For our second day in the big city we planned to meet up with my brother at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to take in the Surrealism show. Peter Schjedahl, writing in last week’s New Yorker, described the Metropolitan Museum’s “Surrealism Beyond Borders” as a deliriously entertaining survey.
We were a little bit early so we wandered through the Greek and Roman wing. This is one of my favorite parts of the museum. It is curious to me how these two civilizations, both around the BC/AD cusp, were depicting people that feel so human today. The Greeks idealized the form while the Romans depicted the unglamorous as well as the mighty. Then it seems we didn’t come out of the Dark Ages until the Renaissance. I realize this is an uninformed abbreviation of art history but that is the way it strikes me. The Michael Rockefeller wing, where they keep the secrets of the Asmat, is right next door to this wing. They are renovating it and I’m anxiously awaiting its reopening.
There were some photos in the Surrealism exhibit that really sent me, especially by the Colombian Cecilia Porras, along with a Agustín Cárdenas sculpture and the May Ray sewing machine wrapped in a wool blanket but Surrealism, especially the paintings, is not for me. This was made perfectly clear when we exited the show and came face to face with Max Beckmann’s “The Old Actress painting. And in the next room a series of gorgeous Rothko’s.
After the show we cleansed our palette with a stroll through Central Park.
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