Newman's Own at the Met: Less Ego, More Filling

David Smith's "Song of the Landscape" in front of Jackson Pollock's "Number 28, 1950" in the Met's Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman installation

Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman's benefaction to the Metropolitan Museum of 63 objects from her collection of Abstract Expressionist and other modern works (55 of which are now on display) is notable not only for its high quality but also for its admirable selflessness.

Roberta Smith, in her laudatory NY Times review of the collection last Friday, and the Met's own senior consultant, Nan Rosenthal, speaking to me at the Newman press preview, separately lamented the unfortunate fragmentation of the museum's encyclopedic holdings into fiefdoms carved out by individual collectors who insisted, as a condition of their gifts, that their treasures be allotted their own galleries, segregated from related works.

After the current display (to Feb. 3) in celebration of the gift, the Newman works will be integrated with the Met's existing 20th-century collection. This means, for example, that her Pollock drip painting, "Number 28, 1950," can be hung in proximity to the Met's great "Autumn Rhythm" of the same year.

Roberta mentioned "the desultory effects" of donor restrictions that have caused the Met's Renaissance paintings to be scattered "in three places: the Robert Lehman Wing, the Jack and Belle Linsky Galleries and European painting galleries."

She might also have mentioned such other Met fiefdoms as the Walter Annenberg Galleries of 19th- and 20th-century European paintings and the Benjamin Altman Galleries of old masters, as well as one closer in timeframe to the Newman collection---the galleries set aside, at the donors' insistence, for the School of Paris masterpieces bequeathed in 1998 by Jacques and Natasha Gelman. This has caused the unfortunate estrangement, for example, of their 1906 Picasso self-portrait, once owned by Gertrude Stein, from another of Stein's Picassos, his renowned portrait of her from the same year.

Here's what Rosenthal had to say about this fragmentation of installations, when I spoke to her recently at the Newman press preview:

It would be nice if the Gelman collection were integrated with the collection. Other donors of works of the period...did not demand a separate space the way the Gelmans did. But the museum felt the work was of a quality that it would accede to that demand.

I think the Met had a lot of catch-up to do at the time when the Gelman Collection was to be given. Between the catch-up and the quality, I would go along with it. But it would be ideal if the museum had a policy of not doing such a thing, it seems to me.

It seems to me, too.