Greek Vases and Statuary
Kongo: Power and Majesty
Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends
There is an approaching hurricane and it's constant rain outside. So, we are riding the M4 bus from right outside our apartment over to and then up Madison Avenue to the Met Museum. First, we will have lunch in the member's dining room. Then, we will have an afternoon to see the three exhibits listed.
I am currently taking an online course from Wesleyan University on Greek History. I want to see the Greek objects found at the Met.
We also want to see the Sargent and the Kongo exhibits. This should be a good day. Hopefully, there will be fewer tourists and the museum won't be so filled with people.
I was so wrong. The museum was packed with people. The rain drove them inside.
Sargent
"Throughout his career, the celebrated American painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) created exceptional portraits of artists, writers, actors, dancers, and musicians, many of whom were his close friends. As a group, these portraits—many of which were not commissioned—are often highly charged, intimate, witty, idiosyncratic, and more experimental than his formal portraiture. Brilliant works of art and penetrating character studies, they are also records of relationships, influences, aspirations, and allegiances.
Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends brings together ninety-two of the artist's paintings and drawings of members of his impressive artistic circle. The individuals seen through Sargent's eyes represent a range of leading figures in the creative arts of the time such as artists Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin, writers Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James, and the actor Ellen Terry, among others. The exhibition features some of Sargent's most celebrated full-length portraits (Dr. Pozzi at Home, Hammer Museum), his dazzling subject paintings created in the Italian countryside (Group with Parasols [Siesta], private collection), and brilliant watercolors (In the Generalife, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) alongside lesser-known portrait sketches of his intimate friends (Vernon Lee, 1881, Tate). The exhibition explores the friendships between Sargent and his artistic sitters, as well as the significance of these relationships to his life and art."
Kongo
"Central Africa's Kongo civilization is responsible for one of the world's greatest artistic traditions. This international loan exhibition explores the region's history and culture through 146 of the most inspired creations of Kongo masters from the late fifteenth through the early twentieth century.
The earliest of these creations were diplomatic missives sent by Kongo sovereigns to their European counterparts during the Age of Exploration; they took the form of delicately carved ivories and finely woven raffia cloths embellished with abstract geometric patterns. Admired as marvels of human ingenuity, such Kongo works were preserved in princely European Kunstkammer, or cabinets of curiosities, alongside other precious and exotic creations from across the globe.
With works drawn from sixty institutional and private lenders across Europe and the United States, Kongo: Power and Majesty relates the objects on view to specific historical developments and challenges misconceptions of Africa's relationship with the West. In doing so, it offers a radical, new understanding of Kongo art over the last five hundred years."
Review: ‘Kongo: Power and Majesty’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Much art is made for pleasure or profit. Some is made to save lives and souls. The 15 sensational carved wood figures, standing like thorny trees in a grove, at the end of “Kongo: Power and Majesty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are examples of art of the rescuing kind. They are sculptural responses to a slow-motion emergency, one that shaped the history of the African continent and continues to resonate there today.
For centuries the West assumed that Africa had no history, because none had been found written down. Instead, it was said to be timeless in the way that the primitive was timeless: that is, retarded, suspended in backwardness. Call that a state of innocence; call it savagery. Either way, it was a condition to be patronized, corrected, exploited. Only beginning in the late 20th century, when the notion of primitivism came under widespread critical fire, were the antiquity and dynamism of African cultures acknowledged, and demonstrated in long-researched exhibitions like this one, which has been organized by Alisa LaGamma, the curator in charge of the department of the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.
It begins at a very specific time and place: the coast of Central Africa in 1483, the year a navigator named Diogo Cão, on a pioneering mission for the Portuguese court, landed near the mouth of the Congo River to scout possibilities for trade. He carried on board several seven-foot-high limestone columns carved with a cross and the royal coat of arms. With them, he staked territorial claims for Portugal in what is now Angola. All but one of those columns vanished long ago. The sole survivor is at the Met, introducing the exhibition in much the way that, centuries ago, it introduced Europe to Africa, and vice versa.
The Portuguese had landed in territory occupied by Kongo peoples, who formed several separate states ruled by kings in urban courts similar to those of Europe. And the initial encounter was auspicious, viewed by both sides as a meeting of equals. Spiritually adventurous and intellectually curious, the Kongo elite took an avid interest in Christianity and quickly learned the skill of writing. One of the earliest items in the show is a 1517 letter from the Kongo king to his Portuguese counterpart requesting a shipment of prayer books and liturgical instruments.
We know from records that many thousands of such things subsequently flooded into Africa, though none have been tracked down there. What has been found are religious images made by African artists after European prototypes. A little brass Kongo figure of a crucified Christ with starburstlike hands and feet is one. And Western museums hold a small number of objects that, in the 16th and 17th centuries, traveled from Africa to Europe as souvenirs or gifts, landing in Medici palaces and cathedral treasuries.
A lot of what has been preserved of this precious export material is in the Met show, and consists mainly of two types of luxury items: elephant tusks carved with exquisite geometric patterns (one is from the Palazzo Pitti in Florence), and woven palm-fiber textile panels incorporating the same abstract designs. Examples of both float, as if on the sea, in the blue-walled opening gallery. And they carry history with them. The patterns they share appear in almost identical form on African ceramics dating to the late Iron Age, and on ceremonial caps and capes made between the 16th and the early 20th century.
The wearers of such regalia included priests or ritual specialists, who played a crucial role in governance. The Kongo cosmos was generally understood to be made up of two realms, one occupied by the living, the other by the ancestral dead. The priest’s job was to maintain communication between the two, and to channel otherworldly energy through certain charismatic objects, often sculpted figures called minkisi (singular, nkisi), which policed human behavior and promoted peace. Social balance and continuance were the highest good, embodied in paired male and female images, and in the perfect, endless abstract patterns woven in textiles and inscribed on ivories.
About halfway into the show, however, something appears that throws that balance off: It’s a tusk covered with tiny figures, among them shackled slaves. The piece is late, probably from the 1880s, but the realities it documents are much older. The rapport between Europe and the Kingdom of Kongo was brief. Portugal soon made its colonialist intentions clear. Other Western nations — France, Britain, the Netherlands — aggressively followed its lead. Kongo peoples lost their gainful position as gatekeepers to the wealth of the continent’s interior.
Worse, the effects of the Atlantic slave trade were catastrophic. Africans had always participated as suppliers. But by the mid-17th-century, Kongo territory roughly corresponding to modern Angola, Congo and the Congo Republic— had itself become a primary source of captives. By 1850, a third of its population had ended up in chains in the Americas.
Nor was there relief to be found in Africa. There the age of colonialism was underway. Forced labor was common. With the adult male population reduced by slavery, the nuclear family, the core unit of Kongo social organization, was shattered. Traditional occupations, economic structures and value systems, along with the communal identity they sustained, were radically destabilized.
Religion was what was left. Female power figures, depicted as women of idealized beauty supporting and nursing infant-size adult males, proliferated. Regal but tender, they held the promise of fecundity in a withering time, and certain sculptors made a specialty of them. Two such artists — called the Master of Kasadi, the Master of Makaya Vista and the Master of Boma Vonde, for the regions where they worked — have been identified by style. Although each adheres to a fixed image type, their approaches, seen in comparative pieces in the show, are distinctive in detail and mood.
As expressive as these images were, they could do nothing to prevent the reign of terror visited on the Kongo world by Belgian colonial rule beginning in the 1870s. At that point, in what feels like a last-ditch move, a shock troop of male power figures, called Mangaaka, was brought into play. Only around 20 are known; 15 of those, from collections in Europe and the United States, including the Met, are in the final gallery.
Just under life-size, they were carved from wood by master artists. Fitted with animal-hair beards and huge white ceramic eyes, they lean forward, mouths open, as if looking and listening intently, ready to leap. Their torsos bristle with pounded-in spikes and nails, each the seal of a vow made or an injustice to be prosecuted. The source of their energy lies in magical substances — medicines — placed by priests in their hollowed-out bellies and behind their eyes.
Such images are the spiritual equivalent of antibodies, designed to hunt down and eliminate infection in a social body on the verge of systemic collapse. They were meant to stop a viral history in its tracks, reverse its course. They were focused in a way that makes much other art, however ambitious, feel vague in purpose, a distraction from, rather than an engagement with, the politics of living and dying. It’s a measure of the respect they inspired that all of the figures, brothers in arms, seem to have had their medicine removed before leaving Africa. The West would get the form but not the substance of their might.
They make a memorable conclusion to an unusually tight, idea-filled and troubling show. When these figures were conceived, the Scramble for Africa was on full-bore, with Western nations barbarously slicing up and devouring a continent. That depredation has never stopped, even if some of its participants have changed, China being the latest scrambler. And Africa’s history, embedded in some of the world’s most potent art, goes on.
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