The Met's New European Galleries: The Good, the Bad and the Dumbed Down

Gary Tinterow, the Met's curator in charge of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art, showing off the new galleries to the press.

The Metropolitan Museum's renovated galleries for 19th- and 20th-century European paintings and sculpture provide 8,000 square feet of additional space (the Henry J. Heinz II Galleries) for more art---always a good thing, but particularly welcome when a collection is as deep as the Met's.

But just how much of a good thing it is depends on how well the project is executed. In this case, the blessing is mixed.

I enjoyed the most obvious crowd-pleaser---the Wisteria Dining Room (with original furnishings and decorations). The Met says it is the only French Art Nouveau interior on display in an American museum. I also enjoyed a more unassuming room, the new gallery given over to picture postcard-like gems---small, plein-air oil sketches by such lesser-knowns as Granet, Bertin and Rémond. Many of these are either from the collection of Wheelock Whitney III (which has recently come to the Met as partial purchases and promised gifts) or works from retired New York dealer Eugene Thaw. The Met's associate curator Rebecca Rabinow told me that Thaw has given or pledged these works, to be shared between the Met and the Morgan Library & Museum.

I had a nice sit-down with Rebecca (who informed me that she reads CultureGrrl..."we all do"). In an unguarded moment, I mentioned to her that I thought some of the works that had been hauled out of storage might better have been left there.

She immediately demanded an example. I unhesitatingly replied:

Detail: Giovanni Boldini, "Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, and Her Son Lord Ivor Spencer-Churchill"

Rebecca confided that when she saw this painting listed among those being considered for display, she wrote a big NO next to it, but was "overruled." Rebecca is my middle name. Great Beckys think alike.

That said, there were other works newly hung that I was very glad had surfaced, notably William Blake's "The Angel Gabriel Appearing to Zacharias," which, of course, appealed to the college literature major in me.

But back to Boldini: What made this saccharine, slapdash society portrait, with its strangely cartoonish physiognomies, even MORE irritating was the fatuous label describing the duchess:

In addition to being one of the era's most lavish and ambitious hostesses, she was also active in politics and social causes. In England she campaigned for the rights of women; in France she devoted much of her later life to the care of the sick and underprivileged children.

Unfortunately, far too many of labels, even for much more important works, read like the Boldini balderdash---telling us more than we wanted to know about the personnages portrayed, but not nearly enough about what made these paintings worthy of our attention as works of art, either art historically or aesthetically. Far too often, the text was superficial and anecdotal, rather than engrossing and scholarly.

Many of the labels were adapted from the new coffeetable book, Masterpieces of European Painting, 1800-1920, that the Met has published in conjunction with the reopening of the European galleries. This compendium suffers greatly in comparison with Met curator Walter Liedtke's recently issued erudite two-volume catalogue (intended for a more serious audience) of the Met's collection of Dutch old masters.

The label-writing is still a work in progress: Rabinow told me that only about one-third of the 600 object labels had been redone for the rehang. Maybe the next 400 will get it right.