Picked by PhDs: January 2018 in New York, Wiener Werkstätte and Michelangelo

In five days in New York we visited eight museums, twenty-four exhibitions, four plays and the Santiago Calatrava transit hub at the World Trade Center.. We had lovely meals at the Pergola French Restaurant, The Blue Fin, and Sardi’s in the Theater District, Fig and Olive near the Whitney, and the restaurants at the Met, the Guggenheim, and the Neue Galerie, not to mention the friends who provided wonderful dinners for us. We did not spend any time in the permanent collections of any of the museums, due to lack of time, energy, and any compulsion to look again at art we have seen many times before. We expect there will be time for that later.

With so many exhibitions, I can hardly have delved deeply into any of them, but I did have responses to them all. Four were the keystones of the trip. They were Wiener Werkstätte 1903 to 1932: The Luxury of Beauty at the Neue Galerie, Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer at the Metropolitan, Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World at the Whitney, and Josef Albers in Mexico at the Guggenheim. I love the designs of the Vienna Workshops, especially Josef Hoffman and Koloman Moser. A vitrine of brooches is spectacular, as well as the room full of earlier mostly silver objects. Although some of the objects designed by Dagobert Peche are lovely, I thought he weakened the coherent image of the movement by adding more floral components and making the objects larger and more colorful. As the workshop struggled to stay afloat by designing for manufacture rather than individual artisanship, the objects became more colorful and the designs seem looser. No photographs are allowed, so I can only link to the Neue Galerie website for images. A review in the New York Review of Books provides a few more images and discussion of the economic and architectural aspects of the works.

Not surprisingly on a Saturday, the Metropolitan was packed and it was almost impossible to see the Michelangelo drawings, definitely impossible to have a leisurely viewing. It made me wish the Met would charge full price for exhibitions, with pay-as-you-wish for general admission. The narrative of the exhibition is coherent and brings up a range of aspects of Michelangelo’s practice, for example drawings for and by students, collaborative works with Sebastiano del Piombo (the subject of a major exhibition at the London National Gallery last year, also with facsimiles used as educational materials), finished drawings for and of the people Michelangelo loved, drawings for paintings by Marcello Venusti, and portraits of the artist. Among the sculptures on view I was particularly taken by the small bronze by Michelangelo’s teacher Bertoldo di Giovanni, of Apollo playing his violin and turning in space, figura serpentinata before it was a thing. I don’t remember seeing drawings showing student copies of Michelangelo examples before and found those enlightening both for the objects themselves and for the sense they provided of the master in teaching mode. The exhibition suggested the degree to which Michelangelo collaborated with other artists, to some degree revising the idea of him as an isolated genius.

The facsimile of the Sistine Ceiling, one-quarter size, attracted considerable attention. I think more people photographed that than the drawings Michelangelo made for it. It was supposed to be helpful in locating the figures for which the drawings were made, but the small photographs included in the labels were probably easier to connect to the drawings. I suppose if you've never seen the actual ceiling, the facsimile is pretty impressive. The labels were helpful and clearer than most of those at the Met, relatively free of jargon, at least for me, but studded with adjectives – “bold, striking, ravishing, vigorous, impressive, forceful, remarkable, finely rendered, powerful, beautifully elaborated, elegant, active” for Michelangelo and “awkward, less subtle, wooly anatomy” for not-Michelangelo. I tend to argue with adjectives in labels and they distract me from experiencing the works of art on my own. I believe that people can figure out if an object is vigorous or ravishing or beautiful without being told.

While this was a most impressive gathering of a great number of Michelangelo works, most of them terrific examples of his drawing style, I wondered still about his working process. Did he produce only this small number of drawings for the Sistine Ceiling or the Medici Tombs? Of course not, and it would have been fascinating to see more examples of how Michelangelo’s conception of figures evolved in the process of designing these monuments, and others. This is not to disparage the exhibition, which must have required near superhuman diplomacy and extraordinary funds to get the important loans on view. It’s the kind of thing that only monumental museums like the Met can mount.

A comparison between Michelangelo’s unfinished bust of Brutus (1539-40) and a finished bust of Julius Caesar (1512-14) by Andrea di Pietro di Marco Ferrucci calls the Ferrucci “delicately ornate,” setting up a contrast with the far more muscular, bulked up unfinished face of Brutus. Caesar is approximately life-size, while Brutus is about double life size and on a much higher pedestal, accentuating the curatorial position that the Ferrucci is an inferior work. I found the Ferrucci extremely touching in its expression of thoughtful honesty, and the figure seemed aristocratic as opposed to the rougher aspect of the Brutus. As the label observes, Ferrucci’s mastery of marble carving served him, and Michelangelo, well when he was “head of the workshop in San Lorenzo in 1524.” The sculpture of Julius Caesar is a pretty wonderful object, beautifully executed and not all that much more “delicately ornate” than Michelangelo works closer to it in date, such as the St. Peter’s Pietá and the Bruges Madonna.