Rendez-vous with Art PDF
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Philippe de Montebello holding the Madonna and Child, c. 1290–1300, by Duccio di Buoninsegna (2004.442), bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004. About the Authors Philippe de Montebello is the longest-serving director in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s history. His retirement in 2008 was described as the end of an era ‘in the cultural life of the city, the state, the nation, and the world’. He is a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and an Officier de la Légion d’Honneur, and has a worldwide influence on cultural policies, often in an advisory capacity. He is now Fiske Kimball Professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and an Honorary Trustee of the Prado Museum. Martin Gayford has been art critic for the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph and Bloomberg News; currently, he is the London critic for Artinfo. He is the author of the acclaimed Man With a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud and A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, both published by Thames & Hudson. Among his other publications are The Yellow House, on the nine weeks Van Gogh and Gauguin spent together in Arles, and Michelangelo: His Epic Life. Other titles of interest published by Thames & Hudson include: Man With a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud by Martin Gayford A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney by Martin Gayford In My View: Personal Reflections on Art by Today’s Leading Artists Mirror of the World: A New History of Art How to Read a Painting: Decoding, Understanding and Enjoying the Old Masters The Gallery Companion: Understanding Western Art See our websites www.thamesandhudson.com www.thamesandhudsonusa.com Contents Introduction: Yellow Jasper Lips at the Met 1. An Afternoon in Florence 2. A Flood and a Chimera 3. Immersed in the Bargello 4. A Sense of Place 5. The Case of the Duccio Madonna 6. In the Met Café 7. Princely Collections 8. An Artistic Education Sentimentale 9. Lost in the Louvre 10. Crowds and the Power of Art 11. Heaven and Hell in the Prado 12. Hieronymus Bosch and the Hell of Looking at Art with other People 13. Titian and Velázquez 14. Las Meninas 15. Goya: An Excursion 16. Rubens, Tiepolo, Goya Again 17. Rotterdam: Museums and their Discontents 18. Star-Spotting at the Mauritshuis 19. Where Do You Put It? 20. Exploring the Rainforests of Paris 21. Hunting Lions at the British Museum 22. Lunch in the Great Court 23. Fragments Index Copyright INTRODUCTION Yellow Jasper Lips at the Met Philippe de Montebello pauses in front of a piece of shattered yellow stone. ‘This’, he exclaims, ‘is one of the greatest works of art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, indeed in the world, of any civilization!’ The object we are looking at is part of a face, the lower section. Of the upper portions – the brow, the nose, the eyes – nothing remains. Those sheared off long ago, in one of the innumerable accidents that occurred during the approximately 3,500 years since the sculptor finished carving it. What is left is just the chin, fractions of cheek and neck, and the mouth. Essentially, the sculpture is a pair of lips as full and sensual as those of Mae West, which were once recycled by Salvador Dalí in the form of a surrealist sofa. In its way it is every bit as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa; there is no smile, only an expression of the mouth, as if the lips were about to part. This splintered remnant portrays the face of an Egyptian woman who lived in a palace on the Middle Nile in the 14th century BC. She might have been Nefertiti, or she might not. We do not know, and it is extraordinarily unlikely that anyone will ever find out. The only way would be to discover the rest of the carving, broken and discarded probably thousands of years ago. Fragment of a Queen’s Face, New Kingdom Period, Amarna Period, Dynasty 18, reign of Akhenaten, c. 1353–1336 BC, Middle Egypt, probably el-Amarna (Akhetaten), yellow jasper, 13 × 12.5 × 12.5 (5⅛ × 4⅞ × 4⅞). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1926 (26.7.1396). Photograph by Bruce White. Image Metropolitan Museum of Art. ‘If you told me you’d found the top of the head’, Philippe continues, ‘I’m not sure I would be thrilled because I am so focused, so absorbed and captivated by the perfection of what is there; that my pleasure – and it is intense pleasure – is marvelling at what my eye sees, not some abstraction that, in a more art historical mode, I might conjure up. It’s like a book that you love, and you simply don’t want to see the movie. You’ve already imagined the hero or the heroine in a certain way. In truth, with the yellow jasper lips, I have never really tried to imagine the missing parts.’ The point about the mouth of the anonymous Egyptian queen (or, perhaps, princess), is that it is a fragment. That is its fascination. In a way, however, everything around us in the Met is a fragment: as well as the yellow jasper carving, there are bits of buildings, parts of sculptural ensembles, rooms from houses, and paintings that have been removed from the walls of villas and palaces. What we see in the Met – or any other museum or collection – are elements detached from a greater whole. The Egyptian woman’s lips are part of her face, but they have also been broken off from some context, quite what we do not know, that made sense during the reign of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. And that epoch, with its distinctive styles and beliefs, was only a passing moment in the period of the New Kingdom, which forms a subsection of the long, long history of Egyptian art and civilization, and in turn takes its place in the wider chronicle of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. So it goes on, like a set of Russian dolls, each fitting into something larger. MG One day, while I was sitting for a portrait to Lucian Freud, I asked him what, for him, was the most difficult aspect of painting such a picture. His answer was a surprise: that he changed all the time. ‘I just feel so different every day that it is a wonder that any of my pictures ever work out at all.’ A few days later, it emerged that I – the subject – constantly altered too. Therefore, his attempt to make an enduring image was also an effort to track two moving targets: artist and model. What was true of Lucian in 2004 surely applies to some extent to all of art and life. If we stand in front of a work of art twice, at least one party – the viewer or the object – will be somewhat transformed on the second occasion. Works of art mutate through time, albeit slowly, as they are cleaned or ‘conserved’, or as their constituent materials age. Even if they remain visually identical, they may make a different impression according to the company they keep. Next to a Salvador Dalí, the Egyptian queen would not seem the same at all. We, the viewers, however, are yet more fluctuating. Had I not been walking through the Met in Philippe’s company on that bright autumn day, I would probably not have paused in front of the yellow jasper lips; certainly I would not have seen them as I did, because I looked at them in his company. The next time I saw them would be inflected, together with many other factors, by the memory of the first time. For his part, Philippe had seen this fragment hundreds of times before – which doubtless coloured his reaction, as did the fact that on this occasion he was looking at them with me, listening to my reaction to his response. Everything is like that. Inevitably, we all inhabit a world of dissolving perspectives and ever-shifting views. The present is always moving, so from that vantage point the past constantly changes in appearance. That is on the grand, historical scale; but the same is true of our personal encounters with art, from day to day. You can stand in front of Velázquez’s Las Meninas a thousand times, and every time it will be different because you will be altered: tired or full of energy, or dissimilar from your previous self in a multitude of ways. Philippe and I had embarked on a joint project: to meet in various places as opportunities presented themselves in the course of our travels. Our idea was to make a book that was neither art history nor art criticism but an experiment in shared appreciation. It is, in other words, an attempt to get at not history or theory but the actual experience of looking at art: what it feels like
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