Agnolo Bronzino and Dawoud Bey, New York, August 2021

 Working through the past year, in order to get to what's on my mind now.....

I was determined to go to New York to see the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570. so we took the chance and went to New York when Covid was still a concern, but we had been vaccinated. I understood that the exhibition was dominated by portraits by Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) and his circle, with a few additions by other artists (several works by Francesco Salviati (1510-1563), a less-known contemporary of Bronzino, and single portraits by Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, plus sculpted portraits by Benvenuto Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli, and Giambologna). It refers to just a segment of the Medici family, including neither the fifteenth-century profoundly important Cosimo Il Vecchio, Piero, and Lorenzo, nor the later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Medici dukes who led the declining city. 

Both Tom and I were disappointed by the exhibition, For Tom it did not do what it advertised: "Cosimo shrewdly employed culture as a political tool in order to convert the mercantile city into the capital of a dynastic Medicean state, enlisting the leading intellectuals and artists of his time..." He wanted to understand how Cosimo de' Medici used art to promote his agenda and increase his power and international standing, but for Tom the various portraits, many unidentified and many of people not engaged in power building, did not advance his understanding of that mission adequately.

I wanted to see the Bronzino paintings. Looking at my photographs from the exhibition, I'm struck by how wonderful the are, but I also remember having doubts about whether several, which I did not photograph, were actually by Bronzino, I didn't see much about how he employed assistants to make multiple versions of some portraits, and found some of the works by other artists, especially Bronzino's teacher Jacopo Pontormo (1494-1556), especially wonderful. I was particularly troubled by a portrait of Cosimo from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The label says there are almost 30 versions of this portrait and this one, autograph, was given to Paolo Giovio, a physician, writer, and art collector. I wanted to know how many of the portraits are autograph and who else received them, and why giving it to Paolo Giovio mattered, since the label didn't mention Paolo Giovio's influence at the Papal Court, particularly with the Medici Pope Clement VII or the reputation of his collection of portraits. The idea of Bronzino having a sort of portrait factory seemed worth discussion.

photographed at an angle to avoid reflections from glazing

I was doubtful about the authenticity of a small number of the portraits, which looked like Bronzino's work but without the subtlety of his handling of paint. Perhaps they were significantly restored or products of studio assistants. 

There were several portraits of unidentified people who suggest the hauteur of rulers, but add little to the narrative of the exhibition. A wonderful example is the Woman with a Lapdog from the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt, which we were fortunate to see again in its home institution in June, 2022.

If you're going to show so many portraits by Bronzino, it would help to give more indication of his other paintings patronized by the Medici, for example the monumental fresco of the Martyrdom of San Lorenzo in the Medici church of the same name in Florence, or the renowned and infinitely reproduced Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time allegory in the National Gallery in London. Bronzino's people seem to be made of something hard, the light that molds their faces and hands is bright and cold, and their expressions are reserved, proud, and distant. 

Finally, the Pontormo portraits were wonderful, softer than Bronzino's very marble-like figures and strange in their own way. This example of a Man with a Book, also indicates the wide-ranging sources of loans for the exhibition; it was not an easy show to organize. This painting is from the Collezione Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti per l'Arts, on long-term loan to Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporaneo, Rivoli, Turin (CC.3P.PON.1534.A195). 

Drawn to New York by the Medici show, we stayed for several days and visited other museums, as well as the new little island on the West Side near the Whitney. We saw fabulous Cezanne drawings and Automania at MOMA, the Frick Collection's installation at the old Whitney, Bibiena stage designs at the Morgan Library, the art at the new Penn Station, Craft in Art 1950-2019 at the Whitney, and the Maya Lin installation at Madison Square Park.

A year later, I'm particularly struck by the exhibition we saw at the Whitney, Dawoud Bey: An American Project. Bey is a photographer whose work has captured my attention since the first time I saw it quite a few years ago. The Whitney's labels aptly describe Bey's purposes and interests, and I'm copying a bit of the text referring to Harlem U.S.A., an early series: "Drawn to the neighborhood as both a symbol of and a wellspring for Black American culture, Bey wanted to portray its residents as complex individuals in images free of stereotype...it was critical to Bey that the work be shown in the community where they were made, allowing the people he was representing to have access to the work they inspired." Bey's large photographs give power to his subjects, in a completely different context and medium, that seems to me somehow still a version of what Bronzino was doing in the 16th century. My photographs are inadequate, so I'm hoping links to the NY Times review of the exhibition, the Whitney announcement of the exhibition provide some images, as well as information. I was especially drawn to the large-format Polaroid image of Kerry James Marshall and Cheryl Lynn Bruce, 1993, titled Kerry and Cheryl I. 

One series in the exhibition, shown in its own gallery, was particularly moving. As the label reminds us, on September 15, 1963 the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four girls and two boys were killed. For the 50th anniversary of the bombing, Bey made paired portraits of Birmingham residents, one the age the victim of the attack died and one the age he or she would have been in 2012. He made the photographs in the Bethel Baptist Church, an early civil rights headquarters, and the Birmingham Art Museum, which in 1963 admitted Black visitors only one day a week. Here's one of the images:

Betty Selvage and Faith Speights, from The Birmingham Project, 2012
Rennie Collection, Vancouver