Not long ago, after a years-long renovation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art reopened its collection of European paintings from the 14th through the 18th centuries. Just a few weeks back, the Brooklyn Museum presented a new hanging of its collection of American art. These two institutions have long led parallel lives. They were built in the late 19th century on the edges of symmetrical parks, designed in part by the same architects, paid for by members of the manufacturing and commercial aristocracy of their age, and renovated now with money made on the media, law, technology, and finance.
The commonalities of the new arrangements of these collections are many. The Met aims to project an image of Europe as multicultural, multiracial, mobile; Brooklyn presents an America that has always been mobile, multicultural, and racially diverse. Both museums are preoccupied with the same social ills (racism, sexism, homophobia) and move to repair past injustices symbolically. Both make a heavy, sometimes overwhelming use of texts to establish their perspective, informed by recent academic approaches: Social history guided the curators at the Met; black feminist thought is the avowed framework in Brooklyn. But the Met uses a gentle hand, while Brooklyn is polemical. Brooklyn aspires to revolution; Manhattan to reform. The Met’s perspective, we might say, is liberal, Brooklyn’s openly progressive.
The renovation at the Met left the floor plan intact, but new skylights were opened, lighting was improved, and a new installation of the collection was set up by a team under the direction of Stephan Wolohojian, chief curator of European Painting. The old chronological order was roughly maintained, but rooms are organized following different criteria. Each has a title, and many have a thesis to prove. We no longer have a section devoted to the Renaissance, plain and simple, but a room called “The Home in Renaissance Italy,” which groups pieces that offer depictions of the 15th-century home with others that were displayed in wealthy mansions, along with a display case of plates and a couple of wooden chests.
Walking through the installation, I had the impression of taking a series of seminars on diverse but intertwined themes, each given by a different instructor, with various methods and ideas: Some rooms feature only paintings; others include objects (a sword, some vases, music instruments) for context. One of the criteria used is the character of the support (wood, copper, paper); another is the uses of the works in their time (as pieces of devotion, as political weapons, as spectacles). The most common gesture is to group the works by theme or genre (portraits, landscapes), as was done in the salons of yesteryear.
This heterogeneity may be a virtue, but it also produces an impression of fragmentation, which is reinforced by the fact that many of the curatorial ideas remain as isolated initiatives. In a room devoted to the still life, we have a work of the contemporary artist Adrian Piper, but that’s all the contemporary art we get. In the entrance hall, we are confronted by a bust of the Buddha made in Ghandara when the Greeks were the rulers there, but this is, as far as I can tell, the only piece of Asian art on show.
“The curators insist repeatedly on the salutary effects of markets and migrations.”
One theme, however, runs through all of them: the intention to present a Europe of labile edges, interconnected and multicultural, the antecedent of the European Union of the present. The curators insist repeatedly on the salutary effects of markets and migrations through the selection of objects, the names of the rooms, and the profuse wall texts. Artworks tend to be luxury objects that travel long distances or instruments to project the political power of those who commissioned them. The general narrative no longer tells the saga of the great innovators, the old geniuses, nor does it accept that there is a more or less autonomous history of art. Instead, changes are presented as direct responses to developments in social or political history. Artists are generally intent on advancing their careers, serving their masters (whose authority they reinforce), or responding to changing public tastes. The presentation occasionally makes it seem that patrons are the primary movers of art history.
Yet the general feel of the place remains mostly intact. Curators have tinkered on the edges (introducing, for example, the work of some exceptional women artists), but the collection is recognizably the same, and it carries the same imbalance that was bequeathed by the founders of the institution and the creators of its collection. Those men and women had a specific taste, which favored art of a realist bent. European art became modern, they thought, by celebrating the riches of this world and gradually leaving behind the otherworldly. They didn’t much like the fantastic, those traditions of allegorical painting where aspects of the Middle Ages survived beyond the 15th century, or popular and folk art, which is as absent now as before.
This Europe is sociable, affluent, not too religious, and generally enlightened, despite its dark side of colonialism and slavery, which the Met frequently acknowledges, often in a clumsy way. The wall text in a room on “Political Portraiture and Empire,” devoted to portraits of political figures of 18th-century France, tells us that the country’s fortunes “derived significantly from its colonial territories.” It adds that “though not readily visible on the surface of every portrait, the lives of the artists and sitters here intersected with this international network through birth, politics, and economics.” We find out that Madame Philippe Panon Desbassayns de Richemont, painted by Marie Guillelmine Benoist, ran a vast enslaved labor force in her sugar and coffee plantations. How does this knowledge help me look at the portrait as an artwork? Am I invited to see Benoist as an accomplice in washing up the image of a vile, reprehensible figure? Should I look at this painting primarily with an eye to its aesthetic value or as a documentation of an individual susceptible to being judged in moral or political terms? Too often, the new presentation at the Met leans toward the latter.
In the old Met, the verbal frames aspired to remain in the background, gray, modest, barely visible; in this new dispensation, they are much more imperative and tend to deliver a world already interpreted, already evaluated. Their cumulative effect is a narrative informed by recent developments in the social history of art that, more often than not, amounts to a social history of modern Europe as it appears in its painting, a continent always already open, connected, mobile, mature, globalized.
The new presentation of the Brooklyn Museum’s collection of American art has the general title “Towards Joy” and was organized by a team of five principal curators, assisted by a large group of external advisors. “Myriad voices—of curators, artists, Brooklyn Botanic Garden staff, and NYC drag queens, to name a few—add to the many conversations and questions that the reinstallation surfaces,” the wall text at the entryway says. This “kaleidoscopic display” is unified by “Black feminist and BIPOC perspectives,” which “act as through lines” in a display that aims to valorize “the contributions of historically marginalized producers.” As in the Met, the show is organized as a series of rooms, each with a different “framework” and a different museographical approach.
Four seem thematically organized and their categories are long-established: landscape, portrait, flowers, and the nude. One area is devoted to rest and includes artworks and objects deemed soothing; another has a multitude of disparate items that are black, white, or both. A further room is ostensibly devoted to represented and real chairs, but its main element is a row of portraits of 19th-century prosperous, white Americans hung low to the ground in front of a series of park benches. In the thematic rooms, objects are packed very tightly. Nineteenth-century Chinese vases, pots from this or that Indigenous tribe, modern sculptures, fabric fragments, advertisements, and paintings encroach on one another and have to share the space with enormous amounts of text. The word “bric-a-brac” comes to mind.
The first room is dedicated to water and includes several landscapes of the river and the sea, photographs, drawings, and, amongst other things, three Nazca vases with fish motifs that are so solitary, so deprived of the companionship of similar objects, that they become mere pieces in a drama in which they do not play a primary role. Words proliferate in every nook and corner. We learn about the importance of the coastline in the lives of indigenous peoples, the action of water on paper, the racial politics of swimming pools in New York, and much more. The entire space appears saturated with a strongly ideological discourse, from which it is difficult to be distracted in order to practice that old habit: the observation of an individual object in silence. And since many of the paintings and sculptures on display were made to be looked at in that way, the Brooklyn Museum’s strategy often renders them inert and helpless.
A problem with the hyper-abundance of text is that it limits the room for images. In a long, high, and narrow room, many portraits and some masks hang in several horizontal rows. Those pieces confined to the purgatory of the top row are very difficult to see. The light reflects off the protective glass or varnish, and we have trouble finding the position from which the glare does not cover the face of the sitter. And they are all hung so close to each other that it’s simply impossible to look at any of them without four or five others entering the visual field. This room is also destined to provide a space to project documentary films and for audience activities, so it’s possible that the point is to create something like an atmosphere that favors socializing.
Creating an atmosphere is what a space painted in austere tones and dedicated to cultivating calm intends to achieve. This is “A Quiet Place,” reserved for meditation and self-care. Two couches front a Florine Stettheimer painting. Behind the couches is a splendid 19th-century wooden mantelpiece, evoking that space of bourgeois leisure: the stately living room. Paintings, sculptures, and relics have been selected for their ability to represent states of serenity or to imbue the viewer with that spirit. This is perhaps necessary because the other rooms encourage us to deploy our aggression. In one, a series of 19th-century portraits are hung in a row, almost flush with the floor, to make it clear that they do not deserve the honor we have for so long bestowed upon them. This is the gallery of moral monsters, where the denunciations that the Met confined to sober wall texts are materialized more imperatively.
But was it necessary to devote this amount of space to show paintings we are invited to deplore? Freeing it would perhaps serve to reduce the crowdedness of the adjoining room, dedicated to nudes, where a large bronze sculpture is planted in front of a vast canvas, and a wall filled with naked bodies seen from behind is surrounded by reams of explanation.
I expected to see an exhibition that would give value to previously devalued artworks from under-recognized artists. But the truth is that the presentation elevates some of the objects assembled and demotes others. This last fate falls as frequently on historically marginalized producers as on those from privileged groups. Objects and images are thrown into a competition that is inevitably won by the largest, most colorful, and most imposing. That’s one reason why early 20th-century artists and curators were adamantly against salon-style presentations. They tended to favor the spectacular over the subtle, consecrating the former and flattening the rest. By its insistent focus on showing “connections” and celebrating heterogeneity, the Brooklyn Museum sets up a situation where, more often than not, the loudest voice prevails.
It is symptomatic of the central role that “Towards Joy” gives to text that the last room is devoted to a vast construction pierced by vitrines that display (just display; they cannot be opened) the books comprising the bibliography used in the preparation of the exhibition, and selections of additional tomes proposed by some prominent professors. The show finishes with a paean to academia and a monument to the written word. In the end, language reigns almost undisputed.
“I have to confess a nostalgia for those museums where paintings hung in silent and anonymous spaces.”
I have to confess a nostalgia for those museums where paintings hung in silent and anonymous spaces, where one would inevitably make unforeseen discoveries and let the mind play with images that remained enigmatic. It was a world less explained, less signposted, where the viewer was less tenaciously guided towards correct interpretations and accepted conclusions. In Manhattan, art is mobilized to teach social history and depict a Europe that was always globalized; in Brooklyn, to provide a framework for a conversation that, since the parting words are said in the idiom of the university, risks developing in an increasingly esoteric way.
Both presentations are testimonials. They are embodiments of the two great political utopias of the 21st century—the utopia of a global community linked through well-functioning markets, and the utopia to come after the revolt of the Global South and the Northern minorities—just as their precursors, the old Brooklyn Museum and the old Met, were embodiments of the mad dreams of their time. The two utopias have proved capable of coexisting and persist, but both are less likely than ever to come true in a world that, in this time of fragmentation of Europe and racial depolarization in the United States, is moving inexorably away from them.