Tag Archives: Édouard Manet

HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS: THE FRICK IS BACK — AND BETTER THAN EVER

El Greco’s St. Jerome is once again flanked by Hans Holbein the Younger’s Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

THE FRICK COLLECTION
1 East 70th St. at Fifth Ave.
Wednesday – Sunday, $17-$30 (pay-what-you-wish Wednesdays 2:00–6:00)
www.frick.org

The Frick is my happy place.

Judging by the smiles on the faces of the hundreds of other Fricksters I encountered at a recent members preview of the reopened Fifth Ave. institution, I am far from the only one.

In 1913, American industrialist and art collector Henry Clay Frick commissioned the architecture firm of Carrère and Hastings to design the building as both a private home and a public resource. Frick died in 1919 at the age of sixty-nine; his daughter, Helen Clay Frick, served as a founding trustee of the collection and, in 1920, established the Frick Art Reference Library. In 1931, the building was adapted into a museum by architect John Russell Pope. The Frick Collection opened on December 11, 1935, for distinguished guests; three days later, ARTnews editor Alfred M. Frankfurter wrote that it is “one of the most important events in the history of American collecting and appreciation of art.”

The Frick closed in March 2020 for a major renovation, temporarily moving its remarkable holdings to the nearby Breuer Building on Seventy-Fifth and Madison, the former home of the Whitney. On April 17, the Frick will reopen to the public, with ten percent more square footage, going from 178,000 square feet to 196,000, including 60,000 square feet of repurposed space and 27,000 square feet of new construction, increasing the gallery space by thirty percent, highlighted by the unveiling of the second floor, which has been converted from administrative offices to fifteen rooms of masterpieces. The renovation and revitalization also features a new Reception Hall, Education Room, and 218-seat auditorium.

The 1732 Great Bustard resides on a pedestal near the Garden Court fountain (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The main floor will be familiar to anyone who has ever visited the Frick; amid some minor changes, the twenty rooms have remained mostly intact. The Gainsboroughs are in the Dining Room, Boucher’s The Four Seasons are in the West Vestibule, four Whistler portraits stand tall in the Oval Room, Fragonard’s The Progress of Love series populates the Fragonard Room, and Goya’s Portrait of a Lady (María Martínez de Puga?) brings mystery to the East Gallery.

El Greco’s Purification of the Temple can be found in the Anteroom, Tiepolo’s Perseus and Andromeda in the East Vestibule, and Vecchietta’s The Resurrection in the Octagon Room. John C. Johansen’s portrait of Henry Clay Frick enjoys primo placement in the Library, where he is joined by Gilbert Stuart’s 1795 portrait of George Washington and numerous canvases by such British artists as Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Turner, and Constable, whose Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds has delighted me over and over again.

The Garden Court, with its peaceful fountain surrounded by columns, plantings, and Barbet’s Angel, is one of the loveliest indoor respites in the city.

Velázquez’s King Philip IV of Spain and Goya’s The Forge hang catty corner in the West Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The glorious West Gallery houses many of the greatest hits, from Rembrandt’s stunning 1658 Self-Portrait and Velázquez’s regal King Philip IV of Spain to Goya’s gritty The Forge and Veronese’s enigmatic parable The Choice Between Virtue and Vice, along with a pair of gorgeous Turner port scenes, Corot’s captivating landscape The Lake, Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid, portraits by El Greco, Hals, Goya, and Van Dyke, and more than a dozen small mythological sculptures.

Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert no longer has its own room but is coping (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The centerpiece of the Frick has always been the Living Hall, with magisterial furniture, chandeliers, large vases, and a five-hundred-year-old Persian carpet. On one wall, Titian’s Pietro Aretino and Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat flank Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, which in the Frick Madison had its own room. Opposite that trio is the pièce de résistance: El Greco’s elongated St. Jerome stares out above the fireplace; to his left and right, respectively, are Hans Holbein the Younger’s stunning portraits of archenemies Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More, the latter, in my opinion, the most spectacular portrait in the history of Western art. Its name, the Living Hall, could not be more appropriate, as it feels lived in.

Drouais’s The Comte and Chevalier de Choiseul as Savoyards is near the base of the stairs (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The South Hall offers two Vermeers, Girl Interrupted at Her Music and Officer and Laughing Girl, facing a Frick fan favorite, Bronzino’s Lodovico Capponi, with its cleverly placed sword. After years of appearing behind the ropes that bar visitors from going upstairs, Drouais’s The Comte and Chevalier de Choiseul as Savoyards, depicting two young boys smiling like the cat who ate the canary, can now be approached before you make your pilgrimage to newly sanctified land.

And then, there it is: the Grand Stairway leading to the previously off-limits second floor. The looks as people make their way to the steps are fascinating, a mix of bated breath, yearning, excited anticipation, and even stealth, as if some museumgoers still can’t believe it is allowed. At the landing is a decorative screen and an Aeolian-Skinner organ that was once played by Archer Gibson for Henry and at dinner parties. At the top is Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Promenade, a lush oil of a woman and two young twin sisters that used to reside near the base of the stairs and now serves as a fine introduction to the myriad treasures upstairs.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Promenade greets visitors at the top of the Grand Stairway (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The second floor is a mazelike procession of tighter spaces where the Fricks lived, again adorned with dazzling classics and lesser-known works that were not regularly on view in the past. Corot’s Ville-d’Avray and The Pond are in the Breakfast Room, with sets of jars and wine coolers and Théodore Rousseau’s The Village of Becquigny. Manet’s The Bullfight can now be found in the Impressionist Room, joined by Degas’s The Rehearsal and Monet’s Vétheuil in Winter, which had numerous people gasping. “I don’t remember ever seeing this before,” one woman said, and others nodded. Don’t miss Watteau’s The Portal of Valenciennes in the Small Hallway.

Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Man is now upstairs in the Sitting Room at the Frick (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Gold-Grounds Room gathers such religious works as Fra Filippo Lippi’s The Annunciation, Piero della Francesca’s The Crucifixion, and Paolo Veneziano’s The Coronation of the Virgin. Although there is a user-friendly app that tells you where everything is, I preferred searching on my own and was thrilled when I finally located Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Man in the Sitting Room, a depiction of an invitingly calm, laid-back man. Ingres’s Louise, Princesse de Broglie, Later the Comtesse d’Haussonville, another Frick fave, now holds court in the Walnut Room, near Houdon’s marble Madame His.

Among the other second-floor galleries are the Clocks and Watches Room, the Du Paquier Passage, the Boucher Room and Anteroom, the Ceramics Room, the Medals Room, and the Lajoue Passage, each with their own charm. And be sure to check out the hallway ceilings, covered in a beautiful mural with fabulous detail in the corners and ends.

The corners of the second-floor ceiling murals hold tiny gems (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

As recently retired former Frick director Ian Waldropper notes in the Frick’s Essential Guide, “The reopening of the renovated Frick Collection is cause for celebration.” It’s an inspiring place to visit old friends and make new ones, to see masterpieces in literal and figurative new light. One way the Frick has not changed is that the institution still does not allow any photos or videos, except at the early members and press previews. At first, I wasn’t going to take any pictures, but then I heard a few guards say, “Get out your cameras now, because you won’t be allowed to starting April 17.”

My happy place is back, and just in time.

There are two current special exhibitions; “Highlights of Drawings from the Frick Collection,” continuing in the Cabinet through August 11, consists of a dozen rarely displayed works, from Pisanello’s haunting pen and brown ink Studies of Men Hanging and Whistler’s surprising black chalk and pastel Venetian Canal to Goya’s brush and brown wash The Anglers and the coup de grâce, Ingres’s graphite and black chalk study for Louise, Princesse de Broglie . . .

Vladimir Kanevsky’s porcelain hydrangeas can be found in the Breakfast Room (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Meanwhile, for “Porcelain Garden,” US-based Ukrainian artist Vladimir Kanevsky has installed porcelain flowers in nineteen locations throughout the Frick, on the floor and on tables, in vases and pots, creating a dialogue between the fragile plants and the museum’s many treasures; you’ll find lilacs in the Dining Room, foxgloves in the West Vestibule, cascading roses and white hyacinths in the Fragonard Room, dahlia branches and anemones in the Portico Gallery, and a lemon tree in the Garden Court, among others.

And from June 18 to August 31, “Vermeer’s Love Letters” unites the Frick’s Mistress and Maid with the Rijksmuseum’s Love Letter and the National Gallery of Ireland’s Woman Writing a Letter, with Her Maid.

Below are only some of the scheduled programs, with more to come.

Friday, April 18
Gallery Talk: A Home for Art, Library Gallery, free with museum admission, 6:00 & 7:00

Gallery Talk: Closer Look at Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid, West Gallery, free with museum admission, 6:00 & 7:00

Friday, April 25
Gallery Talk: A Home for Art, Library Gallery, free with museum admission, 6:00 & 7:00

Saturday, April 26
Spring Music Festival: Jupiter Ensemble, Lea Desandre, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00

Thursday, May 1
Spring Music Festival: Takács Quartet and Jeremy Denk, Piano, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00

Saturday, May 3
Spring Music Festival: Sarah Rothenberg, Solo Piano, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00

Sunday, May 4
Spring Music Festival: Alexi Kenney, Violin and Amy Yang, Fortepiano, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00

Thursday, May 8
Sketch Night, free with advance RSVP, 5:00
Spring Music Festival: Emi Ferguson, Flute and Ruckus, Baroque Ensemble, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 7:00

Friday, May 9
Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher Fellow Lecture: The Milicz Medals of Johann Friedrich of Saxony and the Subtleties of Political Art in the Age of Reformation, with Maximilian Kummer, Ian Wardropper Education Room, free with advance RSVP, 6:00

Sunday, May 11
Spring Music Festival: Mishka Rushdie Momen, Solo Piano, Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, 5:00

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MANET / DEGAS

Edgar Degas, In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker), oil on canvas, 1875–76 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris); Edouard Manet, Plum Brandy, oil on canvas, ca. 1877 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon)

MANET / DEGAS
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Fifth Ave.
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through January 7, $30 (NY, NJ, CT residents pay-what-you-wish)
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

In 2003, MoMA hosted the revelatory exhibition “Matisse Picasso,” a dramatic exploration of the documented, nearly half-century rivalry between the French Henri Matisse and the Spanish Pablo Picasso.

The Met is now taking a similar approach with “Manet/Degas,” a deep dive into the personal and professional relationship between French artists Édouard Manet (1832–83) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917), albeit with far less direct evidence. “Each was incredibly ambitious, and their sustained, thoughtful, and at times competitive observation of one another and their contemporaries would become vital to their enterprise,” Met director and CEO Max Hollein says in the below video. However, wall text points out, “Attempts to assess the relationship between Manet and Degas are complicated by the sparse record of their exchanges,” and the narrator on the audioguide explains, “Manet and Degas would continue to push each other to take the risks that would define their careers. But they left little evidence of their relationship in their papers. For example, though Degas speaks of Manet in his many letters to others, none of his letters is addressed to Manet. And for his part, Manet left just a few letters to Degas.”

The show opens with Manet’s Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette) and Degas’s Portrait of the Artist next to each other, setting up the side-by-side nature of the exhibit, which comprises more than 160 paintings and works on paper. The men, born two years apart, met in the Louvre in 1861–62 and both became friends with artist Berthe Morisot, who later married Manet’s younger brother, painter Eugène Manet. They both copied Diego Velázquez’s depiction of Infanta Margarita. Before they met, they had each made a self-portrait in the style of Filippino Lippi. Manet’s The Madonna of the Rabbit, after Titian hangs next to Degas’s The Crucifixion, after Mantegna. At the 1865 Salon, Manet’s Olympia created a furor, as opposed to Degas’s relatively unrecognized Scene of War in the Middle Ages; the paintings hang nearby each other at the Met.

In 1868–69, Degas made a series of drawings of Manet in addition to a painting of Manet relaxing on a couch, looking at Degas as Manet’s wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, played the piano. He gave the canvas to Manet, who quickly slashed off the right side so his wife’s face and the piano were no longer visible. Degas ended up keeping the work and hanging it on his wall, eventually adding a blank strip that perhaps signaled that he was going to restore the missing section, but he never did. Manet never drew or painted Degas, but he did paint Suzanne at the piano, perhaps as a response to Degas’s work. While Degas collected paintings and drawings by Manet, Manet did not seem to return the favor. Degas helped organize the first Impressionist exhibition, in 1874, while Manet decided not to participate.

Edouard Manet, Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette), oil on canvas, ca. 1878–79 (private collection); Edgar Degas, Portrait of the Artist, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 1855 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

Other telling pairings at the Met include Manet’s Standing Man, after del Sarto and Degas’s Study of a Draped Figure, Manet’s Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste De Gas and Degas’s Music Lesson, Manet’s The Dead Toreador and Degas’s Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey, Manet’s The Races in the Bois de Boulogne (in which the figure at the lower right might be Degas) and Degas’s The False Start, Manet’s Plum Brandy and Degas’s In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (which feature the same model, actress Ellen Andrée), Manet’s On the Beach, Boulogne-sur-Mer and Marine and Degas’s Beach Scene and Fishing Boat at the Entrance to the Port of Dives, Manet’s Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet and Degas’s Hilaire Degas, and Manet’s Woman with a Tub and Nude Arranging Her Hair and Degas’s Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub and Nude Arranging Her Hair.

The show is divided into such sections as “An Enigmatic Relationship,” “Artistic Origins: Study, Copy, Create,” “Family Origins and Tensions,” “Challenging Genres at the Salon,” “The Morisot Circle,” and “At the Racecourse,” tracing the many intersections of Manet’s and Degas’s personal and professional lives, which continued after Manet’s death in 1883 at the age of fifty-one, as Degas, who died in 1917 at eighty-three, purchased more of Manet’s work, highlighted by his unsuccessful attempt to bring together all fragments of Manet’s masterpiece The Execution of Maximilian.

But the Met, in collaboration with the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, has done a marvelous job of bringing together the work of the these two giants, friends and rivals whose lives overlapped in captivating ways.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MANET: THREE PAINTINGS FROM THE NORTON SIMON MUSEUM

Three works attest to Manet’s vast skill in small but powerful show at the Frick (photo courtesy the Frick Collection)

The Frick Collection
1 East 70th St. at Fifth Ave.
Through January 5, $12-$22
212-288-0700
www.frick.org

The Frick’s seventh collaboration with Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum might not be a large-scale blockbuster, but that doesn’t make it any less of a must-see. “Manet: Three Paintings from the Norton Simon Museum,” which ends January 4, features three canvases hung side by side in the Frick’s glorious, intimate Oval Room that show off the vast skills of French modernist Édouard Manet. The 1864 still-life Fish and Shrimp reveals Manet’s masterly brushwork, the paint at times almost sculptural; the salmon appears to slither on a chest, its tail flapping. “A painter can say all he wants to say with fruit or flowers or even a cloud,” Manet related to artist Charles Toché. Manet says plenty here with seafood. To the far left is a small portrait of Manet’s wife, pianist Suzanne Leenhoff, who posed for him often. Painted around 1876, Madame Manet shows Leenhoff, who was the family’s music teacher before marrying Édouard, looking slightly away, her dress slightly darker than the shadowy gray background. Tiny parts of the canvas peek through, but the work is not unfinished; it has a sketchy quality despite many layers of paint, lending a mysterious air to the subject.

The Ragpicker, ca. 1865–71, possibly reworked 1876–77 Oil on canvas 76 3/4 × 51 1/2 in. (194.9 × 130.8 cm) The Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena, California

Édouard Manet, The Ragpicker, oil on canvas, ca. 1865–71, possibly reworked 1876–77, (the Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena, California)

In between those two canvases, rising above the fireplace, is The Ragpicker, Manet’s bold and provocative portrait of a bushy-bearded older man in tattered clothing, grapsing a cane, refuse in the foreground. Painted between 1865 and 1871 and possibly reworked in 1876-77 — Manet was a constant reviser — it was the final piece in the artist’s “4 Philosophers” series, focusing on beggars and men on the margins of society. Inspired by Diego Velázquez’s style and Manet’s friend Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Ragpicker’s Wine,” the work, at more than six feet tall, elevates the subject’s importance in a way generally reserved for the wealthy and powerful, yet another reason why the Salon, the arbiter of Parisian artistic success, was not always fond of Manet, who did not gain critical acclaim until after his death in 1883 at the age of fifty-one. While at the Frick, be sure not to miss “Bertoldo di Giovanni: The Renaissance of Sculpture in Medici Florence,” which includes the dazzling bronze sculptures Battle, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, and Crucifixion by the Florentine artist (ca. 1440–91).

UNFINISHED: THOUGHTS LEFT VISIBLE

Vincent van Gogh, “Street in Auvers-sur-Oise,” oil on canvas, 1890 (Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Collection Antell)

The Met Breuer
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 4, suggested admission $12-$25
212-731-1675
www.metmuseum.org

In Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s 2014 biopic about British artist J. M. W. Turner, the controversial landscape painter (played with a splendid curmudgeonly gruffness by Timothy Spall) examines a canvas of his hanging at the Royal Academy, approaches it with his brush, and dabs on one last bit of color, as if adding a period to complete the painting. But what really determines whether a work of art is finished? That is the question asked by the Met Breuer in its inaugural exhibition, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.” The show, which features nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and sculptures, explores various aspects of completion while referencing the Met’s takeover of Marcel Breuer’s building, originally built for the Whitney, which recently moved to its new home in the Meatpacking District. (At the very least, the downstairs of the Met Breuer has not been finished.) “A work is complete if in it the master’s intentions have been realized,” Rembrandt said. However, Pablo Picasso asserted, “To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul.” The exhibition, spread across two floors, includes several canvases by Rembrandt and Picasso as well as works by Titian, Pollock, Velázquez, Monet, Homer, Whistler, Friedrich, Hesse, Gericault, Ruscha, Bourgeois, Cézanne, Sargent, Matisse, Szapocznikow, Tuymans, Richter, Johns, Twombly, Dumas, and many others, from the Renaissance to the present, a fascinating journey into the creative process. But the majority of the pieces on view — divided into such sections as “The Infinite: Art Out of Bounds,” “To Be Determined: Painting in Process,” and “Decay, Dwindle, Decline” — are not immediately identifiable as being incomplete, especially given curators Andrea Bayer, Kelly Baum, and Nicholas Cullinan’s wide employment of the concept of “unfinished.”

Janine Antoni, “Lick and Lather,” chocolate and soap, 1993-94 (collection of Jill and Peter Kraus)

Edouard Manet kept repainting the face of “Madame Edouard Manet” and eventually gave up, not satisfied with the results. James Tissot’s “Orphan” etching was made from a painting that is now lost. Elizabeth Peyton’s “Napoleon (After Louis David, Le General Bonaparte vers 1797)” was based on an unfinished portrait by Jacques Louis David. Lucian Freud continually reworked the face in a 2002 self-portrait with oil paint, leaving the rest of the canvas as a charcoal sketch. Gustave Courbet chose not to give definition to his visage in “The Homecoming.” Alberto Giacometti made significant changes to “Annette” after it was first shown publicly. Edvard Munch’s “Self-Portrait with Wounded Eye” is an unsigned piece that mirrors the vision problem the artist was suffering from. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “The Dirty Bride or The Wedding of Mopsus and Nisa” was a design for a woodcut. Gustav Klimt’s “Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III” was commissioned half a dozen years after the subject committed suicide, and then Klimt died before it was complete. Janine Antoni licked and washed with the two busts of “Lick and Lather,” but the materials she used (chocolate and soap) will eventually disintegrate on their own. It is not known why Albrecht Dürer did not finish “Salvator Mundi” after he fled Nuremberg for Venice and later returned. Camille Corot’s “Boatman among the Reeds,” a finished work, looks unfinished when seen from up close; one critic noted, “When you come to a Corot, it is better not to get too close. Nothing is finished, nothing is carried through. . . . Keep your distance.” Meanwhile, X-radiographs have revealed an earlier state underneath Corot’s signed “Sibylle.” Vincent van Gogh committed suicide before completing “Street in Auvers-sur-Oise.” Edgar Degas reworked the 1866 “Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey” in 1880-81 and again around 1897; the artist reportedly said to Katherine Cassat, mother of Mary Cassat, “It is one of those works which are sold after a man’s death and artists buy them not caring whether they are finished or not.” Indeed, the nature of death, the ultimate finality, hovers over many of the works. “The painting raises fundamental questions regarding the transitional nature of the moment of death and the inherent ‘unfinishedness’ of human life,” the wall label says about Ferdinand Hodler’s “Valentine Godé — Darel on Her Deathbed,” a poignant oil depicting the Swiss artist’s ailing lover.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, “Rough Sea,” oil on canvas, ca. 1840-45 (Tate: Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856)

The centerpiece of the show is a side room — missed by many museumgoers — that contains five glorious later canvases by Joseph Mallard William Turner, abstract seascapes and landscapes painted between 1835 and 1845. Pre-Impressionist, they seem to stand at a sort of gateway to the modern and a transition between earlier ideas of “unfinished” related to product and later notions associated with process. There are few definable objects in the works — “Margate (?), from the Sea,” “The Thames above Waterloo Bridge,” “Rough Sea,” “Sun Setting over a Lake,” and “Sunset from the Top of the Rigi” — and there is debate over whether they are non finito (intentionally unfinished), never completed for various reasons, or in fact finished paintings. Given the experimental nature of the glowing canvases, it wouldn’t have surprised me if Spall walked into the room, carefully surveyed the canvases, then added a dab of paint here, a splotch of color there. It also makes one question whether it even matters if a work is finished or not; without knowing any of the background behind these five Turner paintings, you’d be hard-pressed to consider them unfinished; Turner’s magnificent use of light and color and exquisite brushwork take your breath away, filling every bit of you with emotion, leaving nothing untouched, even if, to Turner, they were not done. As Barnett Newman said, “The idea of a ‘finished’ picture is a fiction.”

The exhibition finishes September 4; be sure to also check out Tatsuo Miyajima’s first-floor installation, “Arrow of Time (Unfinished Life),” which was specially commissioned as a companion piece for the show; it consists of approximately 250 red, numeric LEDs hanging from the ceiling, counting down from nine to one over and over at different intervals, an endless cycle evoking life, death, and rebirth. Miyajima named the piece after Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s theory concerning thermodynamics and entropy and was inspired by the Buddhist notion of samsara, which fits right in with the theme of the Breuer’s first major exhibit.

LIFE OF CATS: SELECTIONS FROM THE HIRAKI UKIYO-E COLLECTION

Takahashi Hiroaki (Shotei), “Nude Playing with a Cat,” color woodblock print, ca. 1927-30 (courtesy Private Collection, New York and Tokyo)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Through Sunday, June 7, $12 (free Friday 6:00 – 9:00)
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

“Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose),” Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami said in an interview about his 2002 book, Kafka on the Shore, which features a character who has a rather unique rapport with felines. (It’s not a coincidence that we named one of our cats Haruki.) Japan’s relationship with cats goes back some fifteen hundred years, when it is believed that cats came to the islands on ships carrying Buddhist scriptures from China. Cats do more than just naturally slip in in the Japan Society exhibit “Life of Cats: Selections from the Hiraki Ukiyo-e Collection,” a claw-some gathering of more than 120 color woodblock prints, hanging scrolls, paintings, and sculptures. Each work contains a cat in one form or another, sometimes hovering in the background, other times front and center, for both good and evil purposes. Dating from the Edo Period (1615-1867), the works are divided into five groups: “Cats and People,” “Cats as People,” “Cats versus People,” “Cats Transformed,” and “Cats and Play,” depicting the diverse relationship between humans and felines. “A cat is just a cat, but the cat motif contains many nuances and connotations,” the catalog points out, and indeed, the nuances and connotations are many in the exhibition. Sometimes the cat is hovering in the background, barely visible, or on the pattern of a kimono, while at other times it’s front and center, providing loving warmth or performing a dastardly dance of death. People become anthropomorphized cats, with claws, whiskers, and not-so-cute ears. Housecats turn into demonic figures, while tigers and lions lurk threateningly. A cat sits on a man’s back or cuddles at a woman’s neck. Some works are tantalizing and sexy, like Takashi Hiroaki’s “Nude Playing with a Cat,” while others, known as omocha-e, or “toy pictures,” provide moral lessons for children, like “Newly Published Scenes of Good and Evil Cats,” by an unknown artist. There are works by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Kanagaki Robun, Utagawa Hiroshige, Kitagawa Utamaro, Utagawa Kunisada, Katsushika Hokusai, and even Édouard Manet, depicting cats in a multitude of ways, not always as adorable as they are in online videos. (If you saw the show prior to the end of April, you might want to go back, as nearly fifty pieces were rotated in on April 29.) Essentially, the exhibition reveals what we already know: that cats rule, and there’s nothing you can do about it.