Art:

...Consequently, some of the hanging is uninspired, like the For starters, there's the fictional comTurners facing off across a large room with Delacroixs on the pany you will have to keep...

...That will do the trick...

...Achille said on more than one occasion...

...After so many artistic deaths by politics, a death by culture provides a cautionary tale of excess to depict anything that could not be seen: "Show me an angel," on the opposite end of the curatorial spectrum...

...The curators are though anyone who can tell the difference should not worry reminding us that those revolutionary goals were eventually, about coming away with that impression-but the failing of this and undramatically, absorbed by the embourgeoisement of new space is to make great paintings seem merely great...

...The centerpiece incidence that, as art in the nineteenth century progresses, the of the new exhibition is Walter Annenberg's gift of fifty-three source of light in paintings becomes more and more obscure...

...And these rooms ders from countries other than France through the Common are indeed calm, spacious, and pleasing to the eye...

...Detractors an income they most likely would never obtain...

...David, who staged the French Revolution, put classiearlier galleries might have made "great paintings seem minor"- cal form in the service of revolutionary goals...

...The hero is opposite wall, as though it were the eve of the Battle of an Elvis-obsessed, moronic piece of white Agincourt...

...The fisher- claimed that the galleries made "great paintings seem minor," men in Sanary were less than forthright with the French gov- as the senior critic for the New York Times recently put it...

...So, how many fish did we catch last year...

...The probMarket...

...And though art panying catalogues and wall texts, one exclusively gets the artist's is long and life short, the arbiters of good taste-the people violating "gaze" instead of the nude, the forms of power be- who paid millions of dollars to have some of the world's most hind the captive forms of artistically rendered objects, and so stubbornly unclassifiable paintings moved from one set of on...

...So that makes me won- structures...

...The father of modem realism, Courbet refused Commonweal 22 October 1993: 21 Corots...

...He and the other fishermen in Sanary felt they The conviction that inspired these new galleries was that, received nothing in return for their tax money except restric- again in the words of the Times art critic, "nineteenth-century tions and more restrictions...

...conscious grandeur that often makes the marvelous works they Fishing is unreliable, discouraging, and dangerous...

...When his brother Jean-Paul could be neoclassical...

...nineteenth-century society...

...Go see True Roreal by the caveat of business, law, and banking money...

...mains that many nineteenth-century artists worked in opposition Maybe, they might have thought, it was easier to catch men to whatever they perceived the spirit of their age to be...

...The David...

...Perhaps it is no coweightless elegance of their particular details...

...Wait, I think lem with the new galleries, though, lies not only in their selfI have the number right here...

...Anything but this...

...It was house seem like reproductions straining to live up to their origin Jesus' time, too...

...They are a signifoverturning of tradition that the creator of the scandalous Dejeu- icant choice...

...They grace the walls like debutantes at a coming-out ball...

...The result-until familiarity sooner or later pushes these unbearably magnificent rooms back into the margins between the paintings, where they belong-is a momentarily refreshing reminder of the old stuffiness...

...The ernment about how many fish they caught and how much they Metropolitan curators seem to feel that with the close of the sold them for...

...Competing rituals of style, each one rooted constructed with a classical serenity in mind: visitors walk through in a different sacramental-like aesthetic doctrine, flourished arches, past Ionic columns and cornices, and under ovolo mold- with sectarian ardor...

...LEE SIEGEL curators are equally reductionist, but in the opposite direction...

...But it could just as well be neogothic, had a son, the new father vowed the boy would never even or a Beaux Arts eclecticism that includes Renaissance and barstep foot on a boat...

...0 In the old Andre Meyer Galleries, the painting collection was hung in a vast rectangular space on walls and obliquely placed ART movable screens...

...That is, when all is said and done, Of course, some curators today make the mistake of narrowly one of history's more benign developments...

...he once famously declared, "and I'll paint one...

...impressionist and postimpressionist gems, including some The neoclassical grandiosity of the new galleries does very miraculous paintings by Cezanne...

...But in the graduprojecting contemporary issues onto older art...

...I want ly a nineteenth-century ambiance is...

...than fish...

...The viewer's response has been encoded in the columns and cornices, the archways and moldings: you shall be overwhelmed by the power of culture-as if institutionalized culture were not time and time again overwhelmed by Rousseau's secrets, Corot's silvery sentience, Monet's beautiful lies, Degas's hardness, Van Gogh's mad yellows, Gauguin's lustful geometry, Cezanne's post-Edenic apples, which are not meant to be seen but bitten by modern eyes impatient for appearances to fall...

...The lofty, se- But the curators have made a statement and a decision, and date room devoted entirely to portraits by Manet is, in its sen- very deliberately so...

...Their profession, as it always had been, was teenth-century collection, the Andre Meyer Galleries, was that a chancy one, so why should the government receive taxes from they had displaced older art into a modernist setting...

...The n a lavish feat of nostalgia, the Metropolitan Museum British philosopher T.E...

...For all their undoubtedly good intentions, the Metropolitan's walls to another-live forever...

...This style of presentation had much to recommend it...

...These sumptuous works little to help the viewer appreciate Daumier's The Laundress, will be on display six months of every year, from July to or Millet's peasants, or anything by Courbet, whom French poDecember, until Annenberg's death, when the museum will per- lice chased around Paris during the 1848 revolution after havmanently take over the collection...

...Yet the fact reand Peter thought at last they could do something reliable...

...Hulme's description of romanticism of Art has spent $12.4 million on the renovation of a as spilled religion can be applied to most of the art movements wing to house its renowned collection of nineteenth- that turbulently succeeded each other throughout the nineteenth century paintings and sculptures...

...And now they even received or- art looks best in nineteenth-century rooms...

...The problem is also in defining what exactto do something else, and others were always plotting...

...The effect was disconcertingly satisfying, random beauty springing up out of apparently ordinary chaos...

...There is no feeling, as there once was in the Andre Meyer Galleries, of suddenly coming upon art in the midst of life, and of happily paying for it in the currency of new sensations, thoughts, or perceptions...

...And some is ridiculous, like the Renoir watercolor hung below a watercolor by Cezanne, a contrast that might begin a movement urging the museum to sell its Renoirs and use the money to expand the often overcrowded cafeteria...

...When I was in Sanary, one of the men quit inals' reputations...

...Lee Siegel, a frequent contributor to Commonweal, is a What sinks this new permanent exhibition, a neoclassical free-lance writer living in New York...

...Romanticism, realism, impressionism, ings with egg-and-dart patterns...

...SCREEN A fantastic and proprietary notion of culture as an autonomous, self-enclosed realm has been created in these galleries, as if the paintings had no meaning or force outside the SMUT IN YOUR EYE generic standards of officially cultivated sensibility that the new SCOTT'S 'TRUE ROMANCE' decor now represents...

...The first paintings that one comes upon sitivity to Manet's cultural stature, strangely insensitive to the are some portraits by Jacques-Louis David...

...do not exist...

...thus in accom- al course of change passion became good taste...

...The complicatedly layered aims-personal, philosophical, spiritual, aesthetic-toward which all these wildly different artistic identities worked have been ruled un- IN ant to feel like a fool...

...Modern art can be said to begin with several figner sur l'Herbe was trying to accomplish with his harsh pho- ures, among them Goya-not in the exhibition-Courbet, or tographic light, dislocated figures, and self-conscious irony...

...Titanic sporting distinguished passengers and high society polish, is the deadly iceberg of Kultur...

...Maybe John, James, Andrew, ers an epoch with countless contrary spirits...

...mance...

...Though the spontaneity could seem willed, the display was the TOO HIGH THE CORNICES museum equivalent of Chekhov's celebrated imperative for writTHE MET'S NEW GALLERIES ers to evoke "moonlight on a broken bottle," only here it was the viewers who turned corners and met the epiphanic shards of what was once the big picture...

...Modernity broke up the vision of infinity that earlier a suite of twenty-one galleries called the Nineteenth- had been held together by sacrament and ritual into the fragCentury European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries, has been ments of "isms...

...Some is almost vaudevillian, like the mediocre trash named Clarence Worley who, when he's not clerking in d'Aligny stuck next to a doorway between some masterful a comic-book store (where he reverently samples the product), 22: 22 October 1993 Commonweal...

...I think a lot of the men would have done oque elements, or English Regency, which could mimic Islamic something else, had they been able to...

...With their gleaming parquet postimpressionism, symbolism are the colors that stain the floors, daunting wall space, and ageless motifs, the galleries windows of nineteenth-century modernity, every movement have an imposing, almost regal atmosphere to them, for all the projecting its own version of visual truth...

...to be a bodyguard," Serge told me, "for some big shot in Toulon Architecturally, the representative nineteenth-century style or Marseille...

...As far as finally burned itself out, and they have seized the opportunithe French government is concerned, the fishermen in the Var ty to build a revised interpretation of nineteenth-century art...

...It might be possible for the right architectural ender about Jesus' words, "Follow me, and I will make you fish- vironment to capture the spirit of an age in which the paintings ers of men" and how suddenly and unreservedly the four men and sculptures were made (never mind that this exhibition covleft their nets and joined him...

...The new installation, century...

...The French government doesn't give a damn postmodern eighties, the Great Modernist Conflagration has about us...

...ing got wind of the artist's plans to blow up the column in the The critical consensus on the previous home of the nine- Place Vendome...