A Masterpiece in a Corner of the MET
Words and image by Misha Parisius
Last summer the Metropolitan Museum of Art put on an exhibition of Winslow Homer’s works entitled Crosscurrents. Crosscurrents had as its main attraction the infamous The Gulf Stream painting. The image of the black man aboard a mast-less and imminently sinking sailboat encircled by sharks adorned the facade of the MET. I went to see the exhibit, and as advertised, The Gulf Stream held a central point. When I entered the gallery I was confronted with two walls ten and twenty feet away with rectangular windows cut out so that my view of the painting thirty feet away was unobstructed. Vik Muniz, a Brazilian visual artist, says the MET is “a huge frame, a huge pedestal, you choose to put things in it.” This exhibit typified the idea that the museum presents you with not only the object but a curatorial narrative and a structure of how to approach the piece.
Last week I was surprised to find The Gulf Stream shamelessly occupying a nondescript spot at knee height behind an inch of glass. I discovered it in The Luce Center. The Luce Center is a large L-shaped room on the second-floor mezzanine of the MET with a dizzying amount of art ensconced within glass bays arranged like bookshelves. It is what the MET calls “visible storage”. This room is one of my favorites at the MET. The environment is more like a library or an archive than a museum, and it prompts one to think about the societal function of a museum. The art that is shown in the rest of the MET is carefully curated, giving the impression that they hold significant importance. The objects in the Luce Center are simply there. They lack the frills of presentation a museum-goer would be accustomed to finding.
The Gulf Stream, 1899. Winslow Homer
The glass that separates the viewer and the object has a plethora of effects. A benefit of the glass is the absence of any hovering guards which creates a more relaxed atmosphere. On my most recent visit, there were children pointing at art and freely running around to get a look at everything they could. An additional benefit is that the reflective surface of the glass doesn’t lend itself to photography. With the Instagrammability of the space minimized, it forces people to simply observe the objects. Vik Muniz says the Luce Center acts as an “anti-museum”; it subverts everything that a modern museum is.
The Luce Center does not only have paintings; there are sculptures, furniture and woodwork, glass, ceramics, and metalwork. Some of the highlights are paintings by Sargent, furniture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and an array of Tiffany lamps. This Escher-like multiformity prompts the passive discovery of connection between seemingly distant things.
In writing this article, I went back to the Luce Center to see The Gulf Stream once again. When I arrived at the place where I’d seen it only a few days ago, I was greeted with a blank wall. The art that makes up the visible storage is added and subtracted at the whim of some unbeknownst person. Maybe in a few days it will be back. I know I will be.
