The Cloisters and Metropolitan

I have spent the last day looking at (mostly medieval) art with my new favorite museumgoing partner.  I'm in Teaneck, staying with the Feldmans, and Peninah and I took the bus across the Hudson to visit the Cloisters, New York's European monastery, imported piecemeal by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  We had been up since before seven that morning, and arrived at the Cloisters at 10:00 am.  I haven't been to the Cloisters since I accompanied the rest of Mrs. P-B's Medieval History class, when I was a senior in High School, nearly four years ago (and the only time before that was also with Mrs. P-B, come to think of it, when I was a High School sophomore).  Very little has changed, but more significantly, Peninah is such a great traveling buddy, and knows New York City's public transportation system far better than I do.

We saw some amazing pieces in the Cloisters.  Although there were many pieces that I remember having seen before, such as Robert Campin's Merode triptych, the hunting-themed playing cards, Rogier van der Weyden's Nativity, the series of Unicorn tapestries, and the arcades and courtyards of the Cloister buildings themselves, all of these felt refreshingly new and interesting.  To some extent, I owe this to my energetic traveling companion, who pointed out to me at least one detail I had never before noticed about every piece that we discussed.  To some extent, I'd like to think, this was due to my deeper appreciation of art history, specifically knowledge of technique and style, and their relationship to geography and chronology, thanks to my exposure to Western art in European art museums and in Professor Lazzaro's class.  Regardless, it was good to revisit these pieces, as well as to notice pieces that I had never noticed or admired before.  For instance, I had never noticed the 12th-century pane of stained glass from Canterbury Cathedral, depicting the martyrdom (by fire) of Saint Lawrence.  Although the Cloisters have some pretty amazing pieces, I had never realized that they had stained glass surviving from the largest cathedral in England!  Likewise, I don't think that I had ever noticed the fully-illuminated copy of Saint Augustine's City of God (I hadn't read the Confessions the last time I visited, and may not have recognized the book's historical significance).  Likewise, I had never noticed the Cloister's pilgrimage badges before, again, because I don't think that I knew what pilgrimage badges were (in my mind, devised by the same kind of mind that came up with tiny Eiffel Tower keychains).  I know for certain that I never would have spent as much time scrutinizing the long genealogical tree of Jesus, dating from 13th-century England, had Peninah and I not tried to figure out all of the links in the chain.  Unfortunately, our games of name-that-apostle showed that neither of us really can interpret most the distinguishing symbols added by the artist, beyond maybe the keys always held by Saint Peter.  You see a row of twelve guys, and all of them are holding books, and most of them have beards -- how on earth do you tell one from the other?  Art historians can, but I know that I certainly can't.  I learned in the course of this, and in attempts to identify Biblical scenes in tapestries that Peninah is far better at reading artwork than I am.  One art style that we both could recognize was the glazed Andalusian pottery: the Muslim influence is very obvious in medieval Spanish Christian art.  The Cloisters were full, if not crowded, mostly by Europeans, if the languages that I overheard were any indication of nationality.  I guess that Europeans visit the great City of New York at about this time of year, and find that the most cultured part of town is imported from home.  That's just my guess.

Despite some subway (I'm not allowed to call it "The Metro") issues that arose involving broken ticket machines, we made it to the strip of Museums on the East Side.  Although we had already paid admission to the cloisters, which got us in to the Metropolitan Museum for free, we still needed to wait in what was a very, very long line of tourists, just to enter.  Luckily, the line went very quickly, and it turned out that the amount of time it takes to wait in line to visit the Metropolitan Museum is almost exactly the amount of time that it takes to eat a sandwich, luckily for us.  Checking our bags would have been nuts, so we headed straight towards the galleries of European paintings, at my request.  We saw some Georges de la Tour, some Goya, and some Caravaggesque paintings, before we hit all of the Dutch landscapes.  While Peninah sat for a moment to look at a Dutch countryside, I darted off to look at a Vermeer painting that I hadnoticed, that I didn't recognize, "A Maid Asleep," circa 1670-1674. I was suddenly surrounded by a Japanese tour group, all clustered around the Vermeer painting, and I eventually extricated myself to find Peninah, passing some Rembrandt self-portraits on the way.  We came out to the balcony to find the display of musical instruments that Peninah wanted to see, including some horns with unpronounceable names and indescribably contorted shapes.  She has the pictures on her phone, if you're ever interested.  Across the courtyard was a fantastic display of 19th-century American glasswork and ceramics.  It was mostly functional tableware: bottles, flasks, vases, cruets, that kind of thing.  The difference between antebellum and postwar work was obvious: art became significantly more decorative and skillfully-wrought after 1865.  Peninah was particularly impressed by a lemonade glass, I believe from the 1870s or 1880s, and neither of us could exactly tell what a "celery vase" was, although we saw several.  There were a lot of ugly, ostentatious pieces, many of them from Tiffany's.  My new word of the day was "opalescent."

We found ourselves in the American wing.  We ended up visiting some cramped period rooms (where we learned what differentiates a chocolate pot from a teapot), some of them courtesy of the Van Renselear family, and seeing a special exhibit on women's sports clothing from the interwar period, which I wish my Mother had been present in order to see.  We also discovered the concept of "open storage:" the Metropolitan allows museumgoers to visit its storerooms of furniture and paintings not on display.  Much of it is fairly nondescript, and I can easily understand why it isn't out.  In one row of otherwise plain furniture, were a very remarkable table and desk, which turned out to have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. 

We descended to the galleries of American paintings.  We saw the famous "Washington Crossing the Delaware," an awful lot of official portraits (including much more George Washington), pieces by John Singleton Copley, the Peale family, and Benjamin West.  Those guys.  There was a room full of art that was so ugly that Peninah couldn't bear to stand in it, and, to be honest, I agreed with her.  We had only about thirty minutes left before the museum closed, so we ran off to the opposite wing of the museum to find the Muslim art, from the Abbasid, Spanish Umayyad, and Seljuk periods, in Arab and Persian lands (we never got into the Turkish or later South Asian rooms).  Archaeologists from the Metropolitan had helped to excavate an Iranian site from the 12th century, find all sorts of beautiful art objects and jewelry in their digging.  It made me think: some of these things were surely lost, others left behind.  Why did nobody ever try to recover them?  Surely, if one was fleeing, or going into exile, the bulky bowls that we found whole and undamaged would have been too cumbersome.  But why weren't they looted, or stolen, or recovered?  One of the most interesting pieces we found was world's earliest nearly-complete chess set (it's missing a pawn), from 12th-century Nishapur, Iran.  I wondered how the archaeologists could be certain that the knights, rooks, and bishops were correctly identified (pawns are easy, and the two central pieces, now the King and Queen, but at other times the King and Vizier, closely resemble each other).

It was dark by the time we made it back to Teaneck, but we had had a wonderful (if tiring) day of museums, with no mishaps.  Good going, Peninah!

~JD