Fall 2020 - What is your Museum going to be

“Making the Met, 1870-2020”

It wasn’t so long ago that art museums were being hailed as “temples of culture.” Now they’re routinely denounced as bastions of racism, sexism, imperialism and colonialism. That’s quite a turnaround—with almost as many “isms” as an art history textbook.

Nor have their benefactors escaped the lash. They are accused of “artwashing,” supporting nonprofits solely to erase or obscure their alleged transgressions. Granted, patronage has historically been driven by mixed motives. (See under: Medici.) But without private philanthropy, the U.S. would have no art museums.

Which is why “Making the Met, 1870-2020” is so important. Conceived as a celebration of the museum’s 150th anniversary, the exhibition serves as a timely corrective, a ringing endorsement of two essential concepts: the encyclopedic museum, an Enlightenment notion aimed at celebrating the diversity of world cultures, and the idea of a democratic culture, in which private generosity makes great artworks accessible to citizens of every stripe.

“Making the Met” brings together over 250 works in all manner of media. You get a sense of the richness and variety of the show from the introductory gallery featuring seven objects all centered around the human figure: an ancient Greek grave stele; Richard Avedon’s 1957 portrait of Marilyn Monroe; a 16th-century Nepalese mask; a 19th-century Congolese “power figure”; Auguste Rodin’s “The Age of Bronze” (1876); Vincent van Gogh’s “La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle)” (1889); and Isamu Noguchi’s abstract “Kouros” (1945). As you continue through the exhibition, the sweep and quality are even more head-spinning, with works that include Michelangelo’s “Studies for the Libyan Sibyl” (c. 1510-11); John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau)” (1883-84); Han Gan’s “Night-Shining White” (c. 750), a Chinese handscroll depicting a frisky horse; and El Anatsui’s “Dusasa II” (2007), an enormous wall hanging composed of found materials. If you’re looking for an emotional lift in a bleak year, this is where to find it.

Antonio Rossellino "Madonna and Child with Angels," ca. 1455-60

https://www.wsj.com/articles/making-the-met-1870-2020-review-museum-at-a-crossroads-11604523734?st=pmwg1a9d4oqdvv3&reflink=article_email_share

“Making the Met” was organized by Andrea Bayer, deputy director for collections and administration, with Laura D. Corey, senior research associate, who also produced the exceptionally informative catalog. It is arranged thematically (“Art for All,” “Reckoning With Modernism,” etc.) along a chronological spine. The first two or three of its 10 sections are in some ways the most impressive, showing as they do an institution bootstrapping itself into existence. The museum was founded without a collection or a building. Yet by the turn of the 20th century it had a core of masterpieces by American and European artists such as John Frederick Kensett, Jean-Antoine Houdon and Edouard Manet, Asian objects and a 6th-century B.C. monumental stone head from Cyprus.

By World War I the museum had received a transformative bequest from department store magnate Benjamin Altman. Other gifts steadily followed, among them financier J.P. Morgan’s 1917 bequest of nearly 7,000 works of fine and decorative art and a trove of Impressionist works and other examples of French modernism from the bequest of H.O. and Louisine Havemeyer in 1929. By World War II the Met was the equal of any museum in Europe. The donation in the 1960s of the Michael C. Rockefeller collection of tribal art that would form the core of what are now the galleries of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, cemented the Met’s position as the nation’s preeminent encyclopedic museum, and the 2013 gift of Cubist art from cosmetics executive Leonard Lauder made it a modern art destination.

The one surprise here is the decision not to highlight two triumphant acquisitions of the 1960s and 70s. The first is Rembrandt’s “Aristotle With a Bust of Homer” (1653). On view elsewhere in the museum, it is one of his most psychologically penetrating images and a symphony of paint handling. The other is Diego Velázquez’s “Juan de Pareja” (1650), currently off view yet one of the first occasions in Western art history when a nonwhite individual was depicted with dignity and humanity.

Unfortunately, no exhibition today is complete without its share of woke labeling, so at the entrance to "Making the Met” we read that the museum’s founders hailed “from White Protestant New York society.” (“Why do we need to know the race and religion of the founders?” grumbled a visitor behind me. Why, indeed.)

Nor does Altman’s and the Havemeyers’ generosity go unpunished. Lest our feelings toward them wax too warm and fuzzy as we stand before “Madonna and Child With Angels” (c. 1455-60) by Antonio Rossellino, a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture, or Claude Monet’s pathbreaking landscape “La Grenouillère” (1869), wall texts advise us that the businesses that built the donors’ fortunes depended on, respectively, “intolerable” and “harsh” labor conditions. Prospective Met benefactors take note.

But in its anniversary year, a suddenly uncertain future overshadows the glorious past “Making the Met” surveys. With its finances ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic, the museum has had to retrench, adjusting itself to a world in which, at least in the short term, the old assumptions about attendance, income and philanthropic support must be radically revised.

Even more ominous are the indications that the Met’s leadership has bought into the notion of museums as dens of iniquity in need of a makeover and plans to replace the old, universalist model with an ideological, sectarian approach to its collections and exhibitions.

Thus in June Keith Christiansen, chairman of the Department of European Paintings, entered the social media killing fields with an Instagram post in which, according to the New York Times, which broke the story, he decried the destruction of monuments and statues sparked by the killing of George Floyd. (“How many great works of art have been lost to the desire to rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t approve,” it read in part.) There followed the predictable round of outrage, apology and deletion.

Jean Antoine Houdon "Benjamin Franklin," 1778

Asked for a comment, Met Director Max Hollein told the Times, ‘’There is no doubt that the Met and its development is also connected with a logic of what is defined as white supremacy. Our ongoing efforts to not only diversify our collection but also our programs, narratives, contexts and staff will be further accelerated and will benefit in urgency and impact from this time.’’

Narratives and contexts. Makes you wonder if there will even be such a thing as a Department of European Paintings at the museum a few years hence. In that event, “Making the Met” is likely to be remembered less as a celebration than as a swan song.

—Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Arts in Review editor.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/making-the-met-1870-2020-review-museum-at-a-crossroads-11604523734?st=pmwg1a9d4oqdvv3&reflink=article_email_share