Transcendent Galleries

Happiness researchers say that their studies show New Yorkers to be less happy than people in most other parts of the country. Yet millions of people still choose to live in New York. The reason, some psychologists suggest, is that while living in New York may involve a great deal of day-to-day aggravation — which makes one “less happy”— it also affords access to “transcendent moments” that for some people may be more important than mere happiness.Recently I had transcendent moments. I visited the newly reinstalled Wrightsman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then I visited the recently refurbished Fragonard Room at the Frick Collection.The Wrightsman Galleries hold the Met’s fine collection of French furniture and decorative arts of the ancien régime. Much of the collection came from Charles Wrightsman, who died in 1986, and his wife, Jayne. Mrs. Wrightsman made possible the galleries’ renovation. Although conservation work took place, new items were added, and some rearranging was done, the principal change is in the lighting. The Met has installed a fiber-optic system that mimics the original lighting conditions for which these works were created — and simulates different times of day. It’s subtle, it’s ingenious, and though it takes a little while for the eyes to adjust in some places, the effect, overall, is stunning.If you enter the galleries from the Medieval Sculpture Hall, to the south of the Valladolid screen, you enter into a narrow corridor that opens onto a world of wonders. The first thing I noticed were the cherubs above the far doorway, echoing the ones above the doorway through which I entered. One set of cherubs supports the cock, symbol of France, and of Louis XVI; the other set has the Austrian eagle, for Marie Antoinette. These exquisite cherubs, of carved and painted oak and linden wood, date from around 1775.The artist Pierce Rice wrote:Christian or pagan seraphs, putti, amoretti, cupids are indistinguishable from one another. They are the purest of artistic devices, in the absence of any narrative role, and as much a symbol of the West as the acanthus leaf. … Unlike their human counterparts, barely able to support themselves on the railings of their playpens, the babies of Western decoration are in full command of their activity, yet not in the least earthbound. The model is in art itself, and the conditions dictated epitomize the essential nature of pictorial invention.I have always said that a city cannot have too many cherubs — or too many urns. The wall on the right bears the lovely 18th-century oak storefront from the Quai de Bourbon on Paris’s Île St. Louis. On either side of it stand the most beautiful urns, c. 1785, of carved, painted, and marbleized pine.On the left are views into two “period rooms.” The Met’s decision to replicate the original lighting conditions allows us the better to sense how the artists so adroitly manipulated the hallmark forms that belong to the whole of Western art, but that they in their French 18th-century setting made sing with a resonance seldom excelled. Note the spectacular painted boiserie from the Hôtel de Crillon in the 1770s, and the delicate pine relief panels, from a hotel on Bordeaux’s Cours d’Albret in the 1780s.More “period rooms” follow. The installations are superb, mixing and matching elements that did not originally go together but that, juxtaposed, make plain the astounding level of creativity of the French 18th century. A room from the Hôtel de Varengeville, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain on Paris’s Left Bank, has an openness and a loftiness, and makes such superb use of pale cream and gold boiserie and mirrors that, by contrast, the Frank Lloyd Wright living room (which I love) in the American Wing seems like a coffin.A c. 1670 fireplace provides a cherubic eruption in limestone, 100 or more before the cherubs with the cock and the eagle we encountered earlier. The cherubic form recurs throughout our art, perhaps nowhere with such force as in certain paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, the greatest French artist of the 18th century and as talented a painter as ever lived.In the “Progress of Love” and other panels installed in the room at the Frick we see what Pierce Rice memorably called “boisterous effervescence.” Fragonard did so many things so well: his seemingly effortless ability to be intimate and epic in the same picture; his complete command of the human form, and, above all, his unexampled skill in picturing exuberant movement. The Met once had these pictures on loan from J.P. Morgan and expected they’d get them when he died. Instead, J.P. Morgan Jr. sold them to Henry Clay Frick. The room’s superb paneling sets off the paintings beautifully. And one of the Frick’s recent acquisitions adds a touch that enhances the room even more: a Lepaute clock with figures by Clodion (1738–1814), sculpture’s nearest equivalent to Fragonard. As at the Met, the major renovation concerned lighting. A new system by Renfro Design Group provides a more even and natural illumination of the paintings and of the room itself than previously. The Frick believes that the paintings’ illumination now closely approximates that of their first exhibition at Madame du Barry’s Château de Louveciennes in 1773.The Met and the Frick are in the business of providing unhappy New Yorkers their transcendent moments.

Transcendent Galleries

Transcendent Galleries

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