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To wrap up from last time on black artists and ancient Egypt, the most potent ancient imagery cannot reduce past or present to a stereotype of greatness. Good art cannot appropriate tragedy on behalf of uplift. Rather, it returns quite literally from the grave to haunt the present.

Those black kids at the Met may have loved its Egyptian tomb as much as I did as a child, and so surely did Lauren Halsey. Just a summer ago, she took her version of the tomb upstairs for summer sculpture on the Met roof. It may have seemed awfully straightforward, like a recitation in school, but it evoked, her title explains, the east side of South Central LA. It was the story of her life, retold once more in a colorful collage on two square pillars here.

A full third of the show builds a scholarly history of greatness. If that sounds like a well-researched scam, then come kings and queens who cannot return from the dead. They can, though, learn from children, on a class trip or in O’Grady’s family album. Lonnie Holley transforms deities flanking a pharaoh’s tomb into very real, heavily swaddled children. If they seem one part comforted and one part repressed, so, they seem to say, are black families even today. When Betye Saar paints Window of Ancient Sirens, a triptych after a funerary mask of King Tut, she seems more disturbed than impressed.

Not that the accent is on subtlety. There is always the good cheer of Pop Art for Robert Colescott or the glorified street art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Kara Walker, though, subtitled her grandest public work A Subtlety, and she was not altogether ironic. For all its scale and glowing whiteness, it had black features far from an Egyptian sphinx. And she made it of sugar, like a product of the Domino Sugar plant displaced by gentrification right next door—or of slave labor in the Caribbean. The Met can include only a sketch, a quick one at that, but it will do.

Ancient monuments appear again in contemporary settings, but in miniature, as collectibles. How better for the oldest intercollegiate black fraternity to assert its identity than on boardroom shelves, in a painting by Derek Fordjour? How much better still to explore blackness than with actual shelves on a large field of black soap from Rashid Johnson? David Hammons creates his own pyramids of human hair, while Sam Gilliam creates his in Minimalist aluminum, wood, white, and blue. Maren Hassinger make her Love (Pyramid) both sculpture and performance, in pink balloons. While not much to do with Egypt, Terry Adkins still pays tribute to Carver’s oxidized blue.

Art for art’s sake or history’s makes only a fleeting appearance before the show’s final third, about music. It includes album covers, lots of them, and a space for Afrofuturism, which somehow includes Julie Mehretu, the abstract artist, along with Sun Ra in jazz. And who could deny the impact of African American musicians? Still, album covers can take things only so far, and references to Egypt seem no more than coincidental. Besides, the Met already installed a period room for Afrofuturism in 2021. To misquote Sun Ra, space here is no longer the place.

This is an enormous show for so tenuous a theme. It will be fine for those who seek only role models in the terror and turbulence of history. As a handy survey of contemporary black art, it cannot match a larger and smarter show centered on Alvin Ailey, the choreographer, at the Whitney. Not that it lacks for artists and anecdotes worth knowing, not by any means. Who could imagine that William T. Williams found inspiration for his gray diagonals in Nu Nile, a black hair-care product? There may be gray areas left in a field of black and white, but a museum owes art more than a royal mess.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Cleopatra’s throne does not look comfortable. No wonder she has taken her business elsewhere, into Egypt or into art.

Maybe it comes with the territory for so iconic a ruler and so fabled a beauty. The price of becoming an idol is a loss of humanity, in People or in history, all the more so when she knew that she was about to die. And Barbara Chase-Riboud does indeed give her a golden throne—or simulate one in small squares of polished bronze on wood. It looks magnificent, but also uncomfortably rigid and peeling, and no one would dare sit on it at the Met. She will, though, make more than one return along with a host of familiar images in a show of Black artists and Ancient Egypt, as “Flight into Egypt” through February 17. But are they truly an African American heritage for today?

Many have looked to Egypt before them—and thought it vital to black America’s humanity and dignity . Relate to Your Heritage, proclaimed Barbara Jones-Hogu, in psychedelic colors. The artist spoke out for a movement, AfriCOBRA, formed in the radicalism of the 1960s. Malcolm X traveled to Egypt three times, and a video shares a stop in Cairo. A photo by Eve Arnold accompanies black kids to the Met itself, where a boy in a while shirt and narrow tie could almost be Malcolm himself as a child. It seems only right for a show on the theme of awakening.

From the start, the Met argues, blacks contributed to scholarship on the region, from the Egyptology of the early twentieth century. George Washington Carver collected a sample of Egyptian blue (its ninth oxidation). Aaron Douglas applies the translucent colors that place him among the greatest in the Harlem Renaissance to a vision of ancient monuments. It could just as well represent a modern city under construction. The show takes its title from a loose painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, perhaps an oil sketch, in 1923. He had painted the interior of a mosque a quarter century before.

Two contributors, Steffani Jemison and Jamal Cyrus, set out a study room so that you can discover more. As usual with such rooms, it has an interest in telling you what to study. Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave and abolitionist, had no doubts what is at stake: whites had set out “to deny that the Egyptians were Negroes” in order “to deprive the Negro of the moral support of Ancient Greatness.” The curators, Akili Tommasino with McClain Groff, have to agree. Yet the art on display has many colors, and that could be an African American heritage, too.

Fred Wilson sets out busts of Nefertiti, after the famous one often seen in strict profile, in gradations from white to black. They occupy, the work’s title explains, a Gray Area, and this is its “brown version.” Lorraine O’Grady pairs still more images of the Egyptian queen with photographs of children she has known, as her Miscegenated Family Album. As for Cleopatra’s shade of brown, no one can say. She was the last in a dynasty that Alexander the Great had installed in the path of conquest, which is not to say what it became. Barbara Chase-Riboud does well by leaving her out of the picture.

Europe and America alike had a fascination with Egypt, like many a child at the Met today. J. P. Morgan traveled in person to confirm his scholarly credentials and to stock the Morgan Library. Maxime Du Camp, a close friend of Gustave Flaubert, took up photography to document cities and monuments. Meanwhile black artists like Emma Amos have made a pilgrimage to Africa in search of their cultural and family history, but not to Egypt. Others, like Toyin Ojih Odutola from Nigeria, are still between continents in their art. Exhibitions have returned more and more to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

Then, too, can a focus on African Americans shift those gray areas a little too far toward black and white? Could the Arab world and Islamic art have their own colors and history? Could that, too, be a part of black history in a way the Met cannot fully grasp. Tanner did, after all, paint a mosque. And yet the show at its best questions its own pat history. As a white male, I cannot speak for African Americans, but its artists are still asking what remains of ancient greatness—and I pick up next time with just that.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To wrap up from last time on early Renaissance Siena, an altarpiece by Pietro in Pieve has its own Gothic architecture, with the main panel supporting a seeming church tower, and the gold background could almost pass for sky. Ambrogio takes one inside, his three-tiered household as three acts in a domestic drama. He gives people the run of the streets.

With Martini’s Orsini Polyptich, the cast moves every which way in the shallow space below the cross. They spill out from the city’s gates. Their gestures and props create a near chaos of competing pagans and worshippers.

The protagonists have a greater freedom and responsibility as well. Mary can draw back or look up from the angel of the Annunciation, her prayer book fallen aside. Martini’s Saint John has unkempt blond hair and clasped hands, at once youthful and reserved. His Pontius Pilate may be winning the argument with Jesus. More often, his bust-length saints glower, much as for Cimabue decades before in Florence. Miracles have becomes matters of fact.

Technique has a greater variety as well. Ambrogio sketches on plaster in sinopia, the earth pigment often used for the preliminary layer that a fresco will efface. Its faint outlines have survived, though, like the first thoughts of an artist today. He also plays with gold leaf as at once background, a tooled halo, and jewelry for Mary herself. So much for the Virgin’s modesty. The red of simulated marble for Pietro could pass for blood.

By 1350, all four artists and their rivals were dead. Still, the black plague was about to set in, taking perhaps a third of the population. Historians have long seen it as bringing a premature end to the Renaissance’s cautious or daring beginning. Art after Giotto in Florence will look dour and disheartened as well. It can only look back. Whether Siena ever could look ahead must remain up for debate.

The curators have a lot to reconstruct and far to travel. It shows in their affiliations alone—Stephan Wolohojian of the Met, Laura Llewellyn of London’s National Gallery, and Caroline Campbell of Ireland’s National Gallery, with Joanna Cannon of the Courtauld Institute in London. They were bound to open with the Met’s Stoclet Madonna, and they were bound to describe it in glowing terms. Mostly, though, they supply a convincing back and forth between context and the four leading artists. They also pause for large works and works in series. One need never get lost in the maze of dark walls.

They do not, though, include contact with Florence or classicism. Nicola Pisano, who worked between Florence and Pisa shortly before, was closer than those here to ancient Rome and its influence. His sculpture looks ahead to Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea del Verrocchio, Donatello, and Michelangelo in the next century. The show does stop in Assisi, but with no indication that Giotto may have worked there, and in Arezzo, but with no mention of Piero della Francesca and his frescoes there yet to come. A comparison could have added context, just as in paired slides in a lecture. The Met, though, has a case to make, a case for Siena.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time on early Renaissance Siena, against that background, the show can afford to stick to a small but significant circle of artists. Duccio had an heir in Simone Martini, a student.

Two other likely students, the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, kept separate workshops but stayed close in style and everything else. The Met speculates that two of their panels once hung together as a diptych. (It cannot point to hinge marks or external evidence.) It ends with Martini to bring the story back to its source.

Duccio has his hand everywhere. Whenever a man at the cross raises a lance without piercing the side of Jesus, he quotes Duccio and the artist’s love of crowds. In fact, pretty much any genre quotes Duccio on account of a single altarpiece, the Maestà, commissioned in 1303, with close to fifty panels. It takes its name, meaning majesty or triumph, from the largest panel, front and center, of an enthroned Madonna. The ranks of angels to either side do little but add color, like the rhythms of a song celebrating her glory. One can practically hear it.

One cannot hear much else. Losers do not write history, but artists and poets do, and they had begun to erase Siena from Renaissance history before its work ended. Dante wrote of how Cimabue in Florence, who had his own Maestà in 1280, once held the field but is now eclipsed by Giotto. (No wonder he was in Purgatory for the sin of pride.) Years later, Vasari, himself a Renaissance painter, began his Lives with just those two artists. Sometime around Vasari’s birth in 1511, the dismantling of Duccio’s altarpiece had already begun.

The Met reconstructs it anyway, with photographs and wall text for its front and back. It also brings together one side of the entire predella, or supporting bottom row. That may not sound impressive, but it extends the length of a wall, and it shows Duccio as an able story-teller. A predella often constructs a narrative, and this one is about the ministry of Jesus—with miracles subordinate to a commanding life. Duccio builds a story by relating one figure to another and both to a city very much like Siena. It creates a cumulative picture of a rocky landscape and farmland just outside formidable city walls.

In a panel from the Frick Collection, the devil tempts Jesus with the seven cities of the world. The black devil looks rather like a bearded Richard Nixon, and Jesus looks relaxed and impassive. Each city has its own size and design, but all crisp and candy-colored. Duccio just cannot individuate his actors all that much, and he has no room for city streets. No one really loves or suffers, and no one plays an obvious part. He does, though, have his temptations. It will take the remaining artists to have more.

Their approach is startling. Pietro Lorenzetti depicts the Crucifixion on a shaped panel with an irregular base, where a skull rests on green earth. It has an illusion of depth that brings death home while introducing painting to landscape. A more conventional panel from his brother gives the infant Jesus a fuller body and dark eyes. He looks away from his mother’s breast, coy and aware. There may be a human world after all in scripture and Sienna—and I continue next time with more on Duccio’s fellow artists.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time on early Renaissance Siena, the Met has been building a case for Siena since 2004, when it spent $45 million on a Madonna and Child by Duccio. It was all but asking for controversy, as the surest route to publicity, and got it.

The New York Times wondered at the price for a painting “no bigger than a sheet of typing paper.” A professor at Columbia, James H. Beck, called it a forgery. Today the Met boasts more than ever of its treasure, and it stands apart as prologue to the exhibition. It has an intimacy and delicacy long associated with Duccio, and its very size indicates a painting not for churches, but for private devotion. One can still see the marks of candle flames on its bottom edge.

So, at any rate, the Met says, but a new era really does begin with Duccio di Buoninsegna in Siena and Giotto in Florence. Duccio’s infant Jesus reaches up to his mother, affirming his, Mary’s and a believer’s reverence and affection. In another Madonna, the child takes hold of a golden veil, extending it to the right. It has become a token of royal grandeur. It all takes place just behind the illusion of a carved-wood parapet, setting Jesus and Mary into a space at once yours, too, and theirs alone. That establishes intimacy, too.

True, Beck finds the gesture so badly painted as to rule out the work’s authenticity, the arm a mere stump. He also finds the parapet without precedent for at least another hundred years. Still, it is a wonder that anything survives as more than a stump when the entire surface is cracked, peeling, and overcleaned. And maybe, just maybe, the parapet is an innovation. As it is, there is no clear precedent for Duccio himself. He may have studied in France, Florence, or anywhere at all.

It is just the kind of dispute that has told against Siena for ever so long. It and Florence are little more than an hour apart by car, by much the same route that a trader took back then, but they could be a lifetime apart. Oh, and did I mention Giotto along with Duccio? Western art history often compares the two—in order to introduce the Renaissance in Florence. Lectures show their work on two screens, the better to explain the greatness of Giotto. And Duccio has nothing of his solid, almost columnar human forms, real spaces, and human personalities, filled with fear and love.

Not that the comparison means to write off Duccio as the last stand of medieval art—the art that Giotto surpassed. It means only to distinguish two artists and two paths to what was then the future. Still, a class may never mention Siena again. The Met is out to change that. It has a habit of throwing its weight around on behalf of new narratives and new attributions. For once, though, its expertise and arrogance may pay off.

It connects Tuscany to broader trends in Europe. It includes sculpture from Italy and France, much of it more delicate, intricate, and fully modeled than Sienese painting. It includes manuscript illumination in France by Jean Pucelle and later the Limbourg brothers. And the influence ran both ways. It has an aside for textiles, at least one of which appears in the background to a painting. That trade route was also the Silk Road—and I continue next time with Duccio’s place in history.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Can this be the Dark Ages? Europe in 1300 was bursting with art and light.

Gothic architecture had soared into the light and brought it into the cathedral. In the quiet confines of books and illuminated manuscripts, rtists were beginning to picture medieval life as never before. Philosophy, a school called Scholasticism, had blessed intellectual inquiry. It positively demanded a return to classical times and the rigor of Aristotle—in the service, of course, of true belief. And so much more was to come, if, that is, one knew where to look. How about, say, to Tuscany?

A weak pope was facing greater challenges, even as trade routes to the East brought new goods, new ideas, and a new prosperity. And a key route, connecting France and Italy, ran right through Tuscany—in particular, though Siena. Local princes were showing their strength, and Siena was styling itself a republic dedicated to the Virgin. It also held off its chief rival, Florence, in war earning the right to try. The Renaissance was not so very far off after all, and the Met looks beyond Florence for its origins. It is “Siena: The Rise of Painting,” through January 26, and it will be my subject all this week, with an extra post tomorrow for Siena’s place in Europe and now the Met.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.