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| Raphael, Madonna and Child with Book, about 1502-1503. Norton Simon Museum |
Twenty years ago the Norton Simon Museum lent its
Raphael Madonna and Child with Book to the Metropolitan Museum for "Raphael at the Metropolitan: The Colonna Madonna," a focus show built around the Met's large but massively restored altarpiece. That was an unusual move for the Simon, which rarely lends its works. Now the Met is doing a vastly more ambitious exhibition, "Raphael: Sublime Poetry" (in New York through June 28, 2026). This time the Simon painting is absent.
That's really too bad because the Met show (and its catalog) includes three drawings enhancing understanding of the Simon Madonna. One sheet, from Lille, has two studies of the Virgin's hand and book, establishing its connection to the Pasadena painting. While the Lille head looks feminine, the manspreading stance does not. It's a reminder that Renaissance figure models were almost always male studio assistants. Michelangelo's buff sibyls (female prophets) for the Sistine Chapel ceiling are the best-known examples.
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| Raphael, Workshop Assistant Posing for Studies of the Seated Virgin; Marginal Sketches (The Norton Simon Madonna), about 1502–1503. Palais de Beaux Artes, Lille |
The Getty has lent all three of its accepted Raphael drawings to the Met. Also on view is a newly discovered Raphael drawing that relates to the Getty's Giulio Romano painting, The Holy Family. Giulio was Raphael's protégé and collaborator. Discovered in a private collection, the Raphael drawing is clearly related to the Getty painting, particularly in the three central figures. It appears that Giulio based his painting on his mentor's drawing.
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| Raphael, The Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist and a Figure in a Landscape, about 1510. Private collection |
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| Giulio Romano, The Holy Family, about 1518–1520. Getty Museum |
Comments
I don't know enough about Raphael to know the depth of the show's loss, without Norton Simon's picture. There are innumerable paintings with associated drawings on display.
I do know that the exhibition space is packed with Madonnas, like the poor, three to a bed.
Great thanks to Lille, with its super generous loan of dozens of drawings.
My sleeper favorite medium is tapestry...loads of tapestries...Thank goodness for the Patrimomio Nacional of Spain!
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Off to see Duchamp at MoMA. I hope I'll see Yale well represented.
Meanwhile, LACMA's special exhibition galleries has a room of nothing but hanging objects reminiscent of the chandeliers in the Met Opera House. That display, by the way, goes back months and months---in comparison, the Raphael show hosted by the Met ends at the end of June.
As for the Simon Museum, although I appreciate its format and don't want the museum to change (I'm apprehensive what the Getty Center is doing), awhile ago it did make me ponder the idea of a traditional versus more mixed-together format. The segregated format (ie, styles, eras, regions) of most art museums could use an alternative. But other people (eg, the following critic) will disagree.
By Peter C. Horan, The Manual:
Twenty years in the making and costing more than $700 million, the project is meant to be a signature cultural landmark for the city as Los Angeles…. It has been funded and supported by some of the biggest names in Southern California, along with international backers…All of which makes the experience of visiting the new building both fascinating and oddly frustrating.
The new Geffen Galleries reject…. Chronology, geography, medium, and traditional art-historical categories…. There is also no obvious path through the galleries. The building invites wandering, which sounds liberating in theory. In practice, it can feel more like drifting.
This is not necessarily a bad idea. Museums should not be mausoleums.… But if a museum abandons familiar organizing principles, it has to replace them with something equally compelling. At the Geffen, that “something” is often hard to find.
Elsewhere, in one of the large open spaces, a man was lying on the floor next to a BMX bike. Eventually, he got up and moved around the space…. People watched, but the mood seemed less like artistic engagement than collective uncertainty. There was a lot of “what the hell?” in the room. That, in miniature, is the problem. The building seems designed around the idea that removing familiar structure will force visitors to look harder…and make their own connections. Maybe that will work for some people. But for many visitors…it may have the opposite effect. Without a clear framework, they may simply give up.
It gives Los Angeles a new vantage point on itself. This is not a museum sealed off from the city. It is perched above it…almost suspended inside it. For a travel visitor, that alone makes it worth seeing.
The architecture is also more inviting than photographs might suggest. The building is largely gray concrete, which sounds forbidding, but it is not cold. The curves soften it. The openness gives it life. The concrete provides a strong, neutral backdrop for the art and a certain seriousness without becoming brutal.
And that may be part of the difficulty. The architecture has such confidence that the galleries need to work even harder to hold their own. Instead, too often, the art feels oddly unmoored. You move from object to object without always understanding why these works are near one another… Instead, too many visitors may leave thinking they admired the building more than they enjoyed the art.
The contrast is especially striking because LACMA itself knows how to do this better. Just down the walkway, in the Resnick Pavilion…. the galleries gave me enough structure to understand what I was seeing and enough freedom to make my own discoveries…. I learned something. I left wanting more.
That is the sweet spot. A great museum experience should not spoon-feed the visitor, but it should not leave the visitor stranded either.
For now, the Geffen feels like a bold experiment that has not yet solved its central problem. It has given Los Angeles a remarkable new building. It still needs to become a remarkable museum. [End quote]
Areas like that give the impression LACMA has more space than the staff knows what to do with. Or a very indulgent installation that implies the museum's collections don't have enough quantify, if not quality too.
But that's one angle the writer doesn't bring up or doesn't seem bothered by the way it does to me. Yet he did describe the Geffen (along with the BCAM, Resnick and Goff/Price too?) as "it still needs to be a remarkable museum."
That some sentiment existed in April 1965 too. Or "as much as things change, some things never change."
Groundhog Day.
Speaking of the NBA, the NY Knicks haven't been in the NBA championship since 1999. They last won the O'Brien trophy in 1973.
As for 3 other dates worth pointing out: 1965, 1986, 2026
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The Duchamp show is worth a journey. Vast. Dozens of his early paintings from Philadelphia were shown..these paintings that I have never seen on display in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 40 years of visits. Magnificent.
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And not skads from Yale, but my favorite Duchamp of all time, coll. Yale, was on show: his 1918 Tu M'
(oil on canvas, complete with bottlebrush, safety pins, and bolt)
--- J. Garcin