106
Pablo Picasso‘s “Woman Ironing” at the Guggenheim.
Photo: Pablo Picasso, “woman ironing,” 1904, ©2012 estate of Pablo Picasso/artists rights society (ars), new york. kristoPher mckay, ©the solomon r. guggenheim foundation, new york
says Megan Fontanella, Associate Curator, Collections and Provenance. Also of note is the painting’s peripatetic past: The famous art dealer Justin K. Thannhauser spirited it out of Nazi Germany for an art show touring South America before fleeing the country himself. He later donated 75 important works to the Guggenheim, including the Pissarro. Also not to be missed at the Guggenheim: “Woman Ironing,” a melancholic 1904 Blue Period painting by Picasso. And one with a secret. Due to limited finances, the young Picasso often reused his canvases. “In the late 1980s, a conservation study identified a portrait of a standing man beneath the laundress one sees today,” says Fontanella. Note the telltale drips of paint from the underlying canvas near the woman’s head. Not long after Thomas P. Campbell became Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he handpicked 35 highlights for an audio tour, a lifeline for those confounded by the encyclopedic collection on view. Three dependable dazzlers are the 2,000-year-old Temple of Dendur, the 15th-century Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio and Johannes Vermeer’s “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher” from 1662-63. Of Dendur, a gift to the American people for helping save Egyptian monuments from flooding in the 1960s, Campbell calls the “small but impressive” temple that once stood on the bank of the Nile a way for visitors “to experience an Egyptian temple in New York.” To sample the trompe l’oeil splendors of a Renaissance Italian’s private retreat, the director dispatches us to Federico da Montefeltro’s studio, an exquisite room that looks like a fully furnished interior but is made entirely of intarsia, an elaborate form of wood inlay. “The illusionism is taken to a virtuoso level, with thousands of pieces of various kinds of wood fitted together to form an extraordinary result,” he says. As for Vermeer, the 17th-century Dutch artist created just 36 paintings, but five are housed at the Met, including the luminous young woman holding a pitcher. Drawing attention to the masterfully structured composition and the ingenious way light enters the room, Campbell declares the little painting “a simple scene invested with poetic truth.” And poetry, all these works are. W H E R E G UESTBO O K
NYCGB_161100_Museums.indd 106
11/1/16 1:54:03 PM