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Art & Thought: Pablo Bronstein at the MET

posted by ChickSpeak
Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 6:27pm CDT

In the Metropolitan Museum, I stand in front of a large ink drawing. The skies are flushed in shades of pale gray and brown. The land is barren. A Hellenic column juts pitifully out from the earth like the last pillar of humanity after the apocalypse has struck. However, in the backdrop of all this emptiness is a magnificent building undergoing construction: a museum.

The drawing evokes all varieties of fairy tales and epic myths, and viewing the piece, it is almost like hearing a narrative played out in front of me, as visually appealing and daunting as a dance performed onstage or a film screening.

“The Museum Nearing Completion as Seen from Fourth Avenue” imagines the construction of the Metropolitan Museum, shrouding the iconic building in a veil of mystery and intrigue. Layers of scaffolding enclose every wing of the splendid structure, endowing the museum with a vulnerability and incompleteness that is rarely seen today.

In the past few months, I have admittedly favored the exhibitions of the Metropolitan Museum over other highly respected art institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art or the Guggenheim. And as a regular visitor to the Met, I can say that there is always this self-awareness of my own smallness whenever I walk through the museums’ galleries and halls.

Everything feels so sacred and unreal: artifacts that have been handed down for centuries, donations worth over millions of dollars, new discoveries that find a permanent home in the Met after circling the globe for years.

All of these feelings are somehow masterfully conveyed in this ink drawing. The divide between the museum’s elaborate and decorative construction and the emptiness surrounding the site is one that raised my own awareness of the sheer immensity of this building, not just in terms of money, space, distance, and materials, but - for lack of a better word - the largeness of the manmade project.

“The Museum Nearing Completion as Seen from Fourth Avenue” remains one of my favorite pieces from the exhibition, “Pablo Bronstein at the Met.” The versatility of this artist is nothing short of amazing. In a single exhibition, I can view pictures in a Baroque style, drawings reminiscent of French architecture from the 18th century, and Postmodernist buildings all replicated, re-imagined, and made mysteriously compelling in the uniquely individual method of Argentina-born artist, Pablo Bronstein.

Prior to visiting this exhibition, I had never before realized the beauty of architectural pictures. The amount of detail that goes into one tile or column is simply awe-inspiring, as shown in another one of Bronstein’s masterpieces, “The Departure of the Temple of Dendur from Egypt.” Seeing the drawing for the first time, I felt as if it belonged in a children’s book where its imaginative powers could be truly appreciated and understood.

The drawing goes beyond being merely a rendition of a resurrected Egyptian temple. It conveys movement, however slow and gradual, of the temple’s transportation. Every column, line, and pyramid appears illuminated on the paper because the sky is colored a pitch black in contrast to the whiteness of the sand and temples.

A number of questions ran across my mind as I viewed this drawing. Who is moving the temple? Why take such an impressive artifact away from its native home? And why transport the structure at night? In nearly all of Bronstein’s works, there is a stillness and a silence that wraps the drawing up in what I can only describe to readers as a sacred mantle. One feels that these structures are something truly to be revered because they are manmade, beautiful, and calm in spite of all that we do to build them, move them, or destroy them.

The other pieces in the exhibition are arguably more playful, especially Bronstein’s drawing of a Neapolitan Christmas tree in a festival piazza, which looks wonderfully incomplete, as if just waiting for a child to color in the empty space with a rainbow of crayons. Interestingly enough, most of the drawings illustrate parts of the Metropolitan Museum, from a depiction rendered in ink and gouache of the Great Hall Pavilion to the first and second installations of Pre-Columbian artifacts.

Leaving the museum, I could not help but turn around and just take a few minutes to absorb everything from the vantage point of the sidewalk. The columns. The streaming banners. The crowds of families and couples chewing on juicy hot dogs on the stairs. I realized then that the Met has always been more to me than just another art museum. It is a second home of sorts, an amalgam of past, present, and future. Pablo Bronstein’s works made me realize this: that the Met is indeed a magical and legendary place in a city full of spectacular and surreal events.

For more information, please visit the exhibition’s website. “Pablo Bronstein at the Met” is located in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing and The Giaconda and Joseph King Gallery. The exhibit will be on display until April 18, 2010.

Katherine J. Chen is a sophomore English major at Princeton University with a certificate in Creative Writing. She remains wowed by Pablo Bronstein’s drawings, especially since she has trouble drawing anything in three-dimension.