Right now in
the Metropolitan’s Print and Drawing Room, just to the left at the top of the
Grand Staircase -- the best selection EVER.
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| Peggy Bacon, Country Dressmaking, 1925 |
At the center
of the room, on the western wall, is an installation of six drypoints by Peggy
Bacon dating from 1919 to 1927 and including both her large-figure, pushed
to-the-front characters, as in the hard-working women in Help, 1927, and her
amazingly complex crowd scenes such as Café de la Rotonde, 1921, in which she had
to put the word ‘Cafe’ onto the plate backwards so it would read properly when
the door is open and ‘Cafe de la Rotonde’onto the plate
in the normal left-to-right direction so that it would read backwards as we see
the words from the inside of the room. Phew!
Bacon was a
wonderful printer and all the Met’s impressions are beautiful. But they didn’t
leave it there. In the interest of gilding the lily they took this opportunity
to recognize the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonard da Vinci
on May 2. The most northern half of the room is given to an ‘In Focus’
presentation with four, FOUR drawings by Leonardo. These are actually on the
east wall nearly opposite the Bacons. It goes without saying that they are
worth a trip in themselves. Additionally there is a print by Giovanni Pietro da
Birago -- the earliest surviving copy after Leonardo’s Last Supper. There are
also works after Leonardo by Albrecht Durer, Wenceslaus Hollar, and my favorite,
Martin Schongauer’s Griffin.
It’s not clear
to me how long this installation will last, maybe until the end of March, but
go NOW!
TheMet, Metropolitan,
PeggyBacon, LeonardodaVinci
#The Met #Metropolitan #PeggyBacon
#LeonardodaVinci
