De Kooning, Degas, Donatello (to Bellini): Ambitious Loan Shows that Bucked the Permanent-Collection Trend---Part I (with video)

Left to right: De Kooning, "Clam Digger," 1972, private collection
Degas, "Dancer Looking at the Sole of her Right Foot," modeled between 1896-1911, cast between 1921-31, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Donatello, "Reliquary Bust of Saint Rossore," c. 1425, Museo Nationale di San Matteo, Pisa

The Big D's---De Kooning, Degas, Donatello (et al.)---bucked the museum trend this year towards permanent-collection agglomerations, small dossier displays and single-lender shows. The "D" trio, to me, were welcome throwbacks to the extravagant blockbusters of fond memory---sprawling affairs where distinguished curators got free rein to identify, gather, study and explicate great masterpieces drawn from international sources.

I had the highest of expectations for all three---John Elderfield's "De Kooning: A Retrospective" at the Museum of Modern Art (to Jan. 9); George Shackelford's and (from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris) Xavier Rey's Degas and the Nude at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (to Feb. 5) and the latest entrant into the megashow sweepstakes, Keith Christiansen's and (from the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) Stefan Weppelmann's The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (to Mar. 18). The first met my expectations; the second exceeded them; the third, for me, was something of a letdown.

I'll focus today on the last, since piles of deservedly high praise have already been heaped upon  MoMA's and the BMFA's curatorial tours de force (which I hope to discuss in "Part II," next week).

The Metropolitan Museum's exploration of the origins of portraiture in 15th-century and very early 16th-century Italy is an impressive feat of masterpiece wrangling---an absorbing array of some 160 works, including key examples, roped in from a wide variety of international sources and informed by the Met's high level of scholarship.

For example, two meant-for-each-other busts---separately owned by European museums---were reunited for this occasion. The far more expressive, realistically rendered terracotta served as model for the formal marble portrait:














Benedetto da Maiano, "Filippo Strozzi,"1475: Left, terracotta, Staatliche Museum, Berlin; right, marble, the Louvre

But notwithstanding the high points, I found the cumulative effect of the show's refined but often stolid countenances to be numbing, with occasional jolts of flesh-and-blood energy. Mine is an admittedly minority view among the reviewers who have weighed in so far. Others apparently arrived with the same high anticipation (scroll to bottom) that I had, but left feeling that their expectations had been fulfilled.

When I visited the show for a second time (the first being the press preview), on the Friday before Christmas, the galleries (happily for me) were far from packed, perhaps because most people were engaged in gift wrapping and family-feast preparations:



No blockbuster buzz had been jumpstarted by the favorable NY Times review published that same morning by Ken Johnson, who approvingly noted that "there is hardly a person pictured in the show whom you could not pick out of a police lineup." To me, though, the show brought to mind not so much a police lineup as the composite sketches disseminated by police of unapprehended perps, whose physiognomies aren't precisely known. The broad characteristics are there, but the facial particularities and psychological depth aren't.

From the evidence of this show, 15th-century Italian painters were just beginning to explore the potential of a genre that was later brought to glorious fruition by the likes of Titian and Raphael. At the press preview, Christiansen told us that "you will find over and over again that it's sculptors who are the innovators, painters who respond and follow." Perhaps that's because it is more natural to model lifelike flesh-and-blood in three dimensions than to evoke it with pigments on a flat surface.

Even the relief portraits on the medals that abundantly punctuate the show outshine most of the paintings when it comes to depicting facial furrows and sagging flesh. Below is a medal of the same person depicted in the terracotta and marble busts above:


Style of Nicolo Fiorentino, "Filippo Strozzi," 1489, National Gallery, Washington

In one important way, this show could have been greatly enlivened. There's an elephant not in the room, whom I haven't yet seen the other reviewers mention---Leonardo da Vinci, whose spirit haunts the show, thanks to the introductory quote that greets visitors as they enter:



Leonardo's words of wisdom sound like a recipe for a police sketch. But for him, coming up with the right nose was just the beginning. There is undoubtedly good reason for the near absence of his sublime achievement in the New York show---his generous representation in the acclaimed show that is now drawing ecstatic crowds to the National Gallery, London---Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (to Feb. 5).

The Met does, however, display one tiny, rapidly executed sketch:


Leonardo da Vinci, "Lorenzo de' Medici," c. 1480, Royal Collection, Windsor Castle

Leonardo had what many of the artists in the Met's show seem to have lacked---the ability to animate his subjects with compelling individuality and magnetic allure. His name is invoked, to the detriment of the Met's show, in a couple of labels, most notably one for Lorenzo di Credi's "Portrait of a Young Woman," which is thought to portray Ginevra de' Benci, the wealthy Florentine merchant's daughter who was much more famously depicted by Leonardo:




Left: Lorenzo di Credi, "Portrait of a Young Woman," c. 1490-1500, Metropolitan Museum; Right: Leonardo da Vinci, "Ginevra de' Benci," c. 1474/1478, Natonal Gallery, Washington (the latter not in the Met's show)

By the Met's own admission (on its label), "Credi was clearly inspired by Leonardo but could not match the subtlety of his imagination or the enigmatic beauty of his paintings."

The other elephants barely in the room are the Netherlandish painters from the same period. A wild-card Memling from the Met's collection is included in the exhibition to show the Netherlandish influence on Italian portraiture (which might in itself make a rewarding comparative exhibition).

According to the Met's label for its "Portrait of a Young Man," Memling's work "was admired for its verisimilitude as well as the air of serenity he invariably gave his sitters."

Aside from the 15th-century garb and coiffure, this looks like someone you might greet on the street:


Hans Memling, "Portrait of a Young Man," c. 1472-75, Metropolitan Museum

For me, the long, sometimes wearying trek through the galleries was amply rewarded near the end, when I came upon this distillation of pure spirituality. I took a deep breath, stopped flitting, and just gaped:


Jacopo Bellini, "Saint Bernardino of Siena," c. 1450-55, private collection

Bellini, we are told, "may have heard him [Saint Bernardino] preach in Ferrara, Venice, or in one of the cities of the Venetian territory. Of all the known paintings of Saint Bernardino, this one has the quality of a firsthand encounter."

It's that immediacy, coupled with a profound view into the soul, that defines painted subjects who stay with us long after we have parted company.

For the more informed, official view of the show (and a look at more of its works), let's now peruse the first five galleries in the company of Christiansen and his curatorial colleague at the Met, Andrea Bayer.