#TEEN IN LIMBO RAR RAR#
The slack in this case is only one hall, and not a large one, and some of the objects are of no great conseq ence as rar ities. Even so, “The Art of the Medieval Blacksmith,” which w 11 run through June 12, was planned to take up some of the slack. Just now, some of The Cloisters' most important treasures are on loan to Los Angeles (later to go to Chi cago), but in a museum where so much of the col lection is actually incorpo rared into the structure of the building and where inde pendent treasures are so abundant, the temporary re movals are not disfiguring. I wonder how many people norice that the room where the “Merode Al tarpiece” is installed has teen furnished with objects corresponding to those in the painting? But whether or not you notice the correspond ences, the atmosphere is es tablished. Medieval material is terribly vulnerable to distortion by everything from mawkish emotionalism to hieratic se verity, but everything at The Cloisters is installed with perceptive recognition of its precise quality-a little un derplayed.
The installations at The Cloisters are exemplary in their combination of love, scholarship, and discretion. The other day there was nothing in the gar dens to contemplate except piles of snow already grow ing sooty, but that made no difference.
#TEEN IN LIMBO RAR FULL#
Ex cept on Sundays (it is closed on Mondays, by the way), when the guards have to herd you along traffic lanes, this is the perfect place for wandering, and the various fragments or full cloisters with their gardens still ful fill their original function as sots for relaxation and con templation. The attraction was simply The Cloisters and the things regularly housed there. None of this is directly connected with The Clois ters' new exhibition, which so far has received so little publicity that it couldn't ac count for the attendance. I wonder if It might not be time to take a recount of some kind. Apparently this simply is not true, and my surprise at finding The Cloisters filled with visitors in their teens and twenties was increased when I remembered that a few weeks earlier in the Metropolitan on Fifth Avenue I had found the museum's current canonization of in culture, “New York: Paint ing and Scupture 1940‐ 1970” attended largely by decaying suburban matrons suffering from bad cases of museum fatigue. We are always being told that for anyone under the age of thirty, the art of the first half of this century is already old stuff, that of the nineteenth camp, that of the Renaissance a bore, and any thing earlier well lost in limbo. There were a few male loners who seemed to be studious types minding their own business and several groups of three, four, or five girls, but largely the crowd was made up of couples who wandered about hand in hand, stopping for a long time before some ob jects and passing others up after an interrogatory glance.
What was best was that these were predominantly young people displaying all the totemistic iconology of the youth cult -the long hair, frizzled on the boys and lank on the girls, the beards on whoever was able to grow them, and the ragbag couture. A visit to The Cloisters takes a bit of get ting‐there.īut, again, it wasn't just the number of people that pleased and surprised. It runs around 6,000 on Sun days.) It wasn't a drop ‐ in crowd, either.
(The tally, I learn, was 2,004 for the day. But the big sur prise was that the halls of The Cloisters on a day, when you would have expected this relatively isolated mu seum to have been deserted were filled with visitors not the weekend crush, but just the right number to give the _place an air of warmth and activity. The immediate occasion for the visit was to take look at a new exhibition, “The Art of the Medieval Blacksmith” (a title full of promise for anyone already hooked on both the Middle Ages and blacksmithery), which, although much small er than expected, turned out to be perfect within its di mensions. IT IS a great pleasure for this often grouchy re porter to say that on one gray, icy Friday re cently the Metropolitan, Mu seum, once‐removed in the form of its medieval branch, The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, afforded him three, make it four, very happy ex periences simultaneously.
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