Current and Upcoming Museum Exhibits of Interest

At the British Museum:

Female figure sculpted from steatite.  Found at
Grimaldi, Italy, about 20,000 years old.

Ice Age art -- Arrival of the modern mind

7 February – 26 May 2013

About the exhibition

An exhibition 40,000 years
in the making.

Discover masterpieces from the last Ice Age drawn from across Europe in this groundbreaking show. Created by artists with modern minds like our own, this is a unique opportunity to see the world's oldest known sculptures, drawings and portraits.
These exceptional pieces will be presented alongside modern works by Henry Moore, Mondrian and Matisse, illustrating the fundamental human desire to communicate and make art as a way of understanding ourselves and our place in the world.
Ice Age art was created between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago and many of the pieces are made of mammoth ivory and reindeer antler. They show skilful, practised artists experimenting with perspectives, scale, volumes, light and movement, as well as seeking knowledge through imagination, abstraction and illusion.
One of the most beautiful pieces in the exhibition is a 23,000-year-old sculpture of an abstract figure from Lespugue, France. Picasso was fascinated with this figure and it influenced his 1930s sculptural works.
Although an astonishing amount of time divides us from these Ice Age artists, such evocative pieces show that creativity and expression have remained remarkably similar across thousands of years.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

I may have already featured this exhibit, but it's worth reviewing again.

Buddhism Along the Silk Road
5th–8th Century

June 2, 2012–February 10, 2013Gallery 251

Drawing together objects from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the western reaches of Central Asia—regions connected in the sixth century A.D. through trade, military conquest, and the diffusion of Buddhism—the exhibition illuminates a remarkable moment of artistic exchange. At the roots of this transnational connection is the empire established the end of the fifth century by the Huns (Hunas or Hephthalites) that extended from Afghanistan to the northern plains of India. Although this political system soon disintegrated into chaos, over the next century trade routes connecting India to the western reaches of the Central Asian Silk Road continued to link these distant communities, facilitating ideological exchange and financing the production of Buddhist imagery of great artistic sophistication.

By the fifth century, Buddhism had been thriving in Gandhara and the Swat Valley (northern Pakistan) for six hundred years, financed by the extensive trade that flowed through the Khyber and Karakorum passes. Trade with the Mediterranean began with an overland route established by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C. By 50 B.C. maritime routes allowed merchants to sail down the Red Sea and to take advantage of monsoon winds to cross the Arabian Sea and reach ports along the west coast of India. Trade goods were transported along the Indus River up to Gandhara and then to China via routes passing through Afghanistan or over high Himalayan passes and then through Central Asia.

Between 450 and 520 this trade pattern was disrupted by an invasion of nomadic people from the Central Asian Steppes. They swept through Afghanistan, Gandhara, the Swat Valley, and Kashmir, eventually reaching the plains of north India. The invaders probably comprised several Hun groups known by various names—notably the Hephthalites in Gandhara and the Hunas in India. They ruled briefly in Gandhara and Kashmir and fought battles in north India that destabilized the Gupta Empire. Of great significance, these invasions brought north India in contact with Kashmir, Gandhara, and, ultimately, Afghanistan. As a consequence, the Gupta artistic style of north India pervaded the Buddhist art of Kashmir and the Swat Valley, reaching as far as Afghanistan.

These invasions also appear to have forced Gandharan monks into Afghanistan and western Central Asia, and a corresponding taste for Gandharan classical forms became important at Buddhist centers in these areas. In Central Asia, prosperous Buddhist complexes were established at oases and urban centers that served as way stations for traders crossing the vast deserts. This exhibition focuses on the western regions of Central Asia in the Tarim basin—sites such as Kizil, Turfan, and Khotan—where contact with Afghanistan and, by extension, Gandhara and ultimately north India is evident. The sites around Khotan are especially interesting, as they sit at the mouth of a pass that crossed the high Himalayas to reach Gandhara and the Swat Valley.

The trade systems extending down into India and overland as far as Iran and Iraq affected the lives of nomadic peoples living in the vast expanse of Central Asia. Elite goods such as textiles provide a glimpse into the nature of this trade, and prestige items such as gold ornaments give us a sense of the tastes of these prosperous nomadic communities. These nomads are often overlooked, as they did not build cities or temples, but they were both wealthy and militarily powerful and played an important role in the artistic development of the Central Asian community.

The Lourve Museum:

Not exactly a temporary exhibit, but the totally revamped Islamic Art section of The Lourve opened in September.  There are several videos at the museum's website but I was not able to embed any of them here.  Worth a look at though! 

The New Department of Islamic Art

The Department of Islamic Art is the newest department in the Musée du Louvre. Created in 2003, its refurbishment has been underway since 2008. From September 2012 it is due to reopen in a completely new, restyled setting, which will provide its collections with a space befitting their prominence within the museum.

 

Islamic Gallery Now Open at the Met

If I didn't already have more reasons than I can count on my 10 fingers to plan Trip No. 3 back to New York City, this news would be impetus enough!  I do not agree with the propagandic tone of this article that appears to be saying all things great and wonderful are Islamic, but I do agree that the ancient artwork is precious, beautiful and priceless, expressing an esthetic that has been utterly lost to us.

A Cosmopolitan Trove of Exotic Beauty
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: October 27, 2011

New York City is just days away from a long-awaited Arab autumn.

In 2003 the Islamic galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art closed for renovation, and one of the world’s premier collections of Islamic art more or less vanished into storage.

The timing, barely two years after the events of Sept. 11, was unfortunate, if unavoidable. Just when we needed to learn everything we could about Islamic culture, a crucial teaching tool disappeared.

As of Tuesday the learning can go forward. The Met’s Islamic collection returns to view in what are now being called the galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia.

The new, much expanded installation — organized by Sheila Canby, the curator in charge of the department of Islamic art, with Navina Najat Haidar as project coordinator — is as intelligent as it is visually resplendent. The art itself, some 1,200 works spanning more than 1,000 years, is beyond fabulous. An immense cultural vista — necessary, liberating, intoxicatingly pleasurable — has been restored to the city.

As its title implies, that vista has been carefully thought out and framed. Rather than presenting Islamic art as the product of a religiously driven monoculture encompassing centuries and continents, the Met is now — far more realistically — approaching it as a varied, changing, largely secular phenomenon, regionally rooted but absorptively cosmopolitan, affected by the intricacies and confusions of history, including the history that the art itself helped to create.

At the same time certain visual binders are evident. You see one — language — the instant you enter the first gallery. The written word is omnipresent. Whether in the form of love poems, proverbs or passages from Islam’s holy book, the Koran, calligraphy spreads like a fine net over everything, creating an art that almost literally speaks.

“Praise be to God, the King, the pure Truth,” declares a precious scrap of ninth-century silk in characters stitched in red thread. “Planning before work protects you from regret,” intones a big white 10th-century plate that, given the perfect placement of the inscription around its rim, seems to have heeded its own advice. And from a gloriously colored openwork jug — turquoise on top of cobalt blue, day on top of night — a voice as soft as a sigh shares a lover’s confidence: “One moment, while sitting face to face with her I tied my soul, like my heart, to the end of her curls.”

In the context of Islamic art, language is transferable to almost any surface, on almost any scale. And some insist that you can’t really know this art until you’ve experienced Islamic architecture: grand palaces like the Alhambra, tombs like the Taj Mahal or houses of worship like the Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, all embroidered with inscriptions.

The Met galleries convey some sense of monumentality in a few long-familiar works. The great 11-foot-high mosaic-tiled 14th-century mihrab, or prayer niche, from a religious school in Isfahan is one. The intact wood-paneled reception hall known as the Damascus Room, decorated with poetic verses that have been placed in proper order with this reinstallation, is another.

Then there are carpets, portable monuments. The Met has spectacular examples. The Simonetti Carpet, woven around 1500 in Cairo and named for a 20th-century owner, is nearly 30 feet long. In dim quarters in the old Islamic galleries it was hard to appreciate. Now displayed in a high, wide room designed by Michael Batista, the Met’s exhibition design manager, and atmospherically lighted by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, its garden-and-lawn colors — rose reds, grass greens — look tender with fresh life.

Carpets like this one, emerging from imperial ateliers, are partly about look-at-me largeness. But they’re also about close-up detail, and this is the real story of the art of the Islamic world, and certainly of the examples gathered at the Met.

It is over all an art of intimacy; about one-on-one encounters with individual objects, more often than not quite small; and about the endlessly varied orchestration of a small number of visual motifs and mediums, and the minute felicities such variation generates. The alert eye will spot some of the motifs right away: besides the written word, there are images of stars, flowers, figures and abstract shapes, each migrating from one kind of object to another within a fixed repertory of mediums: textiles, ceramics, manuscripts, and so on.       

Choose any motif or medium, and it will set you traveling. Images of animals will take you from a gnarled little camel-shaped bottle made with Roman glassmaking techniques in Syria in the seventh or eighth century, to a hefty lion-shaped bronze incense burner from 12th-century Iran, to a sculptural knot of predatory beasts — a dragon attacking a lion attacking a deer — perched on the hilt of a 16th-century Indian dagger.

A gallery of Ottoman Turkish art is a floral detonation, with blossoms imported from China, Persia, India and Europe streaming over textiles and landing on plates, helmets and the most beautiful prayer rug in the world. If glass is your passion, a lineup of mosque lamps, enameled and translucent, from Egypt and Syria will be heaven.

Metalwork connoisseurs will beat a path to a 13th-century brass brazier inlaid with impossibly refined silver and copper designs, and to an astrolabe that calculates your geographic coordinates, your horoscope and the precise times for daily prayer.

If your point of reference in art is the human form, you’ll find it — aggressive, ethereal and absurd — in manuscript paintings, the most famous being illustrations for the 16th-century edition of the “Shahnama,” or “Book of Kings,” produced under the art-obsessed and faith-obsessed Persian emperor Shah Tahmasp.

Written around A.D. 1000 as a chronicle of the pre-Islamic kings of Iran, the “Shahnama,” at least in painters’ hands, is history set in a Never Never Land of martial derring-do and mystical raptures. Heroes skewer demons in lavender landscapes; angels drop from gilded skies to help when things go awry. In the 16th-century edition’s very first painting, “The Ship of Shi’ism,” the Prophet Muhammad appears, his face veiled and wreathed in a halo of flames, as if to extend blessings over what will follow.

For more than four centuries those blessings held, but the book’s modern history has been a disaster. In 1959 the American collector Arthur A. Houghton Jr. bought the “Shahnama” with its original 258 paintings still miraculously intact. Then, committing what some scholars consider one of the notable art crimes of the 20th century, he took the book apart and began dispersing its pages; he gave 78 sheets to the Met and auctioned others. After his death in 1990 his estate tried to sell surviving pages of the book to the Iranian government but ended up exchanging them for an American painting that Iran owned but no longer wanted, Willem de Kooning’s “Women III” from 1952-53. A good deal? You can judge for yourself with a visit to the de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

The Met’s Islamic reinstallation, which includes (temporarily) a somewhat obsequious tribute to collectors past and present, is mum on all of this, as is the collection catalog, doubtless in part because Mr. Houghton was a long-time Met trustee. Also the story is old, and not so unusual. [Maybe, but he still sucks.]

Art has always reflected what’s wrong about people as much as what’s right about them. In image after image, beauty is countered by cruelty; utopianism by power grabs. Paradise gardens and battlefields make equally desirable real estate. Yet if treasured objects almost invariably come with ethical ambiguities, one thing is certain: Those objects do keep coming, as recent arrivals attest.

One, on loan to the Met from the Hispanic Society of America, is a tiny Hebrew bible written by a Sephardic scribe named Moshe b. Ya’akov Qalif. When he was working in Seville, in 1472, the once pervasive Muslim presence barely clung to life in Spain, yet the exquisite micrographic interlaces that adorn and shape his text are almost identical to those in Koranic illuminations.

And in the last of the new galleries, devoted to Islamic art in South Asia, comes a 2011 Met acquisition that’s a real surprise. It’s [an] album painting with a Hindu theme: the fierce goddess Bhairavi dancing up a spiritual storm in a cremation ground. The picture is thought to have been a collaboration between two 17th-century Mughal court painters, Payag and Abid, one Hindu, the other Muslim. It was probably commissioned by the Muslim emperor Shah Jahan as a gift to a friend, the Hindu ruler Rana Jagat Singh, who worshipped the goddess.

Here — and over and over again through 15 galleries and across more than a millennium — we’re reminded how fluid a concept Islamic art can be, and often is. If we could ask for only one lesson learned from the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks, surely freedom from essentialist thinking would be the necessary one. That’s the direction the Met’s new galleries take us this fall. In the bargain they give us beauty, spring fresh and second to none.

Lod Mosaic

The incredible Lod mosaic (Roman, c. 300 CE) is on display for a limited time at the Met (through April 3, 2011).  Here is a screen shot close-up of some of the exotic animals depicted in the mosaic, including a wonderful elephant complete with the distinct "criss-cross" pattern to represent the elephant's unique skin texture.

The Met Puts on a Show!

A cool show at the Metrpolitan Museum of Art - for people there or who will be visiting New York, check this out:

Timeless Tales:
Aesop's Fables & The Chess Game
New York Chamber Soloists

The music...simply wonderful...its perky leitmotifs...capturing the quirkiness and beauty of Carroll's text.
—Lewis Carroll Society of North America

Timeless Tales
Saturday, October 2, 2010, 3:00 PM
Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
$30.00  Buy Tickets

The Soloists:
Melvin Kaplan, oboe
Jennifer Grim, flute
Curtis Macomber, violin
Adam Grabois, cello
Elizabeth Metcalfe, piano
Ynez Lynch, viola, narrator

Alice being chastised by the Red Queen.

Music and narration of two timeless tales - Aesop's Fables and The Chess Game - to excite and enchant both the young and the young at heart.

The Chess Game, by Gerald Fried is a brilliant musical piece with narration of three scenes from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (the sequel to Alice in Wonderland) which was commissioned by the New York Chamber Soloists. Based on a game of chess, played on a giant chessboard. Most of the main characters in the story are represented by a chess piece, with Alice herself being a pawn.

Gerald Fried is best known for his works for film and television, including the music score for Stanley Kubrick's films and many Star Trek episodes.


How I miss New York!  It was love at first sight.  What a fantastic city.  I will visit again.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Annual Appeal

I have to say, the Met sure does hire the most charming fund-raisers, LOL!  Last year I talked to a fellow with a decided British accent and he listened with sympathy to my tale of hearing critters in the attic - that was a few days before the exterminator came.  Thankfully no critters (mice) since then, keeping me up with their scampering about on the other side of the ceiling above my bed!  Tonight I answered the phone and it was a fellow who transplanted himself from New York (still has a trace of accent) to LA - poor fellow.  We had a lovely chat about the crappy weather and the earthquake that happened about 80 miles to the south which was also felt here, 4.3 on the Richter scale, about 4 a.m.  I was blissfully unaware - it was one of the times I was actually sleeping during what was otherwise a restless night, waking up what seemed like every 60 to 90 minutes. 

New York transplant man was calling about the Met's Annual Appeal, and he recommended that I do a search at the Met website for Joan of Arc, which was a painting he saw during his last (recent) visit home to NYC.  He said it looks just like a photograph.  He saw it on the second floor, and he was shocked when I told him during my four previous visits to the Met (maybe it's only three, two in 2006 and one in 2009?) I've never made it into the actual parts of the museum where the paintings are!  I've spent the bulk of my time on the first and second floor antiquities sections!

I did make a pledge, but I had intended to do so this year anyway, without any call from a charming man.  But it sure was nice to get that call.  I wonder - do they maintain files on their members - "Jan Newton.  Female of a 'certain age.'  Good for $50 a year plus her annual membership renewal of $50; likes to speak to charming gentlemen."  LOL! 

I believe this is the painting of which he spoke and I do think it looks very  much like a photograph - except for those spirit 'saints' sort of hanging around in the background.  Could have been demons, for all we know.  Poor Joan, she didn't know the difference.  And in the end, it didn't make any difference.  In the face of her incredible power to inspire an entire army, the powers that be at the time were not about to let her stick around to perhaps challenge them in the not-too-distant-future.  They would have got rid of Joan one way or another - but to discredit her as a 'heretic' and then burning her to death - ahhh, now that was just too good a denouement for certain assholes to resist.  Sort of reminds me of what is going on in Iran and China today, with the latest crop of people tagged as "dissidents."

Joan of Arc, 1879

Jules Bastien-Lepage (French, 1848–1884)
Oil on canvas
100 x 110 in. (254 x 279.4 cm)
Signed, dated, and inscribed (lower right): J.BASTIEN-LEPAGE / DAMVILLERS Meuse / 1879
Gift of Erwin Davis, 1889 (89.21.1)

New York Adventures 2

Yesterday we spent the entire day at the Met. (The Great Hall at the Met, shot from the balcony overlooking the main entrance) There was a walking tour with lecture on ancient Egyptian medicine that dondelion and I wanted to do at 10:00 a.m. We arrived about 10 minutes before the start and were the first ones waiting in the gathering area for the group. Dr. David Minninberg of the staff was to give the presentation. There was an older gentleman standing in the same area and dondelion, who never listens to a word I say, asked him if this was the place to wait for the Egyptian tour, and the gentleman said yes, it was. It seemed that we three were going to be the only ones on the tour. I had a sneaking suspicion that the older gentleman was, in fact, Dr. Minninberg, but I didn't mention this to Mr. Don, who would not have listened to me anyway. But, about 1 minute before the tour was to start, several other people showed up. In all, I'd say there were perhaps 10 of us. About 1 minute after 10, the older gentleman stepped forward and introduced himself - he was Dr. Minninberg - and he escorted us across the great hall into the Egyptian wing. The tour was underway. It was a fascinating hour. The group being small, we were all able to ask questions and our guide was entertaining as well as informative. I learned quite a bit I did not know before about ancient Egyptians and their practice of medicine, both practi cal and what we would call magic, and it was fascinating. (The yellow and green vases are shaped like pommegranites and were used for a special elixir made out of the seeds) The time flew by. Afterward Don and I stayed behind and had a chance to ask Dr. Minninberg a few more questions, and spoke with him for about another 15 minutes. Then I pulled Mr. Don away (he could talk about Egypt 24/7) and steered him back toward the rest of the Egyptian Wing, where we happily spent time until about 2:30 when we ran outside for a quick lunch break (New York hot dogs from one of the street vendors) and were entertained by a very talented street singer. We were back inside by 3 p.m., where we took in the exhibits of second floor balcony area that include Islamic art and artifacts from all along the Silk Road. Mr. Don took 115 photos yesterday - I don't remember how many I snapped. Mr. Don stayed on his feet longer than I did so he had more. I finally could not stand up another second more and I went back to the great hall, hoping to find a seat, while Mr. Don finished taking his photos. I was luck to snag a corner seat on one of the large high-backed benches, and was able to rest for about 15 minutes with my head back, eyes closed, ignoring the din around me, until Mr. Don reappeared at my side. As usual, the walk back to the hotel did not seem as long as the walk to the museum that morning. It was only 4 miles round trip plus all the walking we did inside, but to me it felt like 40 miles! (Our feet - Mr. Don's are the long skinny ones, mine are the short fat ones) We got back to the hotel about 5:30 where we both promptly collapsed on the sofa; but I later ventured forth for food, located a grocery store and got some goodies, a drug store where I picked up a few items and stopped at McDonalds. We spent the rest of the evening watching t.v. I was too tired to do anything else. Goddess, that Big Mac sure tasted good! I haven't had one in a long time. I noticed last night that I got sunburnt on the "v" of my neckline, and my face was definitely pink! So much for the supposed sunscreen protection in my face cream and makeup! When we get back home I'll put up lots of the photos we took at Goddesschess.

News from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Some news from the January-February, 2008 Exhibitions & Programs Calendar. Of interest to Goddesschess, the museum has opened two new galleries: one for Oceanic Art (opened November 14, 2007) , and one for the Art of Native North America (also opened November 14, 2007). Despite spending nearly two full days at the Met during our Goddesschess anniversary trip in September, 2005, we did not have the time to devote to the art collections in the Africa, Oceania, and the Americas "Michael C. Rockefeller Wing." Perhaps next trip! The Met always has outstanding special exhibits. Through March 2, 2008: "Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary." dondelion is fascinated by African art, finding many motifs in common with those in ancient Egypt and Libya, including some votive iconography and the ever-present checkerboard pattern, that is nearly as old as man himself. And through February 18, 2008: "Gifts for the Gods: Images from Egyptian Temples." dondelion and I spent most of one full day just exploring the Egyptian Galleries at the Met - glorious, fabulous! I wish we could see this special exhibition. We believe that the most ancient art can teach us much today about the origins of board games, if only we take the time to study the cultural and religious beliefs underlying the art. Explore the Met online.