If you want a robust museum visit whilst in New York City – make The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) your number one spot. If you watched the Met Gala in the last few weeks, you will know that the “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” is now live. Let’s peek at the exhibit,
As a first step in your time at The Met, I would encourage you to map out your journey. What I typically like to do is peruse The Met’s website a few weeks before my arrival in New York City and note down all of my favourites. I then visit one of the attendants at the front desk in the welcoming hall and ask them to help me map out my journey for the day. The attendants are always so helpful and kind.
Exhibits that I enjoyed included:
- The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism
- Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance
- Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery
- Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting
- Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art
- Lineages: Korean Art at The Met
- The Art of the Literary Poster: Works from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection
- Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother
- Anxiety and Hope in Japanese Art
I covered a lot in one afternoon. It took me over 3 hours until my brain started to tap out. However, it was doable. Many people were queued in line for the “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”, which provided me the opportunity to buzz around the quieter exhibit spaces.
One of my favourite installations was the “Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance”. It can be found in Gallery 964 (the bottom level of the museum). There is a lovely seated area with greenery. You can meditate and take a breather from the foot traffic in the seating area.
This exhibition is the first to examine an intriguing but largely unknown side—in the literal sense—of Renaissance painting: multisided portraits in which the sitter’s likeness was concealed by a hinged or sliding cover, within a box, or by a dual-faced format. The covers and reverses of these small, private portraits were adorned with puzzle like emblems, epigrams, allegories, and mythologies that celebrated the sitter’s character, and they represent some of the most inventive and unique secular imagery of the Renaissance. The viewer had to decode the meaning of the symbolic portrait before lifting, sliding, or turning the image over to unmask the face below.
There are approximately 60 double-sided and covered portraits from The Met collection and other American and European institutions, including the reunion of several portraits and their covers that had been split and made part of separate collections.
I really enjoyed looking at the intricate details of these three-dimensional, hand-held interactive objects. They held so much personal meaning to those whom previously owned them. I wonder what it would have been like to receive such an object. I wonder what the journey was like for this object to outlive their previous owners and now be gazed upon by observers in 2024.
The “Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance” although hidden below The Met is one of the jewels to catch before it ends it stay this summer. I would encourage you to make time after perusing the “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” exhibit to pause and see what the hidden faces installation may reveal to you in your own reflective journey.
Thirty Four Flavours 