bernstein, 2020.

Drawn to Rembrandt.  The cottages, farms, and feelings of Rembrandt’s half-hip gabled roofs bring thoughts of the Dutch-style Chicago bungalows I grew up with. Good for snow. 

The sketch is the view out my bedroom window. These homes had basement half-windows at ground level outside and at the ceiling inside. For 25 cents a week, I fed our neighbor’s dog Bunnie by crawling through their basement window. I was not old enough to trust with a key. These halves seemed perfectly scaled to childhood. 

It feels as long ago as Rembrandt.

woulda, coulda, shoulda

Top: Hypothetical reconstruction of the portraits of Tommaso and Maria Portinari (The Met, 14.40.626–27) with Hans Memling, "Virgin and Child," ca. 1470.
Bottom Left and right: copper maps, fig. 11 & 15 Met online. 
Bottom center: Tommaso and Maria, 1470, Hans Memling, gallery 642.

The Met hypothesis of the triptych is a “how it would've been”. A marriage portrait pair with a devotional centerpiece. Quite a difference from the portraits as they are exhibited. Nota Bene - the improvement in the perspective when angled on its assumed hinges. 

The copper map of Tommaso could “show the use of a copper blue to add highlights to the folds of the very deep black jerkin, seemingly to suggest the way a velvet garment slightly glows at the edges when struck by light (left). The decoration in Maria contains copper in addition to lead, suggesting that lead white and a copper blue were used to create pearls further shaded with a carbon-containing black paint.” Met Online.

Memling, in my opinion, should have a more prominent place in the canon. He was an A-list painter in his time, and should be now. Even the copper maps are painterly.

 

Met Percent: Week Seventeen [by Alec Bernstein]

Ornament , Automata & Crime

Left: Two Spherical Clocks, George Seydell, Germany, 17th c. 
Right: Caricature of Engravers "in the Greek Style", Jean Charles Delafosse, French.
Bottom: Ostrich Egg Ewer, Hans Claus I, German, 1630. Sawtooth gravity clock, Isaak Ourry, 1710. Multi-faced Equatorial Sundial, Wolfgang Mayr, 1604. Cryptological Code Dividers, Joachim Deuerlin, 1633.  All in exhibition gallery 999.

The “Making Marvels” exhibition is a technical side-car of the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts galleries. The elite add machines to their sculptures, as if movement automatically makes decor virtuosic. It is a clear case of just how complicated one can make something when unlimited resources and desire meet. Ornamentation, according to Adolf Loos, “is a luxury that is slowing down the human evolution because men are wrongly focused on things they do not need”. - Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime, 1908-13. “Less is more” - Mies van der Rohe, 1947. In the language of my comic book childhood, of which this exhibit reminds me,  ‘Nuff said.’ 

Then again, ornament has been a key element for unconscious release, linked to fantasy and desire*, embodying the never before seen, heard, thought. It has lived on artifacts since there have been artifacts.“Less is a bore” - Robert Venturi, 1966.

* Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire in Nineteenth Century French Literature, Rae Beth Gordon, Princeton University Press, 1992.

 

Angel Action

Miraculous Writing Machine, Friedrich von Knaus, 1760, Austrian, gallery 999.

The video is worth the watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLUoDSNDj4U. Or scroll down to the miraculous writing machine at the Met videos of all automata at https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2019/making-marvels-science-splendor/art-in-motion.

 

Subtleties: Molded, Pulled, Blown, Pressed, Sold

Left: Harlequin, Fürstenberg Porcelain Manufactory, 1764, after model of 1754, gallery 538.

Right: Designs for a pastillage pièce montée in the form of a putto in a chariot being drawn by a hunting poodle and (above) hunting poodle “at rest”, watercolor, 1820, The Bowes Museum.
Bottom: A view of the Empire dessert setting. https://www.historicfood.com/Royal-sugar-Sculpture.htm.

Initially, European porcelain figures were permanent versions of the very popular sugar sculptures. Sugar  table decorations for special occasions were called subtleties* and used by European elites from the Renaissance to the 18th Century. At the meal’s end, they were eaten or taken as souvenirs. The Bowes Museum sugar sculpture archive has 47 moulds for a total of 730 different objects, with 62 tools and 26 drawings.

In the developing bourgeois society, porcelain figurines found a permanent place on mantelpieces and side tables: an entirely new market success. 

* see Kara Walker’s sculpture Sugar Sphinx A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, 2014; and Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney N. Mintz, Penguin, 1985.

Kick Up Your Heels and...Relax

Boiserie from the Palais Paar, 30 Wollzeile, Vienna, Austria, architect Isidor Canevale (1730–1786),1765–72, gallery 526. Inset: Palais Paar, exterior, 1907.

The Baron’s Suite, [email protected].

In case you need an extended, more personal experience of this style, you may rent The Baron’s Suite at the Chateau Grand-Luce in the Loire Valley. Only $15,000  per night, complete with “private library stocked with French literature.”

 

Or Just Kick Up Your Heels . . .

Dance Movement "G", 1910–11 and Nijinsky, 1912, Auguste Rodin, gallery 556.

Stravinsky said in his autobiography that the riots at “The Rite of Spring” premier were not because the music was “radical”; it was because the dancers could not keep up with Nijinsky and stumbled on the stage. 

Rodin’s two captures of the dance in this gallery felt like seamless extensions of the earlier expressive terracottas (see gallery 552 in Met% week sixteen), particularly the bas-reliefs. “Nijinsky conceived a strict two-dimensional limitation; his dancers moved as in a slot, with abrupt profile turns. Poses recalled Greek Vases and stone reliefs. . . . Sculptures of draped maidens from Egypt or Phoenicia”. - review of Afternoon of a Faun, 1912.

Rodin said he had “captured movement” in this work. Once in a meeting on neuro-marketing at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior in Los Angeles, I was told they had discovered a small single area of the brain that is only activated when a still object - that appears to be moving - is seen. A message center for false danger . . .  

Met Percent: Week Sixteen [by Alec Bernstein]

And Away We Go

Model for a Proposed Monument to Commemorate the Invention of the Balloon, ca. 1784, Clodion (Claude Michel) French, gallery 552.

I had walked by this exuberant monument proposal without at first seeing its story. 

Consider this marvel: “This airy Rococo flight of fancy - in which putti pile bundles of hay to launch the balloon, guided by Fame and propelled by Aeolus - is difficult to imagine in marble. Gradually, hot-air ballooning spread to the point of being commonplace, and the project was dropped.” - MetText

This celebration of balloon flight seems a perfect opening to the ESDA department (European Sculpture and Decorative Arts): Hotel rooms, boudoirs, often gilded, and sculpture raw and cooked in bone, wood, silks, marble, crystal. . . and some with all of the above.

I knew there would be surprises.

 

Raw Ideas

Above: Children and Satyr Children with a Pantheress and Her Cubs, detail and (inset) complete, ca. 1781, Clodion (Claude Michel) gallery 552. Below: Pieta, 1864, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, France, gallery 552.

The terra cottas in gallery 552 feel like the first captures of ideas.

“Modelling in clay is to the sculptor what drawing on paper is to the painter… In the soft clay the genius of the artist is seen in its utmost purity and truth…”

 - Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of Art, 1776.

“Mounding the clay pellets and pressing them into shape in mere seconds, Carpeaux’s entire attention is on the Virgin Mary's maternal embrace, to the virtual exclusion of Christ's legs.” - MetText

It is my favorite 3D medium.

To be well read on the contradictions (classic theme vs. modern  expression) of art in the age of reason is one thing. To walk into a gallery and feel it is yet another. Is excluding Christ’s legs rational or raw?

 

 

Hyphen-Love

Le Trait d’Union, June 1872, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, France, gallery 552.

“The term trait d’union is French for hyphen, the sign linking the parts of a compound word. Here it poetically signifies the familial ties that were renewed when Carpeaux and his wife reconciled after their little son Charles recovered from terrifying convulsions. Amélie is on Carpeaux’s lap. Charles binds their heads in an embrace. The reconciliation was brief and Carpeaux himself was soon jealous all over again and already desperately sick.” - MetText

Poetic hyphen? Desperately sick? Again? On this text description, I would have preferred either much more or much less. Their arms, in this context, look like parentheses, which I love.

 

“Real” Portraits

Left: Hypocrite and a Slanderer, ca. 1770–83, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Germany, gallery 548.

Right: Child Portrait, Jean Antoine Houdon (French, Versailles 1741–1828 Paris) gallery 552.

After early commissions and rising stature, Messerschmidt’s late portrait sculptures were at first considered outsider art - exhibited as a freak-show attraction at a carnival - but much later seen as important precursors to both Modernism and Expressionism.

Houdon’s intense naturalism has an equally accurate sense of realism. His children’s portraits express Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “Childhood as a golden age of unconscious happiness”.

“What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? You would say, ‘He is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death.’ Remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason.” - Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education, 1762.

I feel like I am in a thought gallery. . . .

Met Percent: Week Fifteen [by Alec Bernstein]

Tear Catchers (?)
Swan-Neck Glass Bottle, Iran, 19th c., gallery 462;   Christie’s South catalog.

“It is unclear how bottles of this shape were used, though sometimes they are known as ashkdans and were supposedly for collecting the tears of wives whose husbands were away at war”. - MetText

It seems that the use of a tear catcher or lachrymatory bottle is probably not ancient nor even Victorian. More likely they are a romantic myth based on the “eye shaped” openings: The bottles hold funeral tears, and when they evaporate, the mourning period ends. No science here, but so beloved by enthusiasts of the Victorian art of mourning that they are sold and collected even now. Christie's sold two 18th c. bottles in 2014, very like the 19th c. bottle at the Met. 

For tear enthusiasts, see https://tearcatcher.com/tear-bottles/tear-bottle-history/.  “With each tear bottle, you will receive an elegant organza gift bag and a small story card that explains the intriguing history and meaning behind the tear bottle”. 

 

Pilgrim Flasks

Pilgrim Flasks; Left: India or Deccan, early 17th c., gallery 463, Right: Turkey, early 17th c, gallery 469.

Unlike the tear bottles, these pilgrim flasks have a clear function, and appear in many regions and eras. These Islamic vessels were designed to collect and bring home holy water, sanctuary lamp oil or sand from a sacred site. Sometimes called a Zamzameyyah, because pilgrims took holy water from the famous well in Mecca called Zamzam. The word derives from Zomë Zomë, meaning "stop flowing" - a command repeated by Abraham’s wife Hajar attempting to contain spring water in the desert. 

Pilgrim flasks (not on view): Left, Pasargadae, Iran, ca. 4th–3rd century B.C., Middle, Ctesiphon, Iraq, 8th c., Right, Iran, ca. 3rd c. B.C.–A.D.

These early ceramic versions are found in Islamic, Jewish and Christian cultures and are documented in the Crusades. The twin strap-eyed design has a marvelous continuity over millennia. 

 

Parrots

Top: Finial in the Form of a Parrot, Northern India, 17th–18th century, gallery 464
Bottom and detail: Dagger with Zoomorphic Hilt (India, Deccan, Bijapur or Golconda), 16th c., gallery 463.

In Tutinama (A Parrot’s Tale) the parrot tells 52 stories to his owner Khojasta, to prevent her from having an affair while her husband is away. A mynah and a parrot are her guards. The wife strangles the mynah for advising her not to indulge. The parrot, realizing the gravity of the situation, narrates distracting stories over the next fifty-two nights: a more indirect approach.

I lived under flocks of these fine birds in Pasadena, CA and often woke to their extreme calls. I understand their assigned role as storytellers.

 

Textiles Underfoot

The Emperor's Carpet and detail, Iran, 16th c., gallery 462.

Ushak Medallion Carpet on White Ground and detail, Turkey, 17th c., not on view.

Part of Shah ‘Abbas’ (r. 1587–1629) program for restructuring the economy and attracting European merchants was the expansion of both the production and international trading of carpets. They were traded to Europe and the Far East where, too precious to be placed on the ground, they were used to cover furniture or hung on walls. 

The legend of Sir Walter Raleigh putting his cloak on the ground - to help Queen Elizabeth I over a mud puddle - is part of the mystique of textiles underfoot.

 

Vermeer, Ram’s Horns and Hands on Hips

Full page and detail: A Maid Asleep, Johannes Vermeer, 1656-57, gallery 964.

Many carpets from the Middle East are today called by the names of European painters who depicted them: Lotto, Holbein, Ghirlandaio, Crivelli, and Memling. 

Vermeer’s famous A Maid Asleep depicts two different seventeenth-century Anatolian carpets. Within the patterns, one can find classic Kilim symbols: The Ram's Horn - Kocboynuzu - the symbol of fertility, heroism, power and masculinity and Hands on Hips - Elibelinde - the symbol of motherhood and fertility.

 

 

Met Percent: Week Fourteen [by Alec Bernstein]

Beauty-Writing (Callos-Graphia)

“Handwriting is jewelry fashioned by the hand from the pure gold of the intellect.” - treatise on the penmanship of Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, 9th century.

The diacritical marks indicate vowels (the alphabet has consonants only). The text is always cursive and has no upper or lower case (although shape variants are used in the beginning, middle or end of a word). Proportions are determined by a pen-stroke dot “grid” system within a circle.

How the Arabic letter “teh” is written: in its positions, and with its “isolated” proportion guides.

 

Chat with a Lampstand

Lampstand, Iran, 1578-79, gallery 462

Inscriptions are often verses of conversations. This lampstand “speaks” to its owner/viewer in a dialog of flame.

“I remember one night as my eyes wouldn’t sleep

I heard a moth speaking with a candle

Said the moth: Because I am a lover it is right that I should burn

[But] why should you weep and burn yourself up?”

Planning, Truth and Happiness

"Planning before work protects you from regret; prosperity and peace.”

“It seems worthless to me, even after all the terrible things we have had to go through, if we writers do not tell each other the truth.”

"To its owner happiness, security and life as long as a dove coos.”

The bowl with Arabic inscription (top left) has an abstract, almost contemporary, minimalist design, inscribed with a proverb on planning. It is stunning. Iran, 10th c., gallery 450.

The plate (top right) 2007, is from the Oskarmaria Brasserie inside Literaturhaus Munich, the cultural institute promoting education and literary events. After the salmon was enjoyed, a writer at our table discovered the phrase on writers and truth on the plate. At the end of the meal, a German colleague went to the kitchen and returned with the plate in a brown paper bag. She forced it from the hands of the staff. The Brasserie’s namesake, Oskar Maria Graf, was a German writer who, when the Nazis did not have his books on the Munich book-burning list, published an article entitled “Burn Me”. He got on the list.

The pen box (Qalamdan) (bottom) sends praise to the “owner”,  fashioned from brass and inlaid with silver and gold. Iran, 16th century, gallery 462. May there always be cooing . . .

 

Amulets and Talismans

This shirt was believed to be imbued with protective powers and may have been meant to be worn under armor in battle. Its surface is decorated with painted squares and medallions and the entire Qur'an written out and bordered by the ninety-nine names of God written in gold against an orange background. Talismanic Shirt and detail, Northern India or Deccan ,15th–early 16th c., not on view.

The power of the names of religious figures (Mohammed’s relatives), the Qur'anic verses, and the Shi'i prayers endow this standard with its amuletic properties. E.g. the “Protective Throne Verse”: “His Throne doth extend/ Over the heavens/ And the earth, and He feeleth/ No fatigue in guarding/ And preserving them . . .”.  Silver Standard, Iran, 18th century, not on view. 

When I was 10, my Great Uncle Harry - in the back of his wholesale underwear store in Galesburg, IL. - gave me amuletic advise on the battle of life: “To attain your natural leadership, bring your ‘lucky marbles’, and play to win.”

 

Invisible Rules

Left: Ornamental ceramic star, Iran, gallery 453. Center: a set of 15 furmah and 3 zillij. Right: M.C. Escher’s study of a Moorish tile pattern, 1936.

One of the technical design languages in Moorish art is the Zillij (or Zellige) set based system. It combines geometric tiles (furmah) with complex rules (no holes, no parts of a furmah permitted, etc.). There are at least 360 known furmah and an uncountable number of Zillij constellations. These Moorish geometries inspired Escher’s interest in tessellations. For me, they recall the set technique of 20th century serial music. Lots of rules all around.

Left: Met Moroccan Court, gallery 456,  inspired by two fourteenth-century madrasas of Fez. Right: Pattern generated by ruler and compass only. 

These patterns, as noted above, are generated by ruler and compass only. The four basic shapes, or “repeat units,” are: circles and interlaced circles; squares or four-sided polygons; the ubiquitous star pattern, derived from squares and triangles inscribed in a circle; and multisided polygons. I have had a recurring dream since high school geometry, in which I alone discover the way to trisect any arbitrary angle with only a ruler and compass. This was proven impossible in 1837. It is still impossible today.

I was against high ornament in my youth (“youth” defined as adolescence). The Baroque, Mannerist and Islamic patterns were ”over the top”. I was at home with Classic, Renaissance, and Modern. Over the years, I understood this as a need for balance and structure. I liked simpler rules. As the complexities of life became comprehensible - I could admit it - the complex, expansive, and decorative became newly appreciated. Tiepolo and Bernini were joys to grow into, and the door to over-stimulating art has stayed open. 

“I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me.” - Montaigne

 

 

Met Percent: Week Thirteen [by Alec Bernstein]

Ancient Anatomies

“Abstract” rendering of an Assyrian leg, gallery 401.                     “Conceptual” 3D digital lower leg.

The Assyrians are often critiqued for their artistic expressions of violence. I see only strength and beauty in the style. I love the anatomical languages of the Near East, regardless of interpretation. 

“The anatomical landmarks and contours of the leg muscles are prominently depicted in an exaggerated manner (just like a bodybuilder’s), to convey the powerful nature of the creature. The skin folds on the right patella and the hypertrophied calf are well expressed (had the sculptor studied anatomy?). There is (or what appears to be) a prominent superficial vein “beneath” the skin of the lower right leg.” - Osama S. M. Amin, http://etc.ancient.eu/?s=Anatomy&submit=Search

“Fools that you are; you do not recognize that the limbs of your ancestors are still present therein.” - Montaigne

Detail: Statue of Montaigne by Paul Landowski, Square Paul Painlevé, Paris, France.

“ON THE POLYSEMY OF THE FIST”

Left: Copper Object in the form of clenched fist, ca. Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (Turkmenistan), late 3rd–early 2nd millennium B.C., gallery 403.
Center: Abecedario - https://phmuseum.com/francesca_seravalle/story/the-fist-photos-on-the-polysemy-of-the-fist-d883b7a49
Right: “The tiny hands measure 1-1/4" long (right fisted hand) and 1-1/2" long (left hand open palm) with a forearm circumference of 1-7/8" and diameter opening of 1/2". If you have a project requiring (lots of) little hands, this is a wonderful find!” - Etsy

There is no understanding of this ancient clenched fist - not its use or any related information. My speculative fist research led me to contradictory semantics, including black power and white supremacy, to the Masonic fist of capitalism to the communist fist of the Spanish Revolution. 

Babies clench their fists for the first few months of life. A surprisingly similar number of explanations are available, from the palmar grasp reflex to the immaturity of the nervous system to “evolution” (primates hanging from their mothers in the trees).

I had a collection of plastic baby hands. In those days the avant-garde considered any found object art. More contradictory semantics. 

 

Cylinder Seals: Identity Theft & Immortality

Top: Cylinder seal and impression: winged horse with claws and horns, Middle Assyrian, ca. 14th–13th B.C., gallery 403.

Left: Cancelled check stub J. Paul Getty. 

Center: J. Paul Getty’s French Driving Permit, 1930. J. Paul Getty Family Collected Papers, The Getty Research Institute.

Right: A cancelled check for three million dollars from J.P. Morgan to the Northern Pacific Syndicate, 1896

“Some seals depicted one's occupation but others . . . revealed one's personal identity, even one's name. The seal was used to certify important transactions. It is no wonder that people worried over the loss of their seal: it would have been as serious to an ancient Mesopotamian as the loss of one's personal identification is today and the threat of "identity theft" just as great then as it is now.” - Ancient History Encyclopedia, https://www.ancient.eu/article/846/cylinder-seals-in-ancient-mesopotamia---their-hist/

There are complete cuneiform protocols for the process of reporting and replacing a lost seal. The bureaucracy is phenomenally similar to replacing a driver’s license at the DMV.

These seals are the first tools and documents of commerce and individual traders. Both JPs, Getty and Morgan, personally collected ancient cylinders. Morgan’s collection has 1,157 Near Eastern seals (within a total cuneiform tablet collection of 3,000 pieces). 

Both collectors have been described as “art addicts”. Getty’s philosophy of collecting, for example, “inextricably linked art to business and business to immortality.” These seals must have resonated well with our famous traders. . . “PAID IN FULL”

 

 

Hair-Loom

“Rayyane Tabet's great-grandfather left behind a goat-hair rug given to him by the Bedouin of Tell Halaf in 1929. It was his wish that the sixty-five-foot-long rug be divided equally among his five children, with the request that they in turn divide it among their children, and so on, until the rug eventually disappeared. As of today, the rug has been divided into twenty-three pieces across five generations.” MetText, gallery 400.

 

 

Storage Jars and Fainting Goats

Storage jar with mountain goats, ca. 4,000-3,600 B.C., gallery 403.

The myotonic goat, otherwise known as the fainting goat, falling goat, stiff-legged goat, and nervous goat is a goat that temporarily seizes when it feels panic. The fainting episodes are known as "bizarre attacks of stiffness and rigidity" upon locomotion. See https://faintinggoat.com. Despite fainting, they have been bred continually, going back to the earliest goat herding days, for their generally superior qualities: they are alert, good-natured, and heavily muscled.

Twenty years ago, I had a fainting episode. No seizing, no panic. This happened to be during a dispute over brush clearance methods in our California neighborhood. “Can grazing goats prevent wildfires?” “Or are they inefficient?” I was given the “tilt-test”, strapped vertically on a board to induce fainting. Very inefficient diagnostic. Some art is admired as memory. 

Met Percent: Week Twelve [by Alec Bernstein]

“mow tall, mow often.” 

Met floor plan: Yellow highlighted galleries have been viewed, 11/22/19

I have visited 43 times and viewed all galleries up to 399 (~300 out of ~900) - one-third complete.

“The one-third rule means that when you mow, you want to cut off the top one-third of your grass blades . . . Mowing more than a third of the total height of your grass can stress the plant and make it more susceptible to common turf problems.” - https://lawnpride.com/one-third-rule/

The remaining two-thirds will find their own rules.

 

The Letter (an indivisible sound)

Top: Babylonian translation of “Met Percent” into the Cuneiform Alphabet
Bottom: Cuneiform tablet: Sumerian dedicatory inscription from Ekur, the temple of the god Enlil, Mesopotamia, ca.16th–15th c. B.C, not on view.

These writings are some of the earliest found. The “origin of writing” documents both the origins of the world and the first symbolic capture of emotions and thoughts “on paper”. Cuneiform is by far my favorite alphabet. 

The seven Sumerian debate poems (below) are world origin myths. When something was recognized as important, its origin became important, and it was given a myth. “The earth first appeared barren, without grain, sheep, or goats. People went naked” (Debate between Grain and Sheep).

Debate between bird and fish

Debate between sheep and grain 

Debate between the millstone and the gulgul-stone

Debate between the pickaxe and the plough

Debate between silver and mighty copper

Debate between Summer and Winter

Debate between tree and the reed

These myths are not universal and have significant variations throughout the regions and eras. No continuity, no Biblical standard, no problem.

“It becomes evident that he (Ring Lardner) was deeply concerned that the vast majority of mankind had no idea, earthly or otherwise, where it was going or for what reason”.  - Buford Donald Fisher, Ring Lardner as Dadaist, 1970.

“How can you write if you can't cry?”
- Ring Lardner

 

“An Archeologist of Morning”

Cuneiform tablet: a-she-er gi-ta, balag to Innin/Ishtar, ca. 2nd–1st c. B.C., Seleucid or Parthian, not on view.

“This tablet contains a lament by Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of fertility, over the destruction of her cities and shrines, and contrasts her present humiliation with her previous power.” - MetText

Left: A page from Melville’s “Marginalia”. His constant annotations were studied in depth by Charles Olson. Right: summary counts of the words marked by Melville in his Set of Shakespeare. Decoder rings come in many forms. 

Charles Olson described himself not so much as a poet or writer but as "an archeologist of morning."

Assyrian Beards

Relief Panel from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (r. ca. 883-859 B.C), gallery 401.
Cover photograph of Melville on Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson, City Lights, 1966.

Detail, “The Artist's Studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life.” - Gustave Courbet, Musée d'Orsay, 1854-55. “Myself painting, showing the Assyrian profile of my head.” - Courbet.

Speaking of Olson: “Not since Gustave Courbet grew an Assyrian beard has any Western artist attempted such a sweeping rejection of the roots of Western civilization and identified with the Ancient Near East ‘beyond Homer’ and ‘beyond’ the Bible. For him the Sumerians were crucial to the attempt.” - John R. Maier, Charles Olson and the Poetic Uses of Mesopotamian Scholarship, Journal of the American Oriental Society.

“You're too much influenced by Greek and Latin already. Go beyond that, to the Sumerians, and before. Break the hold time has on you; get outside it . . since Western civilization has gone awry, we had better work with what we have from before the degradation.” - Olson quoted by Ralph Maud in his Charles Olson’s archaic postmodern. 

Trotsky, Custer, Zappa and Baraka

Rebellious generations often look forward but go back in time for hair styles. I know great beards when I see them.

 

Rock and Clay (Emergent Figures)

Relief Panel from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (r. ca. 883-859 B.C), gallery 401.

If I free associate, as Montaigne did, I must include my forbearers of influence. I cannot see these ancient bas reliefs without a ghost of the magnificent emergent prisoners by Michelangelo . . . or the Rock Men and the Clay People from Flash Gordon who appeared and disappeared into earth. I connect them, by their nature, their symbiotic relationships with the mineral world. 

 

 

Met Percent: Week Eleven [by Alec Bernstein]

Best Gauntlets, Hands Down

Maximilian I’s Gauntlets, from The Last Knight Exhibit, gallery 899.
Gladys Cooper as the formidable mother in Now Voyager, from the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty (Sylvia Plath’s patron).

From the very start of this project (see Week One), my MetPercent plan was: Move to NY, go through the entire Met, room by room in numerical order.When I described this, every colleague and friend asked, “Even the Armor?”

“Yes, even the Armor.” 

It is upon me. Blades, bludgeons, and blunderbusses abound in the Arms and Armor Collection. 

Weapons again.

 

Arms and the Man¹ (I Sing)²

Warhorses

Assorted Shaffrons (Horse's Head Defense), 15th-16th c., galleries 371, 373, and 379

In Old Arabic, the word for “Chivalry” (Furúsiyyah as horsemanship) (فروسه) was also the word for “Virtue” and “Honour” (Múruwwa as chivalric values) (مروه). Romantic chivalry in medieval Europe is widely considered the continuation of al-furusiyyah al-arabiya. Horsemanship and Poetry were two of the foundational requirements.

Muru’ah and the Code of Chivalry

— Muhammad ibn Idris ash-Shafi’i, the founder of the Shafi’ite rite in Islam.767–820 CE.

If you want to live free from harm’s way
And in good fortune and honor,
Your tongue, if it utters something indecent, stop it and say,
“Oh tongue other people have tongues.”
If your eyes see something immoral, close them and say,
“Oh eyes other people have eyes.”
Practice beneficence and be magnanimous to ones who attack
And depart with that which is better.

Montaigne was a dedicated horseman and wrote an entire essay “Of Warhorses, or Destriers”, covering the War- horsemanship of the ancients. His wish was to die either in his garden working the cabbages or on horseback.

 

Chivalry-Now (and then)

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Honoré Daumier, French, 19th century (not on view).

Warrior, religious, and courtly love chivalries. Created and debunked, and yet these chivalries are desired, and return and return, the code usurped and adorned.

From Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, abortion bombers (“Protectors of the Code”), the KKK, General MacArthur. . . to the International Fellowship of Chivalry-Now (http://www.chivalrynow.net/sitemap.htm).

 

Hats Off

A 1947 survey for the Hat Research Foundation (yes, a real entity) found that 19 percent of men who did not wear hats gave “because I had to in the army” as the main reason. The general belief is that when a formerly functional item of clothing becomes purely decorative, it usually doesn’t last more than a generation or two. 

Not Quite the Knight

Montaigne’s Cenotaph, Prieur and Guillerman, 1593, Museum of Aquitaine, Burgundy. 

Montaigne was late to Knighthood. “He probably never wore armor during his life, at least not on a battlefield. It must be seen as a final homage to his father, the only member of the Eyquem family who actually waged war. The transformation of Montaigne into a noble gentleman was completed only after his death.” (See Montaigne: A Life by Philippe Desan, 2019).

In his cenotaph, his representation is unusual in that his helmet and gauntlets are not worn but placed “nearby”. 

Weapons, Status, Luxury, and Guilt

Smith and Wesson New Model No. 3, .44 Caliber Double-Action Navy Revolver, ca. 1891–92, side and butt views, gallery 372. Winchester Model 1894, Takedown Lever Action Rifle, 1895-1900, gallery 372. Winchester House, Palo Alto, CA.

Tiffany & Co. adorned a series of revolvers for Smith and Wesson with gems, in this case turquoise and lapis lazuli. They are spectacular. The Met has several: https://www.metmuseum.org/search-results#!/search?q=Smith%20wesson&orderByCountDesc=true&page=1

As for Tiffany’s Winchester rifle: It was technically able to fire bullets . . . but the thick silver cladding made it impossible to disassemble and clean, and the ebony wood made it too heavy to use effectively. 

After her husband's death in 1881, Sarah Winchester inherited more than $20.5 million (equivalent to $532 million in 2018) and nearly fifty percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, equivalent to $26,000 a day in 2018. 

A Boston medium told her (while supposedly channeling her late husband) that she should leave her home in New Haven and travel West, where she must continuously build a home for herself and the spirits of people who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles . . .10,000 windows, 2,000 doors (including the one to nowhere). Wow.

https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/sarahs-story/   

 

 

 

 

 

 

Met Percent: Week Ten [by Alec Bernstein]

Sonrientes

Smiling Figure (Sonrientes), 7th-8th c. Remojadas, gallery 358. 

Not much is known about this happy figure. There are mixed cues: male and female, old and young, spirit and human, dwarf and child. It’s too small to stand alone and too large to admire in the hand. Emotional facial expressions, as in this figure, are very uncommon in Mesoamerica. I was captured by it from across the gallery and spent a good amount of time with that smile . . . 

Variations On An Ancestral Theme

Left: Purrukuparli, Enraeld Munkara, Tiwi people, 1955, gallery 354. The sobbing Purrukuparli is an ancestor from the Dreaming (primordial creation period). He chooses not to bring his dead son back, but instead announces the concept of mortality and creates the Tiwi burial rituals. “Humans too will someday die”. The very beginning of ancestors. 

Center: Ancestor Figure (Tsmas), 19th–early 20th c., Paiwan people, gallery 354. Of the Paiwan high nobles, minor nobles and commoners, only the high nobles were allowed to commission human ancestral images. These ancestors have powers, but their influence (help or harm) is controlled by the nobility. Class spirits. Very clear. 

Right: Male Diviner's Figure, 19th–mid-20th century, Baule people, gallery 352. High artistic achievement, the “more expensive the better”, presents not only the wealth and status of the diviner (and owner) of the image, but also “Dazzles the potential clients” of the artist, building his reputation and social position. The professional artist.

 

“   ”  Art

Upper left: Seated Figure, Djenne people, 13th c., gallery 350, Upper right: Constantin Brancusi, Mlle Pogany version I, 1913, MoMA, NYC, Bottom: Recumbent Figure, Henry Moore, 1938, Tate Galley, London.

“The term primitive is to be avoided or used in quotation marks”. - Tate, London. 

Originally, Nelson Rockefeller’s collection was called the Museum of Indigenous Art and later the Museum of Primitive Art. His museum and private collections became the Art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the Met in 1984. The Met had previously turned down the collection - considered by critics an American "Salon des Refusés".

 

Lime Paraphernalia

Lime Spoon with Seated Figure, Inca, 13th–16th c., not on view.  Lime Container, Usiai Island, late 19th–early 20th c., Lime spatula (Tap), Latmul people, late 19th–early 20th c., Gallery 354.

This container (center) was designed to hold powdered lime made from calcined seashells. The lime was removed through a hole in the top by a spoon (left) or a little spatula (right). Lime was a necessary part of the ritual of coca-leaf chewing; the coca leaves were put into the mouth to form a quid, and the lime was added to activate the drug. 

got montaigne? - 8oz Hip Drinking Alcohol Flask, Black (right) by Knick Knack Gifts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foot Jars ‘n Cowboy Boots

Pair of Ceramic Foot Jars, Peru, Inca Valley Paracas, 2nd-1st c. B.C. Gallery 354

      “Some boys went to look for his feet. His toes are made of crystal, so he can hide them, and the boys could not find them. Then the boys threw stones at the rainbow.

      When he enters the body of a man or a woman they become very sick and to cure them they are given a ball of seven-colored wool to unwind.”

From “The Rainbow”, Anonymous, Quechan, Peru, translated by W.S. Merwin.

Plastic cowboy boot cups, 1950s, U.S.A

As I pondered my interest in these charming foot jars, I recalled the three cowboy cups from childhood. My two siblings and I each had our own color cup. Mine was red. I loved that cup.

Met Percent: Week Nine [by Alec Bernstein]

In Situ (Ex Situ)

(Left)  Asmat Tribe, New Guinea. 
(Right) Bis (funerary) Poles, Asmat peoples, 1960, gallery 354 (Nelson Rockefeller Collection).

The question that surfaced, after 3 trips to the Africa, Oceania, and the Americas galleries was one of context. Who were these made for? 

“Two polar types [of art] stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view.” - Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.”

(Left) Prestige Stool: Female Caryatid, Buli Master, possibly Ngongo ya Chintu, 19th Century, gallery 352.
(Right) Prestige Stool: Female Caryatid, Songye Peoples, possibly, 19th-20th Century, gallery 352.

Many Important ritual items were not made to be seen. For the powerful leaders, prestige stools were wrapped in white cloth and hidden in a distant village. As exhibition value has increased (by capital according to the Marxists) cult value is harder to access. The artifacts are gorgeous, even when clearly not viewed as they were meant to be.

“I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.” - Frida Kahlo

 In Absentia

Michael C. Rockefeller, son of Nelson Rockefeller, adjusts his camera before taking pictures of Papuan men in New Guinea in 1961.
Revenge: Ber, head of one of the Asmat villages, was related to the men who killed Michael Rockefeller.

In 1969, the journalist Milt Machlin investigated Rockefeller's disappearance. Several leaders of Otsjanep village, where Rockefeller likely would have arrived had he made it to shore, had been killed by a Dutch patrol in 1958. This provided some rationale for the tribe’s revenge against someone from the "white tribe". Neither cannibalism nor headhunting in Asmat were indiscriminate, but rather were part of a tit-for-tat revenge cycle. So it is possible that Rockefeller found himself the inadvertent victim of such a cycle started by the Dutch patrol.

“After having a long time treated their prisoners very well, and given them all the regales they can think of, he to whom the prisoner belongs, invites a great assembly of his friends. They being come, he ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner, of which, at a distance, out of his reach, he holds the one end himself, and gives to the friend he loves best the other arm to hold after the same manner; which being done, they two, in the presence of all the assembly, despatch him with their swords. After that, they roast him, eat him amongst them, and send some chops to their absent friends. They do not do this, as some think, for nourishment, as the Scythians anciently did, but as a representation of an extreme revenge.” - Montaigne, Of Cannibals

“I am not sorry that we should here take notice of the barbarous horror of so cruel an action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to our own. I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead . . . ” - Montaigne, Of Cannibals

 

“Warming the Dance Space”

(Left) Helmut Mask, 19-20th c., Mende or Sherbro peoples, Gallery 350.

(Center) Headdress  Janus Mask, 19-20th century, Ejagham, Bale peoples, gallery 352. 

(Right) Moon Face Mask, 1880, Baule peoples, gallery 352, worn to “warm the dance space” at the beginning of a sequence known as “gbagba” or “mblo”.

Worn during funerals and initiations. Some are startlingly naturalistic and may be portraits of known individuals; others are highly stylized. There are three overall types: helmet masks that cover the wearer's head entirely, headdresses that are attached to basketry caps worn on top of the head, and masks that cover only the face.

Pre-Colombian Gold

Significant precious metalwork from the early Americas surpasses local 5th Avenue Retailers . . .

“The practice (from 2000 BC) only ceased when indigenous American societies lost access to gold during the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century.” - Met Text

Nice way to put the economic workings of colonialism. After 3,000 years of brilliant design, all gold ore went directly to Europe; do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Read Before Traveling

“These stick charts are memory aids used to navigate island positions and wave patterns. The exact significance was known only to its maker, and they were never carried to sea. That would question the navigator’s skill. They represent a system of mapping ocean swells, which was never before accomplished. 

Marshallese navigators used their senses and memory to guide them on voyages by crouching down or lying prone in the canoe to feel how the canoe was being pitched and rolled by underlying swells. there are four main ocean swells: the rilib, kaelib, bungdockerik and bundockeing.” - Met Text

Imagine figuring out that by lying in a canoe, you could feel the cross currents and tell where the islands are . . . .

This is impressive. 

Or . . . You can use your Hos for weather magic. With its legs of Sting Rays and a chant. As the climate crisis grows, if you can’t navigate it, pray.

Weather Charm (Hos), Caroline Islands, Micronesia, 19th-20th c., gallery 353

Met Percent: Week Eight [by Alec Bernstein]

Medallion with Christ from an Icon Frame, Byzantine, 1100, gallery 303

At the Met, lingering in the darkened galleries of the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, I select a few favorites:

Eikonomachía - literally, "image struggle" or "war on icons" - is a controversy over the proper use of religious images, and it results in the destruction of icons in all media. 

Iconoclasts - "breaker of icons" - is the deliberate destruction within a culture of its own symbols . . . for religious or political motives.

Iconolater, Iconodules, and Iconophiles are derisive terms for those who revere or venerate religious images.

Electric Chair, 1971, Andy Warhol [Met, not on view]. Gold necklace with Cross, Byzantium, 6th century, gallery 301.

“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.” - Lenny Bruce

 

“Guillotine of History”

Head of Christ, Netherlands, 1480-1520, gallery 306; Head of a Cleric from a Tomb Effigy, France, 1450-60, [not on view]; Head of Emperor Constans, Byzantine, ca. 337–40, gallery 301.

Throughout the image wars, the destruction of the head, face (and nose) was rampant, because the head was the most potent symbol of the body. 

“During the High Middle Ages, portraiture did not rely on likeness . . . thus individual selfhood was subsumed in broader forms of corporate identities.” - The Face in Medieval Sculpture - Met Heilbrun Timeline of History. 

In my  twenty years of business air travel, I would study Tiepolo or Raphael and draw heads - of no one in particular - a flight attendant, a sleeping passenger, the occasional celebrity . . . by abstract construction or memory. Apparently my “corporate identities” philosophy is in accord with the Medieval masters. Nice to know.

Montaigne concludes Of Physiognomy with a pair of anecdotes in which his life was threatened, but his kindly demeanor and honest words saved him. “If my face did not answer for me, if people did not read in my eyes and my voice the innocence of my intentions, I would not have lasted so long without quarrel and without harm.” But he also writes, “The face is a weak guarantee.”

 

Bread Branding

A ceramic Bread Stamp, Byzantine, 500-900, gallery 300. Inscribed in Greek in reverse,“IC, XC, NIKA”: Jesus Christ Victorious. Used for The Eucharist breads. Interesting the “victory” (NIKA) stems from Nike in the Greek.

The Uzbek still carries the tradition of bread stamps: now decorative and secular, the stamps appear all over Etsy for “lively flatbreads” (advertisement below).

-  We guarantee you'll love our bread stamp(s) or your money back 

-  Makes an ideal Central Asia-theme gift 

-  Added durability (made from walnut tree) 

-  Safer from injury (blunted pins) 

-  No chemical or artificial substances used 

-  Comes with a short maintenance guide 

-  As a bonus, you get Uzbek bread recipes in pdf format

-  By buying this product, you contribute to a better quality of life for rural Uzbek craftspeople 

 

 

 

Nike, the personification of victory, late 5th century B.C., gallery 156

 

 

 

 

 

Your Skull Here

Abbey Head-Shaped Coffin, France, gallery 306

This carved wooden coffin was for an important skull. And in the next display case, a “valuables” coffin. Important to preserve both. But not together. I note how different the terms “coffin” and “sarcophagus” feel.

Valuables Coffin, France, gallery 306

 

Paul Klee Anyone?

Footed Cup with Falconer, Byzantine, 15th century, gallery 300. Angelus Novus, Paul Klee, 1921, Israel Museum.

Walter Benjamin bought Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, an oil transfer drawing with watercolor, for 1,000 marks in Munich. Benjamin passed it to Theodor Adorno, and Adorno to Gershom Scholem.

Benjamin’s friend Charlotte Wolf then recalled how this “gauche and inhibited man” had “behaved as if something marvelous had been given to him." By simply looking at the drawing.

This is the first time I have seen the word “humor” in the MetTexts. The  cup has a “sense of humor”, according to the museum documenters. But to Benjamin, “This is how one pictures the angel of history.”

Met Percent: Week Seven [by Alec Bernstein]

Byzantine Leads to Gothic

Sarcophagus, Byzantine, early 300s, gallery 300    Capital with Four Heads, Gothic, 1225–50, gallery 304

Just never saw it that way

1,000 years from the end of Rome to the Renaissance: the gigantic new Christian colloid of Rome, Greece, Persia, Scandinavia, England, Syria: no wonder I never saw the connections . . . and the imagery was a continuum of  controversy. 

 

“The human spirit cannot keep on floating in this infinity of formless ideas; they must be compiled for it into a definite picture after its own pattern.” - Montaigne

 

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget

 - “Byzantium”, William Butler Yeats

 

“As a living man does not have to give reasons for his breathing, he does not need to explain his beliefs.” - Montaigne

 

“It’s Byzantine”

 

Keystone from a Vaulted Ceiling, Germany, 1220-30, gallery 300

It’s too too complex is the consensus.

• “Pension savers caught out by ‘byzantine’ tax-relief rules,” reads a headline in The Times of London.
• “Experience in byzantine water policy key in elections at Coachella Valley agencies,” says an editorial in the Desert Sun.
• “It’s Complicated: Bosnia’s Byzantine System Of Government,” puns Radio Free Europe.

 

The Formats of Old Friends . . . The Storyboard

Ivory Altarpiece, ca. 1390–1400, Italy, gallery 306

Stories in units in framed cells. Time divided into sequence in space. Grids of progression. The DNA for films, graphic novels, cartoons, comics . . . 

Stories in Light

Stained Glass Panels, 15th C., German, gallery 306

Q: How do you tell those biblical stories - Mary as Virgin, Queen, Bride, Mother, Intercessor - to a largely illiterate congregation? 

A: Stained glass.

I have heard that the origin of the term kike comes from Jewish immigrants at Ellis Island who would not sign their names with crosses (X), and signed instead with small circles: kikel or kikeleh in Yiddish shortened to kike, i.e. the people who make little circles.

 

The Articles We “Know”

The Last Supper, ca. 1500–1530, German or South Netherlandish, gallery 305

Yes, of course. The Last Supper, The Apostles, The Annunciation, The Madonna, The Child, The Pieta . . . familiar, the stuff of Western Civ. Not “chapter and verse” to me, but by osmosis in school, by television, and my childhood neighbors on their way home from Catechism.

In Los Angeles I discovered all the freeways have articles; a Spanish influence. New Yorkers take 95 to 395. Angelenos take The 405 to The 101.