Naked Before the Camera at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

On my last several visits to the Met I have turned out of the long Rodin Gallery, in reality a corridor on the east west axis, (every gallery at the Met is now in reality a corridor), into the galleries of 19th Century French Art where, two galleries away, a very large Courbet female nude, Woman with a Parrot, confronts the oncoming visitor. My interest is in the persistence of black in the work of Courbet, who I think of primarily as a landscape artist, and this painting seems to me representative of that aspect of his work.

Each time I see it I am reminded as well of the central role the nude has maintained in the art of Western civilization up until the mid twentieth century when the claim was made that abstraction successfully terminated any further need for or interest in figurative work. With that shift in emphasis I have concluded that the place of the nude in modern art probably lies in the field of photography. And as I am rather familiar with the nude as the subject of photographs I am aware as well that there are very few photographs of the nude on strictly photographic terms that have the presence or the power of a Picasso, a Courbet, a Rubens, or any of the other masters of fine art painting who used the nude as expressive form. Clearly an exploration of that subject would seem to be in order.

This exhibition might seem to be a welcome attempt but it does nothing to elucidate the subject beyond an academic overview. In large part that might well be because it is a small exhibition and that in turn is occasioned by the fact that the Gilman Gallery, the designated museum space for photography exhibitions, has been greatly reduced in size. Originally it was five small rooms that opened off a long corridor on the north south axis connecting the grand stairway to the Rodin Gallery. Now the first three of those rooms have been taken over for works on paper and the Gilman Gallery is but the last two small rooms from which one formerly exited into the Rodin Gallery. I don’t know if this is a permanent or a temporary reconfiguration but in either case it is indicative of the Met’s low regard for photography. Another indication of that low regard is that the lighting, as usual here, is really bad: every one of the photographs reflects the lights all around the room as well as the shirt fronts of the gallery visitors. As a final insult this thin offering is scheduled to run for almost six months. (Perhaps the photography department is on extended leave.)

In this overview we see that the nude as the subject for photography began as an effort to create works like fine art painting and drawing, the reference to Ingres is unmistakable, then offered itself as a helpful tool for artists, including a photograph that might have been an aid to Courbet in creating the above mentioned painting. In the modern era we are shown two works by Edward Weston who resolved the problems of photographing the nude by posing the models in contorted and uncomfortable positions, optical distortions created by Brassai, Kertesz, Brandt, et al, and two straightforward Harry Callahan photographs of his wife Eleanor. Evidence is presented that the effort to revive the male nude as subject verifies the assumption that that is but a lot of borderline homoerotic/ pornographic work, and then it concludes with some work from medical journals. In keeping with the smallness of the gallery all of these are small, mostly eight by ten, prints. One of the Callahan prints is a square two and one half inch contact print. But Harry Callahan made many small prints and in most cases I believe that he was right to do so.

Apparently unbeknownst to the curators, or to the Met, is the fact that there has been a rebirth of the male nude as the dominant subject of the nude in art since the 1980’s and that in the digital age a very large body of work has been created using Photo Shop. Ink jet prints are being made in large formats now. I wouldn’t say that all of it is good work but just a quick Google search will lead the interested person to web sites of well over a thousand photographers who only photograph the male nude. Not a word of that is mentioned here. But as I said, the gallery space is small and the interest in photography at the Met is nil.

This exhibition reads as filler biding the time of the staff until the next touring blockbuster show can be booked for the gallery. I hope the staff is outraged by that offense on the part of management …or that the management is outraged to find it has such an uninspired curatorial department. In either case it was a disappointing day at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Other Than Photography.

Considering the really poor lighting at the Met which obscures the character of the paper on which the photographs are printed, one is probably best advised to see the exhibition on the internet. The web page for the exhibition:
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/naked-before-the-camera


Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot:
http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/110000435