Sunday we went into the big city, trains packed, incredible crowds on Fifth Avenue … and on to the Metropolitan Museum and its great annual Christmas tree and Baroque Neapolitan nativity scene. It’s impossible to describe the elaborate crèche! Pastoral and town scenes, Wise Men on camel and elephant, and much more.
There is also Judaica on View, from the Nuremberg Chronicle.
The main exhibit this and next month is Americans in Paris, an extensive overview of American painters in 19th century Paris, and those who did not live in Paris – short-term or long – but nonetheless exhibited at the salons and expositions…
I especially enjoyed the numerous paintings by Mary Cassatt and Childe Hassam
– we consider the latter one of our own, as he is closely associated
with Cos Cob, Connecticut. And then there were the for me unexpected
ones, Thomas Eakins,
for example. There is also a final section “Back in the United
States,” discussing the painters’ influence on American impressionism.
The second major show (through February 19) is the powerful Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s, representing the Verism form at the time and place.
For those who are not as familiar as I with the history – art and
otherwise – of the Weimar Republic, this can be a disturbing and
unsettling exhibit. I'm surprised that the unofficial Sittenpolizei
hasn't raised a hue and cry. But luckily we are in New York here. There is a warning to parents (visiting the Met on weekends is a popular family outing), not unreasonably so as some of
the bordello scenes border on porn. The show is well organized and
explained, which fact could be observed by the intensity of the viewing
audience. Especially prominent were Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, and of course the huge canvasses by George Grosz. For those with New York Times access, there is an excellent review, Amid Shadows of War, a Cultural Decadence, the accompanying slide show however is disappointing.
