Cezanne, Pissarro and Krazy Kat
Tony Zaza
The best show of the summer was invisible to the general public. It was the expansive but hidden exhibit of the staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Set once a year for employees only, the exhibit is a celebration of and tribute to the unseen artists in our midst, "average" people committed to their art while working their day job, which just happens to be at the Met. Every genre and approach is represented that has been shown in the galleries of Chelsea and Soho. Yet these works, all completed this year, share something the new era practitioners of the established showcases lack, a quiet resolution that their art will always, seen or unseen, be an integral part of who they are, security guards, accountants, curatorial assistants, custodians.
Back upstairs, was the work of Matisse–the Moroccan period in which his backgrounds make use of the colors, textures and patterns of Islamic decorative crafts and textiles. Continuing the didactic movement now prevalent in museums, the Met mounted lame examples of textile artifacts that forces the viewer to comparison-shop drawing "obvious" but wrong-minded associations between Matisse’s use of the decorative element of line and the graphic, iconographic potential of the textiles. There is no point to all of this other than to reflect an insecurity concerning the viewers’ capacity to see for itself.
Likewise, MOMA correspondingly feels that its audiences are incapable of discerning the differences and similarities of the works by Cezanne and Pissarro during their buddy period. Hanging the same views painted by each artist next to each other so that average folk can plainly see how two young men working near each other can actually influence each other’s work. Well, I tell you, this is more pedagogy than I can handle so off to the realm of the MOMA screening of the very early Krazy Cat cartoons based on the Herriman strip. These silents, barely survived, usually attached to the front end of a silent feature, circa 1916, before the great war, are artifacts of a very unsophisticated America in which audiences found nearly anything funny that was exhibited in the dark. Nevertheless the economy of simple line drawing against no background but infused with whimsical movement and pre-digital "morphing" proves that there is hardly any greater imagination at work today.
