‘A genre reconnecting with the past’: Met celebrates art | Art

What exactly the picture? In short, it can be an attempt to express yourself or someone else through painting. But consider German artist Max Beckmann’s masterpiece, The Beginning, a series of images from his childhood, or Cuban artist Wifredo Lam’s Ídolo, a series based around the goddess Oyá. More rooted in memory and myth than physical likeness, these pieces stretch what we might think of as art.

Works like Beckmann and Lam – as well as cubist abstractions, a hand-decorated mirror, and one of Joan Miró’s “painting-poetry” pieces, – are all images as described by The Met’s new program The Face of Modern Life, which collects about 80 works from the museum. A complex and chaotic work from one of the country’s most famous museums, this exhibition gives the audience a sense of how to imagine the past and a chance to ask themselves what it means to look like simple and complex forms.

Undoubtedly, Stephanie D’Alessandro, the curator, has carefully looked at the picture, considering how the shape means different things in different seasons, and it has also depended on the artist taking the brush. In this exhibition he examines, among other things, where the subject ends and the artist begins. “People often think that a person looks like them, but what do they have in common?” D’Alessandro reflected on the show’s video interview. Is it physical form? Is it something else?

Visitors to The Face of Life are first greeted by Pablo Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude Stein. Of that, Stein memorably wrote: “I am, and only the reincarnated me that is always me.”

During the painting, Picasso is said to have said: “I can’t see you anymore when I look at you,” choosing to remove Stein’s face instead of continuing to paint her. A few months later he returned to work and recreated Stein’s face from memory, creating one of the most recognizable faces in all of Western art. “It’s a struggle,” said D’Alessandro, “how can I make this known to me?”

A portrait of Picasso is included with the text of Stein’s 1923 poem If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso, one of four pieces of the poem that have been found in the collection. Like Picasso, Stein questions what the image is, allowing the terms “exact” and “resemblance” to change slowly over the course of 27 sweet words before declaring that an image always follows his imagination.

“Exact sameness is exact sameness and exact sameness as sameness, exactly as sameness, exactly sameness, exactly sameness, exactly sameness. For this is so. Because.”

Another theme of the show is Ídolo by Lam, a recent acquisition of The Met’s. The painting was based on Lam’s understanding of Santería, a religion that emerged in Cuba through the fusion of West African Yoruba and Catholic traditions. Depicting the great Yoruba goddess Oyá, Lam reveals her in a beautiful setting, making the image one of her most intimate interactions between humans and animals.

“The way he painted the work, the radios seem to be dripping,” said D’Alessandro, “as if the painting is happening at the same time as they are changing from one area to another.”

The second notable new find is French artist Francis Picabia’s Elegance, a haunting portrait of a woman with a parasol that reflects the artist’s past. The book is accompanied by the poet Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird, whose lines seem to be related to Picabia’s mysterious wife: “I don’t know what to choose / The beauty of the inflections / Or the beauty of the innuendo / The blackbird / or the latter.”

“It’s about the presence of people, the willingness to communicate, proxies or illusions to exist,” said D’Alessandro. “Even works that don’t sound like pictures or don’t look like pictures can be like a picture, a painting.”

From the supernatural to the abstract, The Face of Modern Life also offers works that don’t paint the human face as much as it does in terms of experience and emotional warmth. Among these are Paul Klee’s May Picture and Vasily Kandinsky’s Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II). Said to be inspired by the garden, Image of May offers dreamy squares of soft colors, while Garden of Love offers remnants of the central sun and several figures of people pushed out of print.

“Klee and Kandinsky are paintings that we can easily call, not traditional paintings but beautiful,” said D’Alessandro. “In Kandinsky’s case, all forces work together, a kind of history.”

D’Alessandro emphasized that although the technical skills and intellectual concepts that contribute to the image change with time, the concerns of its form are timeless. Portraits can feel like an attempt to look beyond what we think we know about another person – and what today’s technology pushes forward – to look deeper. “The things we’re dealing with today – like virtual reality or phones – are technologies that allow us to see and not see things. These things are similar to the past. It’s a kind of reconnecting with the past and seeing that everything is never new.”

D’Alessandro also sees in the image the human desire to, in the words of EM Forster, connect itself – to close the gap between the inside and the outside. The works he has collected in Face of Life are a testament to the many ways artists try to do the same.

“There is something in human life that always connects us. There are deep stories, there are different reasons why they happen. If we take a moment to look at a picture, we can understand something more than the story.”