The Met's New Galleries

By A.T.Baker

Wider spaces and perspectives for the 19th century

The 19th century spanned the greatest watershed in the history of Western painting. At its beginning, masters like David and Ingres were producing canvases that Da Vinci or Titian, Botticelh or Durer could have seen without shock, even with admiration, recognizing them as descendants of their own styles. But the work of the painters at century's endMonet's broken colors, Van Gogh's unabashed brushstrokes, Cezanne's blocky formsthey would have regarded with stunned astonishment, perhaps even outrage.

To compass and comprehend such a transformation is a huge undertaking, but last week New York's Metropolitan Museum proved it was equal to the task. It triumphantly opened a set of new galleries that allow the museum to display the full riches of its 19th century collection. Built with a $2.5 million gift from the late Andre Meyer, an investment banker and longtime trustee, the galleries supply more than half an acre of floor space, topped by a vast glass-gridded ceiling that extends, free of supports, over the whole area. The galleries are part of the new southern wing, designed by Kevin Roche/John Dinkeloo, and the huge ceiling provides something almost unique in recent museum constructionnatural light. Special glass on the roof above filters out the ultraviolet light that can damage pigment, while stainless-steel baffles scatter the sun's beams, which are further diffused by pebble-grained glass panels set in the ceiling's grid. The arrangement imparts a subtle variety to many a familiar painting as the sky changes. The impressionists, in particular, take on a new animation, since they painted en plein air and strove to capture the different aspects that nature's changing light could give the same scene.

For lack of space, the Met so far has been unable to show more than one-third of its rich 19th century holdings. Now, with so much floor area at his disposal, Sir John Pope-Hennessy, chief of the Met's Department of European Paintings, has arranged a survey of the century's progress that is unmatched anywhere. The central space is devoted to the century's culminating stylesimpressionism and postimpressionism. With 13 flanking galleries, he could give one to Courbet alone, three to Degas, others to Millet and the Barbizon School. Besides a solid representation of the century's early neoclassicists and a number of Goyas, the new spaces allow a full sampling of the sentimental and pretentious salon art that the century's avant-garde had to contend againstCabanel's sleekly erotic nudes, Meissonier's bombastic battle scenes, Regnault's slyly erotic-exotic Salome, Rosa Bonheur's huge Horse Fair, Bastien-Lepage's sentimentalized Joan of Arc. Of the 22 Courbets, only 8 had been on view in the past; of the 18 Manets, 10; of the 29 Monets, 12. Many of the Met's 40-odd Rodins had not been seen for 20 years.

Even the labels are innovative. Mounted diagonally below each work, they offer not only the date and the place it was created, but also provocative side lights of incident or insight. The caption for David's The Death of Socrates (1787) records that Sir Joshua Reynolds considered it "the greatest effort of art since the Sistine ceiling and Raphael's stanze in the Vatican." Ruskin thought Turner's early The Ferry Beach and Inn at Saltash (1811-12) was "the perfect truth . . . what the mind sees when it looks for poetry in hum ble actual life." And there is Van Gogh's letter to his brother Theo under an 1888 self-portrait: "I prefer painting people's eyes to cathedralsfor there is something in the eyes that is not in the cathedrals, however solemn and imposing the latter may be."

As architecture, the wing has the defects of its virtues. The huge open-span ceiling tends to give the galleries the look of temporary stalls in an open-air market. On a sunny day, the natural light is so intensedespite the bafflesthat a viewer must shade his eyes to screen out glare. And the ingeniously designed Y-shaped islands that separate the individual galleries set up so many planes and angles that one ends up a bit overwhelmed with seeing too much at once: losing that sense of a magic space populated by luminous and ineffable images of beauty, like some aesthetic cave of Aladdin.

There are inevitable gaps in the collectionno museum can (or should) corral all the best works of all the greatest painters. The Met has, for instance, few and only minor Delacroixs, a handful of Constables and only three Turners, though two of them are great ones. But overall, the Met's is an impressive and perceptive presentation that permits a period of art to be seen as it really was, a time when the ar mies of tradition were in the process of being buried, all unaware.

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