The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Rain, rain, rain in New York today. It's wet, I'm damp, and although I'm normally an insanely enthusiastic walker and subway rider, even I am happy to hail a cab (I admit to being economical to the point of asceticism at times but it's not that: I prefer to walk; I prefer public transport. Why pay for a taxi if you enjoy it less?). I step out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where all New York has also decided to spend the afternoon.
The place has a British Museum feel. It's packed with ancient pots and statues from Rome and Greece and has a large Egyptian section too - all of which is the kind of museum stuff that normally bores the pants off me, and I don't think I'm alone. To be fair, though, a lot of it is spectacular: the Temple of Dendur, given to the US by Egypt in the 1960s and presented in its original, 15 BC layout in a stunning modern space surrounded by glass and water, is just terrific. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is an enormous palace, extremely confusing to get round (I had to orienteer here by constantly returning through mediaeval art to the entrance lobby) but full, full of treasure, some of it more worthy than interesting (the classic American furnishings and art, for example) some of it lavish, luxurious and surprising - like the entire rooms lifted from France and Vienna to look plushly decorative on the Upper East Side.
What interested me much more was the art, though. The museum has a ton of European art from every century. Crowds gather round the Van Goghs and Impressionists but you could have spent the afternoon looking at mediaeval, renaissance, baroque or rococo stuff if you preferred. I gravitated towards the modern art, which was very strong indeed. Picasso, Klee, Miro, Modigliani, Braque, Léger, Giacometti, Tanguy and Magritte were all well represented and there were also appearances from De Chirico (whose Ariadne seems to me a companion piece to his Incertitude du Poète at the Tate) Mondrian and Dali. I was looking for American art, though. There was Pollock of course, there was a bit of Jasper Johns - the famous white flag - and a piece (Cut Ground) by Sean Scully, whose work I seem to recall seeing at Tate Liverpool sometime in the last few years. Martin Kline's Nest was the most engaging contemporary piece I saw. I preferred its straightforwardness to the showiness of its British counterparts (Damien Hirst's Shark is here, as is a piece by Rachel Whiteread).
From an earlier period, I'd come to know the work of Georgia O'Keeffe and Max Weber from the American Modernists exhibition at the Las Vegas Bellagio last week. If anything I preferred the O'Keeffes in Vegas: there were two or three cooler paletted works there from the period when she was visiting New Mexico like Ranchos Church here in New York. But I also admired Pelvis II, a title that makes you wonder how on earth she could have been surprised that her works were interpreted sexually when first exhibited by Stieglitz. The other artist I saw in Vegas was Max Weber, a Russian emigré who's crowded, nervous expressionist paintings put one very much in mind of Europe. In a sense Weber and O'Keeffe represent the two poles of America. Weber's East Coast influenced by European immigration and history, and the open West, far from Europe and the city, the red desert to which O'Keeffe fled to find herself. But O'Keeffe wasn't alone. Stephen Hancock (two of whose large-scale works, Oxbow and Kaaterskill Falls, are hung here) has painted the open, broad expanses of natural America, strongly reminding me of the American Sublime school I saw exhibited at the Tate several years ago. It's a style of painting that is politically questionable, in that it suggests a mythical empty American wilderness - which is only partly true - and artistically on the cusp, too. There's something pompously kitsch about this Grand Canyon vision. Yet Hancock's paintings are arresting and compelling enough for me to forgive him.
The Superheroes exhibition, sadly, was rubbish. I was hoping for a study of cartoon art, and perhaps its relationship to film. What I got was Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman outfit and some ludicrous designer frocks.
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