The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1000 5th ave, and 82st Ellsworth Kelly: Plant Drawings. Through Sep 3rd.

I know this reproduction sucks. It's not indicative of the work. I assure you it's my fault, not the artist. This is a really good show.

Just in case you're not familiar with Ellsworth Kelly, he's one of the founding members of the minimalist movement, and is considered one of the great non-representational artists alive today (although just barely. He's got to be about 90 years old). He's known for his monochromatic, shaped canvases combined in diptych and triptych form. His work is what you think of when you think of minimalism. His name is that tightly aligned with the movement. One of the things that makes this show interesting is that here is one of the most well known non-representaional artists of our day making representational images. What's also interesting is that these drawings were not made prior to his flat, non-representational work, nor after them. They were made contemporaneously with them. In fact, the show stretches from the late 1940's up to present day. So, what we're seeing is how Kelly sees figurative images non-figuratively.

I have to admit that one problem I have with minimalism is it's sterile, self important aesthetic. It's a movement that can be distant, and utopian in a "get over yourself" kind of a way. I've felt that way with some of Kelly's non-representational paintings in the past, but I don't feel that way about these drawings. Maybe it's the subject matter, or maybe it's the inexact tremor within the hand that creates these drawings, but there's a humility and sincerity to this work that's very attractive. It may also just be a characteristic inherent to the medium of drawing. I don't know.

There's a sketchiness in the work from the 1940's and 50's which gives way to clean contour drawings in the 60's and after. We first start seeing this with his "seaweed" drawings, which are particularly striking. Now, as anyone who's ever taken a life drawing class will tell you, there are no outlines in nature. So, once you start drawing contour's you're engaging in an abstract thought process. Kelly, a master of abstract thinking, uses this in a particularly sophisticated way. The drawings are usually made with a graphite pencil, but the lines feel like they've been made with a lazer, dividing the paper into clean cool forms. He creates a tense dialogue of positive and negative shapes existing on both sides of the outline. This is most impressively seen in his large "Beanstalk" drawing in the last gallery. Kelly occasionally uses color (watercolor), but that's usually just to create silhouettes.

Why leaves, and vines, and flowers? Well, what's most apparent in this work, and it's relationship to his more known non-representational paintings is his appreciation of symmetry in nature, and it's more subtle asymmetry. Obviously there's a great history of visual artists being drawn to the nondiscoursive delicacy and purposefulness in natures humbler forms, but minimalists? Aren't they supposed to be driven by grander, more epic subjects than a floppy banana plant? Not Kelly. What I find most revealing about this small show is how he translates natures humble, intimate abstractions into large scale non-representational paintings. He was, in this way, following in the tradition of the impressionists. I know, you're thinking "Ellsworth Kelly? Impressionism? Yeah, sure Matt". But trust me, I'm right on this. If you make the chronological transition from Monet, to Gauguin, to Vuillard, to Mattise, you can see how Kelly falls into that Modernist sensibility. Believe me, he has much more in common with Monet and Cezanne than with Mondrian or Malevich. Or don't believe me, see it your self. It's up till September. Or, don't see it. Kelly's not for everyone. No skin off my ass. I'm just trying to help here. You can stay home and watch NASCAR, and eat beef jerky for all I care.

Watteau: music and theater. through Nov 29 Vermeer’s Masterpiece: The Milkmaid through Nov 29

Metropolitan Museum of Art

For me Watteau seems like the kind of artist that's hard to not like. Maybe it's because I've been kind of obsessed with him for the last year or two, but this exhibition is to honor former director Philippe de Montebello, who called Watteau one of his favorite artists. So, apparently I'm not the only one. Watteau has a reputation as the master of sophisticated hedonism. I didn't make that up. I know I read that somewhere, and it seems pretty accurate. Toulouse-Lautrec may have been more of a hedonist, but Wateau was more sophisticated. I'm talking about the painting, not necessarily the subject matter. Watteau's subjects just look like they had more money than Toulouse-Lautrec's.

Anyway, this is a pretty small show that consists of just two rooms. One of drawings, and the other of paintings. Still, there are some real jewels to be found. Also, about a third of the work is not by Watteau but his contemporaries. This is to illustrate the artists influence on 18th century france, but it also draws attention to the qualitative difference between the work of some very skilled artists and that of an old master. The only artist who comes close to Watteau is Nicolas Lancret, who has some pretty impressive work in the show.

Watteau died very young at 37 which accounts for his somewhat small body of paintings, but he was a copious draftsman. Thank god for that, because he was magic with the colored chalk. Most of his drawings were done as studies for his paintings, but his light handed effortless way of rendering makes them stand out from his contemporaries, and function as independent works of art. His paintings also have a subtle elegance that makes them exceptional. He's as famous for his pallet of silvery greens and soft pinks as for his strange theatrical narratives. The interaction of his figures are enigmatic and appear almost otherworldly. These scenarios and the characters that make them up were based on the commedia dell'arte for which Watteau had once worked as a set and costume designer, and figures like Harlequin, Mezzetin, and Pierrot are staples in his work. He used these figures, and narratives to create a new genre of painting called the Fete Galante, which became very popular throuout Europe after his death in 1721.

Vermeer died soon before Watteau was born, which is just as well because I don't think they would have gotten along with each other anyway. Although, they did have a few things in common. They both died young (Vermeer at 45 and Watteau at 37). They both painted relatively small paintings with kind of dreamy ethereal narratives, and they both became hugely influential after their death. Watteau's painterliness, and exoticism though is in stark contrast to Vermeer's precise detailed studies of light and form, and his focus on humble everyday people and objects.

This show is similar though, in that it's small and made up largely of other artists work. Actually, in this case most of the work is by other artists and there are only 6 Vermeer's in the whole show including "The Milkmaid" which is on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. that's not too bad though considering that there are only about 35 Vermeer's known to exist in the world. All the other work in the show is part of the Met's permanent collection including the five other Vermeer's, which can be seen on exhibition all the time anyway. The show was put together to celebrate the anniversary of Henry Hudson doing something important. I can't remember what. Anyway, "The Milkmaid" is a beautiful painting, but I don't think it's his best. I don't think it's as good as "The Girl With A Pearl Earring", and it's certainly not as good as "View of Delft", but neither one of those are in the show.

Both these shows are closing pretty soon, so if you want to see them you've got to get off your ass and get over there. I probably should have reviewed them earlier, but you know I've got things to do.

Francis Bacon, A Centenary Retrospective. Through Aug. 16th

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Francis Bacon, Through August 16, 2009

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is unquestionably one of the most important and influential British figurative painters of the twentieth century. He is also no relation to the actor Kevin Bacon, or to the smoked breakfast meat that I think tastes so good with french toast. But, I digress. When you think about the way British painters have distorted the human body since the first world war for the purpose of finding a truer less romanticized existential image of the human condition (and I'm thinking specifically of Lucian Freud, Stanley Spencer, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and more recently Jenny Saville) Bacon stands chronologically at the head of the pack. You could say that he established a content that would become one of the hallmarks of modern British painting. Another thing that makes him an historically important artist is that he was one of the first to cross reference photography, film, and old master paintings in his work. Also, he did it in a particularly imaginative and original way. His obsession with stills from the film "Battleship Potemkin" and the Diego Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X are themes that reappear throughout his life's work. We know Bacon was an atheist, but I don't know what it was about this image of this Pope that haunted him the way it did. Anyway, I can't imagine the Vatican was one of his major patrons.

That said, I have to admit that I've never been a huge fan of Bacon, and this show didn't do anything to change my mind. The show can best be described as hit and miss, but that can also accurately describe the mans career. Bacons images are arresting and powerful at best, but melodramatic and formulaic at worst. Also, his work didn't really evolve all that much. The paintings in the last galleries of the retrospective look very similar to those in the first both in subject and style. He clearly had a great gift for painterly distortion of the figure, but he frequently resorted to what I would have to call cheap expressionist theatrics, and it's the repetition of those theatrics that undermine their own authenticity. This is more obvious when his paintings are seen in a large group like this. In terms of subject matter he stuck primarily to figures in rooms, usually naked and lying on sofas or beds. There are also a lot of screaming heads, frequently belonging to the Velazquez Pope. Formally you can see the same pallet throuout the show. The same spooky burnt oranges and pinks, and the same big black backgrounds for his pale white figures to sit dramatically against. He also enjoyed drawing linear squares or rectangles around his figures which I guess was meant as a nod to the surrealists, and his use of little red arrows that crop up in his paintings over the last twenty years or so of his life is a pretty superficial compositional device that doesn't serve any intelligent pictoral function, and really annoys me.

There are some undeniable masterpieces in the show. I'm thinking specifically of the "Three Studies for a Crucifixion" triptych done in 1944 and the second version painted in 1962. These are as powerful and disturbing as anything I've seen in modern art. In fact, the triptych format is something Bacon really shines at, and are the most consistently good work in the show. Some of his early figure study paintings are also wonderful, like "Figure in a Landscape" from 1945. Also, the portraits of his late lover George Dyer painted in the 1970s are very moving and emotional images. it's interesting how his obsession with certain lovers seem to mirror his obsession with certain photographs and paintings. When he was on, Bacon was clearly a modern master of great importance. The problem as I see it is that half the time he painted like a lesser, less motivated artist trying to imitate Frances Bacon.

Metropolitan Museum of Art,1000 5th ave at 82nd streetBonnard: late interiors. Through April 19

You've got to love Bonnard! How can anyone not love Bonnard? Well Picasso didn't, but that's just something else to love about Bonnard. They both grew out of the same modernist roots, but while Picasso was creating his own style that so many subsequent artists embraced Bonnard branched out in a totally different direction that even Picasso couldn't appreciate. He was, and to some extent still is one of the most misunderstood artist of the modern era. He's considered by most to be the last of the bourgeois lyricists, and it is easy to initially see his paintings as playful decorative exercises, even "piddling" ones as Picasso said. But, if you keep looking you see how spatially conflicting and structurally complicated his images are. Complicated but never detailed, and slow but never labored. He also liberated color from subject matter in a way so radical that he has to be seen as one of the early modernists that prefigured abstraction.

One of the ways that he separated form from subject matter is that he almost never painted from life. Instead he worked from small spontaneous pencil sketches that had very little detail. Some look almost like Cy Twombly doodles. These gave him very little information to work from, thus forcing the painting to take on a life of its own. Bonnard sketched religiously, and kept a daybook with him at all times making visual notes of the things he saw. Most of those things are pretty mundane, but you'd never know from the drawings. There are a series of these day books in the exhibition that are absolute jewels.

The show focuses on his late interiors, but there are a lot of still lifes to be seen. I suppose a still life technically is an interior unless it's set up outdoors, but...whatever. Anyway, I think it's interesting because these are the same galleries that held the Morandi show a few months ago. I couldn't help but think how different Bonnard's still lives are from Morandi's in terms of pallet, composition, and general paint handling. In some ways though they're strangely similar in their intimacy, and the way they ask the viewer to slow down and navigate through the groupings of commonplace objects.

It is, however the larger more complex interiors that are the most effective and powerful. The way he combines and renders complicated objects and spaces, and transforms them into rich strokes of paint, bringing them back up to the surfaces of these larger canvases is endlessly fascinating.  A still life on a table will be set next to a figure, next to a door leading to another room. Then there will be a window leading out to a terrace, which will in turn lead to a landscape. It's like he wanted to fit as many things into the painting as he possibly could for the sheer joy of painting them, and seeing how they play off one another. I noticed something about Bonnard a few years ago. The scale of his subject matter doesn't usually grow when he paints larger paintings. He just paints more things, like he's opening the lens of a camera to include more. So, it's not the scale but the structural complexity of the image that grows with the size of the painting.

One of the last paintings in the show is "Interior Dining Room" which was finished soon before the artists death. Bonnard never had any trepidation about using color combinations that were challenging to aesthetic convention, sometimes even garish or ugly. This late work is particularly ambitious in that sense. It's a near riot of color, more so than almost anything of his I've seen. That, combined with the severe distortion of the figures and objects in the painting show that the artist never grew complacent in his old age. This is a great show of an amazing painter. Anyway, that's what I think.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th ave at 82nd Raphael to Renoir: Drawings from the collection of Jean Bonna. through April 26

The Bonna collection is a pretty impressive one, and one that covers 400 years of drawing from the late Renaissance to the post impressionists. While it's called "Raphael to Renoir" it actually starts before the former and ends after the later. It also contains only one work from Raphael, and one from Renoir. Maybe the curator had a bias for alliteration. I don't know. It could just as easily be called "Nature and Religion in Drawing" because the subject matter is almost always one or the other, or both. Frequently it's one in the service or the other. It covers pretty much all facets of drawing during the period, from tight detailed studies to loose nearly abstract exercises.

The show is broken into three rooms. The first covers the late Renaissance where you'll see some prominent names like Del Sarto, Carracci, Raphael (of course), and a wonderfully elegant pen and ink drawing by Parmigianino. There is a lot of light handed virtuoso handling of the medium in this room, whether it's chalk, ink, or in a few cases watercolor . Most of this work was meant as studies for paintings, but several were created as independent artworks.

The second room moves to France and the Netherlands in the late 16th century to cover the more secular Baroque era. This starts with a couple of Claude Lorrain ink landscapes that are pure effortless poetry. That light graceful character fills the room, but is only equaled by the chalk drawings of Watteau, Boucher, and Greuze. I was also very conscious of the influence of the Commedia Dell' Art on the artists of the time. Not just on the French artists mentioned, but in a drawing by a 70 year old Tiepolo. Who was, coincidentally the only Italian in the room. At least I think it was a coincidence.

The last room covers the late 18th and 19th century, or late neo-classicism through post impressionism. If you're wondering how something can be both late and neo, just trust me. Almost all of the artists in this section are French, and apart from a few delicate drawings by Ingres, the handling of the materials gets more expressive, painterly and physical. There are a few furiously rendered ballet dancers by Degas, and a wonderfully spontaneous Cezanne watercolor that looks like it could have been drawn by the rain.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th ave at 82nd streetArt and Love in Renaissance Italy. through Feb 16

Metropolitan Museum of Art 5th Ave. at 82nd Street

Usually when you think about Renaissance Italian art you think about religious and mythological art, and more often than not art commissioned by the Catholic church. One of the things that's unusual about this show is that it consists solely of privately commissioned, primarily secular paintings and objects. There are a number of beautifully crafted wedding gifts and dowry objects from wealthy families, like jewelry and ceramics. There are also quite a few childbirth trays, which sound like something an obstetrician might use, but are actually wooden trays that have images painted on one or both sides and are used to commemorate a birth.

the paintings in the show are mostly portraits of couples on the eve or just after a wedding, or in some cases children, or parents and their children. The quality of these vary a bit, but there are some masterful works by big names like Lorenzo Lotto, Dominico Ghirlandaio, Bronzino, Georgione, Titian, and one amazing double portrait by Fillippo Lippi that may be the best thing in the show. There's also a strange and haunting painting of a woman from Loranzo Di Credi.

One gallery is dedicated to paintings commissioned to decorate the "camera" or bed chamber , which I guess was a common practice among rich horny people at the time. A lot of these works are not up to the same level as those in the rest of the show, but there is one Botticelli which is actually part of a larger series that's absolutely stunning.

A lot has been made of the erotic art in this show, but it's a relatively small part of the exhibition and fills only two rooms with prints and ceramics. It seemed to me a lot more comic than sensual, partly because most of the other works in the show uses images of flowers or fruit and vegetables as discreet symbols of fertility and sex, and it's pretty amusing to see in this section how those symbols are replaced with actual genitals. The other reason I thought it was funny is that "the renaissance" by definition is the rebirth of classical thought and culture, so you don't really think of crotch shots and giant dismembered penises. By today's standard these works are pretty tame though, so if you're looking for something Mapplethorpian you may be disappointed. Actually there are two wonderful Titian's in the last gallery that I thought were far more sensual than anything in the "erotic" section. These paintings seem somehow to magically turn paint into flesh through some wild libidinal alchemy. I'm not sure how he did it, but I guess that's why he's an old master.