The Atlantic - Latest Comments in Thursday At The Met

Re: Thursday At The Met

BreakerBaker — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:33:30 -0000

I didn’t see this question until now, at the risk of this being a genuine call to void, I will give a response:

There’s a common misconception that all art depicting the human form realistically was made using a live model. In fact, if we go back, in certain regions, this was more often the exception than the rule. This was the case in Italy whether it be Florence, Venice, or Rome. This is not to say that Titian did not have ample experience working from life, it’s just that there’s very little that indicates he was regularly using models to populate his large Christian or Classical mythological paintings. In fact, when you look at the paintings themselves, it’s not all that difficult to tell which ones are made through strict observation and which are made through an adherence to a sort of formulaic method designed to mimic what he’d learned from observation. During the Renaissance, pure observation was much more strictly adhered to by the Flemish and Germanic painters of the north than it would have been the Italians who, because they were trained as fresco painters, were quite skilled at the art of invention. Observation in Italy really began to get a foothold with the Caravaggisti and other Baroque movements of the late 16th century (about a hundred years after Titian). Still, there was a lot of formulaic invention going on in that work too. Painters didn’t begin to really openly reject invention until somebody like Courbet started defining the term Realist in the middle 19th Century.

Re: Thursday At The Met

colby — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:01:04 -0000

Ok so I'm a week late and nobody's going to read this, but Utah is way better: all the beauty of the Rocky Mountains, plus the uniqueness of the Red Rock south. Can't be beat.

Re: Thursday At The Met

Judson — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:12:44 -0000

she can't wait...she can't wait to cut his fucking head off.

Re: Thursday At The Met

Judson — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:12:19 -0000

she can't wait...she can't wait to cut his fucking head off.

Re: Thursday At The Met

lebecka — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:55:29 -0000

Why? Couldn't Titian afford a model... or know any females?

Re: Thursday At The Met

lebecka — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:53:26 -0000

LOL! So right!

Re: Thursday At The Met

cassia_obovata — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:54:03 -0000

TNC, your link for Regnault at the beginning is for another painter (I noticed his birth/death dates didn't seem right) ... the one you want is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Regnault

Re: Thursday At The Met

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:01:15 -0000

Thanks gonna, push this up some. It's interesting.

Re: Thursday At The Met

silentbeep — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:53:22 -0000

"I do know that it's always nice to see an ample, dark-haired woman smiling at you from across the room"

------

Thanks! ;) (lol sorry I could not resist the allure of the lol this time around...nor the emoticon)

Re: Thursday At The Met

Elizabeth Anne — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:12:18 -0000

Nope, not wrong. :D I think there's something about living here that lends itself to hearing those voices, too...

Re: Thursday At The Met

BreakerBaker — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:06:56 -0000

You might find this interesting. It's the Met's press release from 1916 when the museum purchased the Regnault.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3254116

It has a little exerpt from a review of the painting when it hung in the Salon. Talks about him being a student who was destined for great things. He was dead a year later.

Re: Thursday At The Met

BreakerBaker — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:01:09 -0000

I just mean from an art historical perspective. These European white guys having a sort of skewed perspective bordering on colonial fetishism when it came to Africa (most notably Picasso), the Near and Far East (too many French Academics to mention), and the Pacific Islands (Gauguin). There's a sort of sometimes hidden, sometimes overt European colonialism to so much of the painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

A couple obvious examples:

Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), which is generally accepted as the 'first cubist painting' is little more than a culturally insensitive, borderline racist, not to mention misogynist depiction of nude European women striking poses in African tribal masks.

It's nearly impossible to look at any of Gauguin's paintings from Tahiti and not think of the countless adolescent island girls to whom he brought the great gift of syphilis.

The Near East fascination, because of its connection to Biblical stories is far more intrinsic to the longer history of Western Art, so that, along with the unmistakeable craft of somebody like Regnault (or Ingres before him) can obscure the realization that these were white Frenchman of the 18th and 19th centuries (in Picasso's case, Spanish and 20th century) depicting a very limited understanding of what it is to not be white and French.

I don't mean at all to take away from the painting, but it is my understanding that the picture was not originally to be of Salome, and was instead to be called something like "The Favorite Slave."

Re: Thursday At The Met

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:26:13 -0000

I missed it. But I'd love to hear more.

Re: Thursday At The Met

mrein — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:23:33 -0000

I was about to write the same thing.

Re: Thursday At The Met

Deborah — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:00:28 -0000

I can't speak to the comparative percentages, but I usually see a good mix of people. Two that have stayed with me:

One of the most striking women I've ever seen was at MOMA. Black, short afro with bleached-in polka dots, white blouse, brown swirly leathery looking skirt, substantial but walkable leather sandals. In a city full of people trying to look fashionable, she made it look effortless. That image stays with me in an "if I ever pay more attention to my hair and expand my wardrobe beyond LL Bean, that's how I want the result to come across" way.

And at the Science Museum in Boston, a mom of small toddler twins who was letting them wander the museum at will. I did this with my single children, but overwhelmingly people keep the kids under 4 strapped firmly into strollers. To see a mother with TWO tiny toddlers give them the freedom to explore--again, that's stayed with me.

Re: Thursday At The Met

Deborah — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:50:28 -0000

This was my argument for going to the Grand Canyon this summer. I had been at around age 19, for a few hours, and no photo does it justice. Photos have edges.

We got up early one day and watched the sunrise. Someone my husband worked with had said that they walked along the rim on their visit and got exhausted because the view didn't change. I disagreed--the way the light changed was remarkable, though I could see that it would make a boring slide show.

A week later, the same applied to Antelope Canyon. You've seen photos--just toss "Antelope Canyon" into google image. But the reality, when you can move around, when the light changes--it's different.

Re: Thursday At The Met

Guest — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:27:59 -0000

Isn't that Marc Bolan?

Re: Thursday At The Met

Persia — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:26:32 -0000

You mean attending? I don't know how I'd feel about Gaugin if I were a person of color. Hell, I don't know how I feel about him now. I'm usually pretty good at separating the person from the art, but it's hard to do with him.

Re: Thursday At The Met

Persia — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:24:41 -0000

No, that's true too. When you stand in front of the real thing it's something very different. Dartmouth College has these Assyrian reliefs that are amazing on a computer screen but in person are...

You feel very small and very humble and very young.

Re: Thursday At The Met

PT109 — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:05:06 -0000

I love this picture, the girl in it looks so sexy and naughty. A few months ago I was at the Met, on a rainy Sunday, when it was packed, and I was looking at the picture. A couple was walking by, and they cast a glance at the picture. The girl said, "who is that?", and the guy replied "I dunno, some French hooker!" Which may or may not be true... but I thought it was funny anyway !

Re: Thursday At The Met

msb — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:04:31 -0000

I get these feelings from music and live theatre more than pictures. The last 2 lines of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" nail it for me.

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

Re: Thursday At The Met

BreakerBaker — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:43:34 -0000

I think I know what you mean by 'real women,' but I think it's probably worth noting that Titian probably invented the woman in his painting.

Re: Thursday At The Met

BreakerBaker — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:40:51 -0000

It's a very nice painting from a French painter whose work has been more or less forgotten for having the misfortune of being produced by an Academic just after the death of the Academy.

TNC, while I'm not surprised by your appreciation of the craft, I'm sort of surprised that you don't call attention to the sort of hazy ethnic and racial subtext of the piece.

Here's a sublimely tragic bit of art history. The piece is from 1870. It hung, and was a great sensation, in the 1870 Salon. Regnault was killed 1871 in the Franco Prussian War. He was 28.

Re: Thursday At The Met

BreakerBaker — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 08:21:50 -0000

From this vantage point, it is a photo.

Re: Thursday At The Met

mypinkadidas — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 03:48:20 -0000

I used to work at the Met, actually, and this was the best perk of that job: the ability to spend my lunch breaks looking at art, and not feel I was in a rush or needed to see everything that day, because it would all still be there the next day. TNC: I wouldn't worry! The moment when you know your way around will not be the end of this experience of discovery, but rather, just another turning point in what is really a lifelong relationship that we are all invited to have with any given repository of cultural treasures. Because then, even if you do, say, move to Denver, you'll know, individual paintings may move around, but in its broad outlines, the Met will always be there, and often as not, the individual painting you loved at one time, will be there too -- but maybe in a new context, or in a new show, or maybe you'll see a sign saying the painting's on loan to a museum in Germany or France or Massachusetts.... and in its place is something new for you to see.

This post is a great argument for buying museum memberships, btw. Feeling like you're rushed, and need to get your money's worth b/c you paid for a ticket that day, is the best way to *not* get your money's worth out of a museum. If you have a membership -- especially at a comprehensive museum like the Met -- you can feel comfortable dropping in and out, whether for 5 minutes, or 5 hours.

But this post is also a great argument for the whole "cosmopolitanism" argument for comprehensive museums.... was a big debate a couple years ago drawing in art folks, but also philosophers like Kwame Anthony Appiah at Princeton... asking, to what extent should art stay where it came from, and to what extent is it valuable to collect a lot of different types of art in one place, like the Met? Maybe after the Civil War thing, you can turn to this topic next :-)