Clouds Gather at the Met

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Chasing Clouds,” has been squirreled away in a corridor of the 19th-century wing. You could be forgiven for not being able to find it. Here’s a clue: Locate a sizable painting of a sunset with clouds, lots of clouds, and you’re almost there. Arkhip Kuindzhi’s “Red Sunset” (1905-08) radiates off the wall with a spectacular sense of light and color. It’s a showpiece, for sure, and considerably more sensational than the paintings, watercolors and photographs installed just around the corner.“Chasing Clouds” favors subtlety in terms of image, media and approach. Along with artworks, an oddment of objects have been gathered, including a camera obscura, a stereoscope, and a “Claude Mirror” (19th century), a pocket-sized mirror that imbued a reflected landscape with an arcadian mien typical of the 17th-century painter Claude Lorrain. ‘Red Sunset’ by Arkhip Kuindzhi, 1905-08. Detail. Wikimedia Commons In writing about clouds, curator Stephen C. Pinson notes that “the challenge of depicting their fleeting forms encouraged experimentation across media, from the immediacy of plein air sketching to novel efforts to overcome the limitations of early photographic processes.” He’s culled the items on exhibit, in large part, from the Met’s holdings.Photographers had a hard time of it back in the day. The technology was new, cameras tended toward the bulky, and processing had to be jiggered when it wasn’t riddled with glitches. Gustave Le Gray’s albumen silver print, “The Great Wave, Sète” (1857), couldn’t be more stirring with its muscular plash of oncoming waves, keening light and rush of clouds, but it’s not true or, rather, it’s only partially true. ‘The Pavillon de Flore and the Tuileries Gardens,’ by Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat and Stanislas Rates, 1849. Detail. Via the Metropolitan Museum of ArtEmulsions of the time weren’t able to capture the entirety of a tonal range under focus: Achieving an equivalency between land and sky was difficult. The solution? Mash up two separate negatives, print them on a single sheet of paper, and hope that no one noticed the discrepancies in light and form.Additional photos testify to how a documentary art form is prone to fictionalizing. Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat and Stanislas Ratel masked portions of the purview in “The Pavillon de Flore and the Tuileries Gardens” (1849) to both accentuate and choreograph the surrounding skies just as Edouard Baldus’s “La Ciotat” (circa 1860) wipes clear the surrounding atmosphere to uncanny effect. Speaking of uncanny: Mr. Pinson errs on the side of historical preservation by installing a digital facsimile of a light-sensitive autochrome print, “The Brow of a Hill” (ca. 1908) by Heinrich Kühn. We should be grateful for this 21st-century intervention; still, the cool blue back-lighting feels like a cheat.Art mavens familiar with the cloud studies of the British landscapist John Constable will have to make do with a mere two sketches — one done in oil, the other watercolor — and there are other painters whom casual viewers will recognize, including Eugène Delacroix, John Singer Sargent and, perhaps, the Norwegian artist Johan Christian Dahl. Alexandre Desgoffe’s undated “Cloud Study with Distant Mountains” offers a lovingly slurred panorama on a scrap of paper not much bigger in size than the lid of a shoebox. The crisp silhouettes and glittering light of an ink drawing by Henri-Joseph Harpignies, “Saint Peter’s Seen From the Pincio, Rome” (1856), evince the influence of his friend and fellow Italophile, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.‘Equivalents,’ by Alfred Stieglitz, 1933. Via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.“Chasing Clouds” culminates with the “Equivalents,” a group of photographs by the American impresario Alfred Stieglitz. Looking to the skies, Stieglitz aimed to “put down my philosophy of life—to show that my photographs were not due to subject matter . . . [but] were there for everyone—no tax as yet on them—free.” In a bravura installation, very much like a cloud in fact, Mr. Pinson arranges twenty or so of these diminutive black-and-white pictures to underline how Stieglitz’s romantic tendencies were both corralled and deepened by an exquisite attention to form. It’s a stirring denouement that brings weight to an exhibition very much concerned with the ephemeral.

Clouds Gather at the Met

Clouds Gather at the Met

More from the New York Sun

Twinsy Names on Alaska Senate Ballot May Cause Voter ‘Confusion,’ Violate Election Law, Blanche Contends

A Return Ticket to New Jersey’s Cape May

Hunt Resumes for Missing Salvadoreans in Haiti After Identities of Returned Bodies Are Unconfirmed

Privilege Meets Its Reckoning in ‘Aftermath’

Netanyahu Attempts To Douse Crypto Firestorm

Trump Denies Plan To Bring Back White House Swimming Pool Amid Raging Press Access Battle

A Midterm ‘Thumping’ for Republicans Could Prompt the Party To Chart a New Post-Trump Course

The Hunger for Hope and a Positive Future

More from the New York Sun

Twinsy Names on Alaska Senate Ballot May Cause Voter ‘Confusion,’ Violate Election Law, Blanche Contends

A Return Ticket to New Jersey’s Cape May

Hunt Resumes for Missing Salvadoreans in Haiti After Identities of Returned Bodies Are Unconfirmed

Privilege Meets Its Reckoning in ‘Aftermath’

Netanyahu Attempts To Douse Crypto Firestorm

Trump Denies Plan To Bring Back White House Swimming Pool Amid Raging Press Access Battle

A Midterm ‘Thumping’ for Republicans Could Prompt the Party To Chart a New Post-Trump Course

The Hunger for Hope and a Positive Future