Friday, May 12, 2017

Met Museum: Three Exhibits Closing Soon

I went recently to the Met Museum to see three small exhibits that will be closing in the next few weeks.  Although only one of the artists, Georges Seurat, is well known to the public, the works on view by Hercules Segers and William Chappel were also well worth seeing.

The introductory material on the museum's website goes to a great deal of trouble to impart an air of mystery to Seurat's large canvas, Parade de cirque ("Circus Sideshow"), the centerpiece of the current exhibit.  It reads, in part:.
"Ever since its debut in Paris in 1888, Circus Sideshow has intrigued, confounded, and mesmerized its viewers. Seurat's closest associates were largely dumbstruck. The laconic artist was as silent as his brooding masterpiece."
Looking at the painting, though, it seemed to me fairly straightforward work when one takes into account the pointillism that characterized the artist's style.  The painting merely shows a group of musicians lined up on stage facing the audience with the circus master and a clown off to one side.  True, the low key lighting does partially obscure the scene, but it is after all set at night under gaslight.  Still, the painting is such a masterpiece that one cannot complain of the museum's decision to devote an entire exhibit to it.  And just as fascinating as the painting itself are the preparatory drawings displayed beside it.  These include Une Parade, Trombonist, Pierrot and Colombine, Forte Chanteuse, and At the Divan Japonais, all executed with conté crayon on extremely rough textured paper.  There are also posters and circus paintings by Seurat's contemporaries, but with the exception Grimaces and Misery - The Saltimbanques by Fernand Pelez these are of only slight interest.

The exhibit continues through May 29, 2017.

Before having seen the Met's current exhibit, The Mysterious Landscapes of Hercules Seger, I had never heard of  the artist and was completely ignorant of his work.  That should not have been the case.  Seger was a more than competent artist and stylistically well in advance of the early sixteenth century period in which he lived.  As the museum's website notes:
"Rejecting the idea that prints from a single plate should all look the same in black and white, he produced impressions in varied color schemes—painting them, then adding lines or cutting down the plate."
Several examples of the same image are often juxtaposed in order to provide the viewer a better idea of the manner in which Segers manipulated the etching process.  As one passes among them one realizes that the most striking of the graphic works are those employing the "lift-ground" process.  The paintings show an equal mastery of technique.  Completely out of place, though, is an oil on canvas entitled Skull on a Ledge that is attributed to Segers for no apparent reason.  The naturalistic style of this painting is jarring when set against the more traditional style of the other works on view.

The exhibit continues through May 21, 2017.

Pity poor William Chappel, the nineteenth century New York artist whose name doesn't even merit a Wikipedia entry and whose work, as shown in the current exhibit City of Memory, has been consigned to a small gallery in the American Wing mezzanine that's almost impossible to find even with map in hand.  Not much is known of Chappel, who was a tinsmith by trade, and the dates he created his paintings and his reasons for doing so are entirely a matter of conjecture.  Personally, I think he was simply nostalgic for the New York City of his childhood that had already largely disappeared by the time he reached late adulthood.  The small format paintings he left behind, all of them oil on slate paper, are so simple that they might well be characterized as naive art.  These idealized depictions - the streets are clean and devoid of traffic, and there's no crime or poverty to be seen - show New Yorkers going about the most commonplace activities.  There are chimney sweeps, night watchmen, garbage haulers, and even a fire brigade, all set against backgrounds, such as the Bull's Head Tavern, that no longer existed by the time Chappel came to paint them.  City residents today, seeing the constant development and construction going on everywhere about them, can easily sympathize with Chappel's desire to return to simpler times.  

The exhibit continues through June 25, 2017.

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