Not Playing To The Gallery

The Age

Saturday February 16, 2008

Patrick McCaughey

If there ever is such a thing as downtime in the Big Apple, says Patrick McCaughey, then it's a bonus for the city's museums and galleries.

MANHATTAN IN mid-winter after a snowless January, the first in 75 years, is easy.

With no tourists and few out-of-towners and the museums "resting" between autumn extravaganzas and spring-time offerings, you are free to enjoy without jostling crowds photographing themselves in front of a Van Gogh Wheatfield or a wall-size Jackson Pollock. Even the Metropolitan Museum has its down-time and makes it a good moment to check out its long delayed, recently re-opened 19th-century galleries, housing its prized collection of impressionism and post-impressionism.

Chauvinist though it sounds, the Met's collection strikes me as better than the French national collection in the Musee d'Orsay. It's hard to beat 45 Degas paintings and pastels plus his complete sculpture - those awkward bathers, chunky dancers and brittle horses - to say nothing of 26 Cezannes, 28 Monets plus rooms of Pissarro and Bonnard. Van Gogh and Gauguin are hardly slighted as they play room-mates over two large galleries.

(In reaction to an earlier and incoherent display, all sliding screens and open spaces, the Met built a set of beaux art galleries with big arches, painted columns and pea-green walls. They have lightened the load this time around.)

Most dramatically, they have introduced John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler plus some of their showier belle epoque confreres into the mix.

Now Sargent's notorious Madame X (aka Madame Pierre Gautreau) with her powdered breasts, hennaed hair and full and fleshy right arm twisting snakily against a table provocatively disdains to greet the viewer, turning away her sharp and sexy profile.

This is impressionism as a socially and commercially successful style, suitable for the rich and vacuous Wyndham sisters in London or the equally wealthy but sensible Mr and Mrs Phelps Stokes in New York, the subjects of two other large and glittering paintings by Sargent.

Drift to the left and you find yourself in the Wisteria dining room. Designed by Levy-Dhurmer in 1910-14, it is pure, if late, Art Nouveau and the only room of its kind in the US. Head right from the Sargents and other re-discoveries surface from the basement such as the vast and gripping Organ Lesson by Henry Lerolle, an obscure contemporary of Monet.

Realistic, piquant and tense, it appears to be blithely ignorant of the impressionist revolution. Or does the dignity with which Lerolle endows this casual scene show that the fundamental project of the impressionists, to paint modern life, had sunk in?

Surprise lurks at the other end of the new installation. Lifting your head for air amid the Gauguins and the Van Goghs, you look ahead and are shocked to see the Met's marvellous early Picassos - Portrait of Gertrude Stein, The Blind Man's Meal, The Coiffure - looming. What are they doing here? The Met has carved out new galleries to bring us right into the threshold of the 20th century - a most satisfying journey.

Way downtown another surprise unfolds in the shape of the New Museum of Contemporary Art - just what New York needs, huh? Wedged between the Bari Cafe and a restaurant supply shop, two doors up from the Bowery Mission, the New Museum is one of the most beautiful new buildings in New York.

Designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, from a young Japanese firm and selected because they had never built in the US before, the six translucent, silver blocks rise gracefully and irregularly at the junction of Prince Street and the Bowery, once the last resort of the homeless and the hopeless. Its chaste and modest profile will become as indelible a part of the city as Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim or Marcel Breuer's Whitney and it's only in its second month.

Internally the blocks provide spacious but not overwhelming galleries. The opening exhibition, Unmonumental, occupies all the exhibiting floors and has an urgency, a determination to address the issue of the day as few other New York museums do.

Everything has an edge from Claire Fontaine's key rings replete with hacksaw blades to Sam Durant's Guantanamo-like cage. The three-dimensional triumphs as though the work wants above all else to exist in real space and time. The exhibition unashamedly aims to "embody an uncertainty about the past and a fear of the present that pervades contemporary society".

The shadow and the shame of Iraq hangs over many pieces, most notably in Martha Rosier's photo montages of GIs in night sights and combat gear invading Home Beautiful drawing rooms. The New Museum wants to make it now as well as new. Judging by the seething crowds on a cold and windy Wednesday afternoon, they are succeeding with the under-40s for whom, one suspects, Degas and Monet are as relevant as the man in the moon.

© 2008 The Age

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