The Cloisters Embraces the Ancient Americas, With Uneven Results

Far be it for me to caution culture mavens from visiting one of the city’s more civilized havens, The Met Cloisters. An amble through Fort Tryon Park with its resplendent gardens and a serene Hudson River backdrop; the museum, with its maze-like environs cobbled together from remnants of medieval French abbeys: Who’s to gainsay the venture? Add an inescapable masterwork of European painting, the “Mérode Altarpiece” (c. 1425-28) by Robert Campin and workshop, and the unblinking sublimity of a wooden effigy, “Torso of Christ,” from the late 12th century, and you’re guaranteed an afternoon well spent in New York City.Imagine the curiosity generated when a press notice came in through the transom heralding an exhibition at The Cloisters in which the art and artifacts of the ancient Americas would be placed in a setting dedicated exclusively to European traditions. With the promise of an “exciting new avenue of dialogues between objects rarely seen together,” “Creatures of Myth and Imagination: Europe and the Americas” is touted as something of an institution-rattling effort and an opportunity to underscore commonalities shared by radically different cultures. People through time immemorial and the world over have found meaning in imagining implausible animals — sounds pretty unifying to me.Lord knows our fractious times could benefit from the humanism undergirding the efforts of curators Julia Perratore, Laura Filloy Nadal and Joanne Pillsbury. Utilizing items culled from the collection of The Cloisters and the Met’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, the curatorial trio also secured key loans from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia at Mexico City, chief among them a fearsome manifestation of Tzinacantecuhtli, an emissary of the underworld who does double-time as a fertility figure. Installed toward the entrance of the museum, the so-called “bat lord” is an introductory guidepost that is as bracing as it’s intended to be.The seven-foot ceramic effigy is, in and of itself, worth a trip to Upper Manhattan. Dating from between the years 800-900, Tzinacantecuhtli is humanoid in its basic anatomy, thickly set and selectively adorned with jewelry, bells and an ungainly loincloth. The bestial features include a trio of claws, the right arm having been lost to history, and a mug that would be cartoonish if it weren’t so intensely distended. The thing could give the demon seen toward the bottom of The Master of Belmonte’s “Saint Michael” (c. 1450-1500), long a mainstay of The Cloisters holdings, a run for its deviltry.Feathered serpent pendant, 1325-1521 CE. The Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe trouble is that “Creatures of Myth and Imagination” is, as an exhibition, underwhelming. Tzinacantecuhtli is a hard act to follow and the nature of the Cloisters’ architecture and its corresponding showcases doesn’t allow for flexibility in installation. But relegating the majority of the American art to a down-the-back-stairwell Glass Gallery makes it come off like, if not an afterthought, then a short-shrifting of its significance. An august institution like The Cloisters shouldn’t feel the need to transform itself into a funhouse, but sometimes scholarship can benefit from a little razzamatazz and a lot more chutzpah.Complain why don’t you. There are beautiful and provocative objects on view, including a delicate Aztec pendant of a feathered serpent rendered in shell, a tautly streamlined Peruvian jar in the form of a bird, and an unnerving combination of material necessity and symbolic form that is the self-explanatory “Tuber-inspired stirrup-spout bottle”(600-800 CE). Other objects dot the environs of the Cloisters, and, rest assured, the museum’s famed unicorn tapestry forms part of the proceedings.“Creatures of Myth and Imagination; Europe and the Americas” is less a full meal than an amuse-bouche, a sampler of greater ventures hopefully to come.

The Cloisters Embraces the Ancient Americas, With Uneven Results

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