Age of Splendor Expands

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's "Madame Jacques-Louis Leblanc" from 1823.

"Mademoiselle V. . . in the Costume of an Espada" by Édouard Manet (1862)

"Still Life with Peaches" by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1881)

"Prayer in the Mosque" (1871) by Jean-Léon Gérôme

"Jo, La Belle Irlandaise" (1866) by Jean-Désiré-Gustave Courbet.

"The Organ Rehearsal" (1885) by Henry Lerolle.

Ilia Efimovich Repin's 1884 portrait of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin

"The Dressing Room" (1892) by Pierre Bonnard

Vincent van Gogh’s “L'Arlésienne" (1889)

The galleries of 19th-century European painting and sculpture are the Metropolitan Museum’s most popular attraction. And after they were closed for renovation in August, some very sad scenes ensued. Tourists expecting Monets and Renoirs by the roomful left the museum distraught, hopes dashed. Met regulars who count on having certain things just so — Cézanne’s “Card Players” right there, in that gallery, on that wall, forever — wandered about in a daze, their coordinates thrown off.

As late as last weekend you could find people peering forlornly through gaps in barriers that blocked gallery doorways while reinstallations were still under way. What were they hoping to see? The geraniums blooming in Monet’s garden? Or van Gogh’s “Arlésienne,” bored but resigned in her chrome-yellow room? Or one of Courbet’s thoroughly modern dryads, emerging, nude, from a woodland bath?

Well, now such vigils are over. Barriers are down. The galleries have reopened with most of their familiar sights and a few significant changes. First, 10 new exhibition spaces have been added, to make a grand total of 32. Second, the 19th-century timeline has been pushed decisively into the 20th century. Third, in galleries where “European” has always really meant “French,” German, Scandinavian and even American artists have been added.

The new galleries are identical in design to the existing ones. And with them, the museum once again demonstrates its genius for finding space where, to all appearances, none remains. In the past utility closets and alcoves under staircases have been turned into galleries that housed whole civilizations. The 10 new rooms were spun more or less from thin air. They were built atop what was once the roof of the Oceanic galleries. The extra space has allowed the museum to exhibit fresh things, notably dozens of recently acquired oil landscape sketches by superb but under-known Danish and German artists. It also permits a chronological view of 19th-century European art — organized by Gary Tinterow and Rebecca Rabinow, curators in the Met’s 19th-century, modern and contemporary art department — to unfold at leisure, illustrated by one of the world’s great collections of such material.

The story starts with Ingres, and with one look at his portraits you understand the appeal of 19th-century art to modern eyes. This isn’t an art about kings and saints, salvation and damnation. It’s about ordinary comforts and secular exultations, and about people whom, even when they are different from us, we could imagine being.

Jacques-Louis Leblanc and his wife Françoise, seen in paired 1823 Ingres portraits, had aristocratic connections without being nobles themselves. They had money, at least some of it new. He is dressed in what could be a business suit. Her attire is more elaborate, but not excessively so. Neither handsome nor homely, they offer us confident but noncommital smiles. Their glamour is strictly haut-bourgeois, developed and earned, not a birthright. In an upscale but unglitzy Manhattan restaurant they would blend right in.

Operatic paintings by Delacroix in the same gallery, of biblical scenes and North American Indian life, give a fantastically different impression of early- 19th-century art and the Romantic impulse. But even in their day such pictures must have had the feel of action-adventure films, thrillers that got your blood pounding but had little to do with the way you lived your life.

Real life, or some ideal of it, lay elsewhere in art. In portraits, of course, but also in Millet’s paintings of farmers, their figures as dark and quiet as the earth they sowed. And in the shimmering, white-flecked landscapes that Corot whipped up at Barbizon, near the forest of Fontainebleau. Four of his landscapes placed side by side in a gallery read like a single panoramic view through a rain-splashed windshield.

Barbizon school painting brings us into the new galleries where, for the first time at the Met, Courbet has a room of his own. It is centrally placed, and it should be. For decades art historians have been calling Courbet our first modern artist. I would also call him our first postmodern artist, one whose radically eclectic, deeply skeptical, hierarchy-smashing work only began to fully make sense after the liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s.

It’s certainly bracing to carry the sound of his mutinous, mocking voice into an adjoining gallery of fin-de-siècle art, where Sargent’s portrait of the aristocratic Wyndham sisters unfurls like some mammoth orchid across a wall. Sargent is one of five Americans in the reinstallation; Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins and James McNeill Whistler are the others. All but Eakins spent an important part of their careers in France; but only Eakins has anything like Courbet’s dissident singularity.

One of a handful of paintings uncovered in storage during the reorganization of the galleries is also in this room: “The Organ Rehearsal” (1885) by Henry Lerolle, unexhibited for nearly a century. With its palette of beiges, creams and dove-grays, it’s a beautiful thing, with a silhouetted figure of a woman that might have come straight from “La Grande Jatte,” which Seurat was painting at the time.

And there is the portrait of the Russian writer Vsevolod Garshin (1855-1888), by his friend Ilia Efimovich Repin. Talk about sad scenes. Garshin came from a family plagued with mental illness and was unstable himself. A vehement pacifist, he was drafted into the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78 and the ordeal undid him. After writing a story, based on personal experience, about a wounded soldier who lay four days in a field face to face with the corpse of a man he had shot, he committed suicide at 33.

At this point in the reinstallation things shift gears. In one room we’re looking at 19th-century realist portraiture. In the next we’re standing in Bonnard’s 20th-century dining room with its woozy colors and half-abstract forms. And in the next and finally gallery we encounter Gertrude Stein in Picasso’s 1906 portrait, and we’re on the verge of changing planets.

In Bonnard, the 19th-century bourgeois sublime, one with connections to Ingres via Degas, lives on. But in Picasso’s Stein portrait something different starts. With her massive knees-apart leaning pose; her asymmetrical face; and her hard, ageless, unfooled stare, this figure stakes out social, psychological and sexual territory that Courbet was among the first to explore.

Stimulating as it is to see the Stein portrait in this context, its inclusion feels more like a tinkering with, rather than a rethinking of, the 19th-century European story that the Met tells. And anyway its presence, along with the American paintings, is in part a matter of convenience, as the museum’s modern galleries and American wing are soon to close for refurbishing.

And while it’s good to have a new gallery of so-called Orientalist art — pictures by Europeans, again mostly French, who derived subjects from exotic colonial locales like North Africa — this is hardly an innovation. Far more daring would have been the addition of 19th-century paintings by African, Indian or Middle Eastern artists who were tutored in Western styles and supplied images for a European market. Surely such artists were as European as Eakins was.

There are details to quibble with, but what the reinstallation unquestionably delivers is what most people want: perspective. And it delivers it in a wealth of visual links from gallery to gallery. When we look from an anonymous oil sketch of a nude based on neo-classical models to Courbet’s sacrilegious version of the same, we understand in a flash what revolution means. And when we look from a portrait by Cézanne of his wife to van Gogh’s “Arlésienne,” to Picasso’s “Gertrude Stein,” we put history together the way it really is put together, not in a straight line but seen around corners or glimpsed through cracks in the barriers.

December 9, 2007