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700 Paintings, 45 Galleries: A Guide to the Met’s New European Wing 700 Paintings, 45 Galleries: A Guide to the Met’s New European Wing
(8 days later)
Let the light in. Five years after the Metropolitan Museum of Art set off on a major renovation of its galleries for European painting, the super-prime real estate at the top of its grand staircase is open again. Up in the attic, the architects Beyer Blinder Belle have replaced 30,000 square feet of skylights for the first time since the Truman administration. Down in the galleries, the Met’s designers have widened the rooms, rearranged the sightlines, shellacked the walls purple and blue. The curators have reassembled the whole painting collection for the first time since 2018, shuffled across 45 new galleries and bathed in beautifully tempered light.Let the light in. Five years after the Metropolitan Museum of Art set off on a major renovation of its galleries for European painting, the super-prime real estate at the top of its grand staircase is open again. Up in the attic, the architects Beyer Blinder Belle have replaced 30,000 square feet of skylights for the first time since the Truman administration. Down in the galleries, the Met’s designers have widened the rooms, rearranged the sightlines, shellacked the walls purple and blue. The curators have reassembled the whole painting collection for the first time since 2018, shuffled across 45 new galleries and bathed in beautifully tempered light.
The work was done in two phases, so visitors got a taste of the even, shadowless lighting when the Met presented an abbreviated showcase in a fraction of these galleries in 2020. (When it comes to light, this New Amsterdam institution definitely leans more Dutch than Italian.) Turns out, the new efforts at illumination are not only above your head. For more than a century, the Met had organized these paintings by national school, with all the Italian pictures on one side, all the Dutch ones on the other. Come now, and you’ll encounter the whole continent’s art along a single chronological pathway, starting from the early Renaissance in central Italy and ending about 500 years later in France and Spain.The work was done in two phases, so visitors got a taste of the even, shadowless lighting when the Met presented an abbreviated showcase in a fraction of these galleries in 2020. (When it comes to light, this New Amsterdam institution definitely leans more Dutch than Italian.) Turns out, the new efforts at illumination are not only above your head. For more than a century, the Met had organized these paintings by national school, with all the Italian pictures on one side, all the Dutch ones on the other. Come now, and you’ll encounter the whole continent’s art along a single chronological pathway, starting from the early Renaissance in central Italy and ending about 500 years later in France and Spain.
This new display wanders back and forth across the Alps, zigzags off-piste, and in a few places jumps into the modern age. A Bacon, a Beckmann and a Kerry James Marshall are hiding in here. Duccio’s break-the-bank Madonna and Child, painted in Tuscany around 1300, now shares a case with Ingres’s painting of the same subject from 1852. You’ll see new acquisitions, not least by women of the 17th and 18th centuries, and freshly cleaned favorites, above all Rembrandt’s “Aristotle With a Bust of Homer,” gleaming through melancholy.This new display wanders back and forth across the Alps, zigzags off-piste, and in a few places jumps into the modern age. A Bacon, a Beckmann and a Kerry James Marshall are hiding in here. Duccio’s break-the-bank Madonna and Child, painted in Tuscany around 1300, now shares a case with Ingres’s painting of the same subject from 1852. You’ll see new acquisitions, not least by women of the 17th and 18th centuries, and freshly cleaned favorites, above all Rembrandt’s “Aristotle With a Bust of Homer,” gleaming through melancholy.
As with the reinstallation of the Museum of Modern Art in 2019, these ruptures in chronology often feel safe, even redundant, and lack the serendipity you’d want in a timeline-breaking move. (Picasso sits alongside the elongated ectoplasms of El Greco, perhaps his most explicit old master influence. Why not try Giacometti, or Lynda Benglis?) A little more wit, a little more strategic wrongness might reveal more than these matchy-matchy anachronisms, but in years to come I’m sure the paintings here will get to mingle with Asian, African and American friends, as well as the decorative arts.
By and large, though, this new hang is a sharpshooter, with cunning arguments and refreshed regards on geography, religion and medium. Recent debuts, such as a phenomenal Virgin and Child from 14th-century Bohemia, start to push the early Renaissance beyond Italy and Flanders. Unapologetically ornate devotional pictures from what are now Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador reveal the colonial transformation of “European” (for which read “Catholic”) art. And as lesser museums have offered self-flagellation as their only answer to the ills of the past, the Met is actually thinking about how its European paintings reflect, distort, or contest the virtues and vices one continent loosed across the globe. Its curators, led by the department chief Stephan Wolohojian, don’t hector, but they also don’t skip a fight; their display speaks to adults.