On View...at the Met: Urakami Gyokudō
Notes on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in June, part 2.
Last weekend, our editor Alexandra went to see what was happening on the upper east side and never made it out of the Met. This week, she’s telling you about the five shows that kept her there.
On view: The Three Perfections
From August 2023 to January 2024, the Met exhibited Learning to Paint in Premodern China, a gorgeous exhibit with a modern twist: the wall text invited you to imagine that you were a painting apprentice pre-1800s, and the show took you through the practices of multiple young artists who learned the delicate process of inking a landscape from older mentors or lessons in a textbook. The exhibit featured iconic examples of Chinese landscape painting, which—running counter to Dutch master landscapes of the same time that operate on the horizontal—are vertically oriented, with streams and mountains and mist in the air.
Walking through The Three Perfections: Japanese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting, I could have sworn I’d seen these trees before. In an exhibit that is all about overlaps and exchanges, it's exciting to notice that many of the Japanese paintings on display use techniques that are classically from premodern China1, and that some of the stories being told on the delicate, unfurled scrolls are Chinese tales. The “perfections” on view here refer to poetry, calligraphy, and painting, and the crux of the exhibit is how inherently these three art forms overlap (think: poetry written down in delicate calligraphy; calligraphy using the same brush and strokes as painting; painting creating a world that is poetic). On July 31, right before the show closes on August 3, there will be a (free!) expert talk about the exhibit with Met scientist Marco Leona.
later this week:
Sargent and Paris. Through August 3.
Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie. Through August 17.
also on view in the city:
Eric Blum, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts. Through June 21.
Louise Fishman, Always Stand Ajar, Van Doren Waxter. Through June 27.
Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection, The Museum of the City of New York. Through October 5.
pitch us!
We love putting this newsletter together, but we want to hear from you. You can pitch us a short review (between 100-300 words) to run in this newsletter two ways: email pitches@exhibitsinnewyork.com, or, if you’re using the app, send a screenshot of your review to @pitches or on Instagram.
We’re looking for brief but sensitive observations about a show; we want context (how the art is situated in the world) and affect (a gut response) to coexist; bonus points if you see ways to connect a show areas of the world/culture beyond what’s written in the wall text. Selected reviews will run in our newsletter with credit, go through a short editorial review, and be paid.
Techniques borrowed from the Wu school of painters, for example, a group prevalent during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) in Suzhou, China.