MUSEUM FATIGUE is a familiar experience even for the most ardent art lovers. Sometimes it is simply that the flesh is weak, particularly the feet. But even martyrs and marathoners are susceptible to aesthetic overload, a sense that there can be too much beauty, too many centuries. For a while the effort is exalting, but then it becomes stupefying. Enough already, one says, and surrenders to the cafeteria and the racks of postcards in the gift shop. Those who share such frailty will be happy to hear that New York’s most taxing art venue, the Metropolitan Museum, has improved its dining facilities as a capstone to its most imposing exhibition in recent memory: “Manet/Velasquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting.” That show has already closed, though a bit lingers on in a smaller exhibition, “Manet and the American Civil War: ‘The Battle of U.S.S. Kearsarge and C.S.S. Alabama.'”
Seascapes, sad to say, were not Manet’s strong point, especially at the time he painted this recreation of the 1864 battle off the coast of Cherbourg. Impressionism had not yet impinged on his own performance. When it did, a decade later, his seas brightened up and served him as a foil for figure studies, such as his splendid paintings from Argenteuil, one of which, “Boating,” has a permanent home at the Met. But he would never be another Turner and wisely did not often venture to take on the sea itself as his subject.
There is another problem with the painting of the sea battle (on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art), which has a wider relevance to the art of the nineteenth century. It represents the death knell for history painting, an area for which Manet’s gift for painting larger than life figures better suited him.
A version of his Goyaesque “The Execution of Emperor Maximilian” from the Musuem of Fine Arts Boston appeared in the Manet/Velasquez show, but even though it’s a much better painting than the oddly lifeless sea battle, it shares the same fatal liability as a record of an event: It isn’t a photograph. For a record of the actual American Civil War you can’t beat Mathew Brady. Photography has revolutionized how we think of war, both its glory and its grime. There is something incontrovertible in Brady’s scenes of bodies strewn across a battlefield which would be unseemly if they were painted. (As for the duller sort of history paintings, dignitaries gathered about a large rosewood table, painters are happy to be quit of that part of the job description.)
WHAT PAINTERS have been left with, in our post-Kodak age of infinite imagery, could be seen in nearly all its varieties at the recent, brief annual show at the National Academy of Design, when more than two hundred members exhibited their latest paintings and sculptures. Even with a one-per-artist limit it amounted to an ocean of art, and the academy is now so catholic in its tastes that all styles and trends except the most rebarbatively je-m’en-fouiste were represented, from landscapes and portraits that Manet himself would have approved (a large Wolf Kahn barn, a self-portrait by Michael Mazur) to snazzy abstractions in acrylic (Jules Olitski), granite (William Crovello), and ceramic (Dimitri Hadzi).
No single taste could encompass all the tendencies offered for view, but the impulse to stop and ponder, which is the touchstone of an anthology show, was high in proportion to the impulse to keep moving. But reviews in both the New York Times and the New Yorker dismissed the show with little more than a sniff and a sneer–and in both cases for reasons of a political rather than aesthetic character. The Times objected to George Lundeen’s twenty-six-inch bronze “Field of Blue” as “old-fashioned academic kitsch,” “amusingly retrograde,” and “Norman Rockwell-esque.” What so ruffled the Times reviewer’s feathers was the statue of a boy, all bronze, cradling a folded flag in his arms, with only the flag and the boy’s tie in color. The Times might have no objection to an exhibition devoted to the burning of the flag or its desecration in some other way but this was out of bounds.
The New Yorker likewise found time to take offense at memorials that various artists made about the destruction of the World Trade Center. The reviewer presumably had in mind the woodcut digital print by Antonio Frasconi, “N.Y.C. 9/11/01,” which captures such elements as the twin towers’ surviving steel lattice and has an overall look of Rauschenberg’s illustrations for Dante. Not a blue-ribbon contender, but it did insist on a second, closer look. What did seem a clear winner was Herbert Katzman’s “Glorious Sky, N.Y. Bay, 9/4/01,” a sunset of a crimson sky with clouds irradiated to gold by the setting sun in a palette at once morose and gaudy. The mood is certainly post-September 11, though the title date is a few days earlier. Impossible to know if this was one of the paintings that offended the New Yorker’s taste, and, if so, whether their disapprobation was extended to Joe Lasker’s similar, although undated view of Norwalk at sunset across wide waters, which conveys an urbanely apocalyptic feeling.
Perhaps the most impressive seascape of the many in the show was “Sea Swell,” a watercolor by Susan Shatter of a close-up view near the shore, which captures those patterns of swirl, lift, froth, and translucency that have defied the eye-to-hand competence of even such a wizardly artist as Manet–until photography gave us all a perceptual edge. Painting water is one of the supreme challenges of representational painting, and there were enough canvases at the academy that met that challenge head-on to have made up a first-rate show all on their own.
It was galling to exit the academy’s sparsely populated rooms and see, just down the block, a huge crowd in line outside the Guggenheim patiently waiting to get in to Matthew Barney’s meretricious “Cremaster Cycle”–which has drawn the Guggenheim’s greatest attendance ever, surpassing even the museum’s motorcycle show of 1998. So, what else is new?
AROUND THE CORNER from the National Academy at the Allan Stone Gallery on East 90th St. is a smaller exemplar of aesthetic overload: “Animals: A Century of Animal Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures from Tribal to Contemporary to Folk.” If the National Academy Annual called to mind the packed-to-the-rafters abundance of the English Royal Academy shows of the nineteenth century, the effect of “Animals” is of a top-quality garage sale curated by Citizen Kane. This is the silly season, after all, and this arkload of iron roosters, wooden sharks, buffalo and eagle masks, totem poles, French pigs, and ceramic penguins is a mixed bag. Dip into this carnival of animals at random, transport your auk or gorilla home, and you will have a knockout piece of instant surrealism. But seen cheek by jowl in the same crowded cage they have the melancholy aspect of an underfunded zoo.
Even so, there is something primordial in any assembly of nature’s ultimate others. I remember sharing a train ride once with an Italian priest returning from the mission fields of Africa. He was eager to show the trophies he was bringing home from the Kalahari, but when he unpacked his cardboard valise the horn of his wooden antelope had broken. He cried. Every home should have such a domestic totem, if only a ceramic kitten–whether it comes from Africa, Pier One, or the Allan Stone Gallery. Animals make us human.
Thomas M. Disch is a poet, novelist, and art critic.
