//literary and arts//
Spring 2019
Spring 2019
Temples, Tables, Time:
Letters to an Iconic New York Space
Yona Benjamin
My life happens in museums.
The question of museum space, and the space museums take up in my life was foregrounded for me a few weeks ago when I read in the news that Kevin Roche had died. I didn’t know who Kevin Roche was, but it turned out he was incredibly important to me. Thinking about Roche, and particularly one of his masterpieces, the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the famous home of the Temple of Dendur, started a small obsession within me to figure out why Roche’s work in the Sackler Wing means so much to me.
It’s one thing to live in New York, and it’s another thing entirely to call it home. The German term Das Unheimlich, literally ‘the not-homie’ but often rendered as ‘the Uncanny,’ attempts to describe a phenomenon in which one is restless, unable to feel settled, and just somewhat off in the face of anxiety, fear, or dread. While scholars agonize over how to render the term, it should really be described as ‘the state of being a New Yorker.’ Pithy as that may be, mine is a city which rarely invites calm, and often forces its residents to shift and twist like flies around a horse’s tail. Living here my whole life has made me feel at home in the uncanny, in the never quite still.
All of this changes when you enter the Sackler Wing. Avenues reaching forth into nebulous progress halt, taxi cabs and Halal cart grittles fade away. In the Sackler Wing, the cosmopolitan stands still. Future and past hold hands, then decide to sit together for a while, and perhaps enjoy lunch while gazing at sarcophagi. This is thanks to Kevin Roche. The past, typified by the ancient Temple of Dendur, stands in an open, modern, space. The past stands, waiting to be expressed in the fullness of the modern future.
The Sackler wing is not merely a calm reflective space for the lives of locals and tourists to unfold in; it is rather a display of the wonder and grandeur of time itself. Here, past and future entangle themselves in one another, and the grand drama of life and death is put on display. The ancient world, typified by the classical Temple of Dendur, sits at the center of the wing. It is surrounded by a coin-bespeckled moat. The Temple, built by the Roman governor Petronius of Egypt around the year 15 CE was transported to the Met in the 1960s, as a result of its displacement by the creation of Lake Nasser in Egypt. It was first displayed in the new Sackler wing in 1978 in a room designed by Kevin Roche specifically for this ancient monument.
In the Sackler wing one does not imagine oneself in the sands of the Nubian desert with the heat beating down onto one’s brow. Instead, one finds herself in a modern, sleek space, one which despite its clear 20th-century look, functions as home for antiquity. This is the brilliance and the oddity of the Sackler wing. It displays the past in a new way, it shows how the beauty created by ancient craftspeople and the glory of their gods can be amplified, rather than erased by modernity.
However, this creativity also covers up the rupture and destruction that form the Temple’s story. The Temple is one of modernity’s many victims. Uprooted from its home in order to be saved from the flooding of the new Lake Nasser, the Temple was disassembled and shipped down the river to the Americans. Sitting in the Sackler, seeing how at home this Temple seems, I often wonder how worried it might have been as it travelled in boxes across the ocean, how cold its first winter in Manhattan must have been. The Temple stands in exile; it stands as a testament to a world which needed irrigation more than it loved art. The Sackler is a triumph of art, but it is also a reminder of how more pressing needs can banish a love of beauty. Was this what I found to be so special about the Sackler wing? This concern for beauty, with an awareness of how it fits into our perplexing world? Maybe.
I remained unsatisfied, I felt as if I still could not put my finger on what made this place so special. Perhaps I did not have the correct language to express the phenomenon. What followed was a month of thinking and rethinking, until I found the answer in the strangest of places.
Joan Miro (1893-1983) was one of the great Catalan artists expatriates of the 20th century, who, along with the perhaps better known Picasso and Dali, pushed the boundaries of Western painting to new frontiers. There is currently a MOMA exhibit displaying an unprecedented number of his artworks, and examining his creative process centered around what the curators deem to be his magnum opus ‘The Birth of the World’ (1925). I went to this exhibit simply because I have enjoyed Miro’s creations in the past and wanted to learn more about him and his seminal work. However, in the exhibit I found another painting besides “The Birth of the World” which captivated me. In fact, it oddly pushed me to fully understand Roche’s seemingly unrelated design in the Sackler wing.
This painting “The Table (still life with rabbit, 1920)” is displayed prominently in the exhibit, and stands out as one of the most realist works on view. It portrays a carved wooden table with an inlaid surface, atop of which are an earthen vessel, a fish (above a plate and newspaper), a rabbit, a rooster, and some vegetables. I want to unpack how this painting fits into themes within Miro’ other works from that period, and how understanding that relationship can nail down what is so significant about the Temple of Dendur in the Sackler wing.
We can see each item on Miro’s table as speaking to imagery and artistic motifs in his work, and his identity as an artist-expatriate. Indeed this painting was completed in the year Miro left Catalonia to settle in Paris, beginning his life of self imposed-exile. However, Miro would visit Catalonia in the summer, so that it remained a deep part of his artistic vocabulary. Despite this rootedness in Catalan life, his painting does already contain the Gallic rooster, which would become a motif in his work. French identity was already part of who Miro was, his future as an expatriate already informed his home table, already inspired who he was as an artist.
The 1921 work, ‘Still Life-Glove and Newspaper,’ represents the table, the newspaper, and the earthenware vessel, this time embossed with the rooster. We can see the themes and motifs presented in the 1920 work being remade and reworked in this painting. In light of this, the painting from 1920 is a paradigm, or rather a basis, a setting forth of the possibilities for Miro’s artistic process. However, creativity and change occur as well: not only are the rooster and earthen vessel combined, but the newspaper on the table is French, indicating the artist’s move to Paris and his immersion in French culture. The Catalan table from 1920 is his origin, yet it is does not subsume his present. His work, as it stands in relation to the previous painting, functions as a material representation of his own life story and the commitments therein.
In ‘Still life II’ 1922-23, Miro presents the sliced tomato, which we already saw in the 1920 work. The curators note that this item was indicative of objects on Miro’s home farm in Montroig, Catalonia, and that Picasso considered this work to be “pure Poetry.”[1] We see here, in the nod to Miro’s home of Catalonia and in Picasso’s love of the work, that the depiction of produce can be seen as a reference to the beauty of Miro’s homeland (shared with Picasso)—his origins, his past. So too with the earthen vessels, those which are formed out of the soil of his home and which are set upon the table with his bounty.
The hare is also a motif in Miro’s work. It appears on the table in 1920, but also in one of his most famous work, ‘The Hunter (Catalan landscape.)’ This 1923-24 work, which saw Miro engage with the surrealism of his countryman Dali, is an homage to their shared homeland as much as it is to artistic radicalism. The rabbit of the Catalan woods is one of the only discernible shapes and it stands out as a recognizable form, a fulcrum for the viewer trying to make sense of a confusing world. So too for Miro, whose homeland remained a source of inspiration for his work abroad in Paris, a grounding in is home-ground as he worked from afar.
Thinking about Miro’s Catalan table from 1920 and how the images and themes from that work capture who he was and who he would become inspired me to delve into thinking about how the past and present inform one another. It was then that I came to realize what I was looking for: The Sackler wing is Miro’s table, but for New York City.
As a capital of global culture, New York is full of diversity and variety. This can often lead to confusion and discord, but hopefully more often, creativity and collaboration. We learn from Miro that a creative future must be grounded in a heritage, a past. The Hellenistic world which produced the Temple of Dendur is one such heritage that New York City inherits. Further, the legacy of African post-colonialism which brought the Temple to Manhattan is also preserved and offered by the wing. The architecture of the Sackler wing, with its novelty and openness, creates a space in which both of these heritages can reach new heights and engage in new projects. It is the analogue to Miro’s move to Paris. Just as Miro was challenged to be a better artist, be more creative, and more insightful as an expat, exposing himself to the new and the different, the Sackler wing challenges New Yorkers to be grateful for the Hellenistic and African heritage of Dendur, while charging us to be more open, more welcoming, more sensitive to those whose voices have not yet been lifted up. Dendur was a table of bounty, and Kevin Roche’s designs have created a space in which we are challenged to invite and let flourish all the global bounty which New York holds in its embrace. Spread forth a table, anoint our heads with oil, our cup overfloweth.
The question of museum space, and the space museums take up in my life was foregrounded for me a few weeks ago when I read in the news that Kevin Roche had died. I didn’t know who Kevin Roche was, but it turned out he was incredibly important to me. Thinking about Roche, and particularly one of his masterpieces, the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the famous home of the Temple of Dendur, started a small obsession within me to figure out why Roche’s work in the Sackler Wing means so much to me.
It’s one thing to live in New York, and it’s another thing entirely to call it home. The German term Das Unheimlich, literally ‘the not-homie’ but often rendered as ‘the Uncanny,’ attempts to describe a phenomenon in which one is restless, unable to feel settled, and just somewhat off in the face of anxiety, fear, or dread. While scholars agonize over how to render the term, it should really be described as ‘the state of being a New Yorker.’ Pithy as that may be, mine is a city which rarely invites calm, and often forces its residents to shift and twist like flies around a horse’s tail. Living here my whole life has made me feel at home in the uncanny, in the never quite still.
All of this changes when you enter the Sackler Wing. Avenues reaching forth into nebulous progress halt, taxi cabs and Halal cart grittles fade away. In the Sackler Wing, the cosmopolitan stands still. Future and past hold hands, then decide to sit together for a while, and perhaps enjoy lunch while gazing at sarcophagi. This is thanks to Kevin Roche. The past, typified by the ancient Temple of Dendur, stands in an open, modern, space. The past stands, waiting to be expressed in the fullness of the modern future.
The Sackler wing is not merely a calm reflective space for the lives of locals and tourists to unfold in; it is rather a display of the wonder and grandeur of time itself. Here, past and future entangle themselves in one another, and the grand drama of life and death is put on display. The ancient world, typified by the classical Temple of Dendur, sits at the center of the wing. It is surrounded by a coin-bespeckled moat. The Temple, built by the Roman governor Petronius of Egypt around the year 15 CE was transported to the Met in the 1960s, as a result of its displacement by the creation of Lake Nasser in Egypt. It was first displayed in the new Sackler wing in 1978 in a room designed by Kevin Roche specifically for this ancient monument.
In the Sackler wing one does not imagine oneself in the sands of the Nubian desert with the heat beating down onto one’s brow. Instead, one finds herself in a modern, sleek space, one which despite its clear 20th-century look, functions as home for antiquity. This is the brilliance and the oddity of the Sackler wing. It displays the past in a new way, it shows how the beauty created by ancient craftspeople and the glory of their gods can be amplified, rather than erased by modernity.
However, this creativity also covers up the rupture and destruction that form the Temple’s story. The Temple is one of modernity’s many victims. Uprooted from its home in order to be saved from the flooding of the new Lake Nasser, the Temple was disassembled and shipped down the river to the Americans. Sitting in the Sackler, seeing how at home this Temple seems, I often wonder how worried it might have been as it travelled in boxes across the ocean, how cold its first winter in Manhattan must have been. The Temple stands in exile; it stands as a testament to a world which needed irrigation more than it loved art. The Sackler is a triumph of art, but it is also a reminder of how more pressing needs can banish a love of beauty. Was this what I found to be so special about the Sackler wing? This concern for beauty, with an awareness of how it fits into our perplexing world? Maybe.
I remained unsatisfied, I felt as if I still could not put my finger on what made this place so special. Perhaps I did not have the correct language to express the phenomenon. What followed was a month of thinking and rethinking, until I found the answer in the strangest of places.
Joan Miro (1893-1983) was one of the great Catalan artists expatriates of the 20th century, who, along with the perhaps better known Picasso and Dali, pushed the boundaries of Western painting to new frontiers. There is currently a MOMA exhibit displaying an unprecedented number of his artworks, and examining his creative process centered around what the curators deem to be his magnum opus ‘The Birth of the World’ (1925). I went to this exhibit simply because I have enjoyed Miro’s creations in the past and wanted to learn more about him and his seminal work. However, in the exhibit I found another painting besides “The Birth of the World” which captivated me. In fact, it oddly pushed me to fully understand Roche’s seemingly unrelated design in the Sackler wing.
This painting “The Table (still life with rabbit, 1920)” is displayed prominently in the exhibit, and stands out as one of the most realist works on view. It portrays a carved wooden table with an inlaid surface, atop of which are an earthen vessel, a fish (above a plate and newspaper), a rabbit, a rooster, and some vegetables. I want to unpack how this painting fits into themes within Miro’ other works from that period, and how understanding that relationship can nail down what is so significant about the Temple of Dendur in the Sackler wing.
We can see each item on Miro’s table as speaking to imagery and artistic motifs in his work, and his identity as an artist-expatriate. Indeed this painting was completed in the year Miro left Catalonia to settle in Paris, beginning his life of self imposed-exile. However, Miro would visit Catalonia in the summer, so that it remained a deep part of his artistic vocabulary. Despite this rootedness in Catalan life, his painting does already contain the Gallic rooster, which would become a motif in his work. French identity was already part of who Miro was, his future as an expatriate already informed his home table, already inspired who he was as an artist.
The 1921 work, ‘Still Life-Glove and Newspaper,’ represents the table, the newspaper, and the earthenware vessel, this time embossed with the rooster. We can see the themes and motifs presented in the 1920 work being remade and reworked in this painting. In light of this, the painting from 1920 is a paradigm, or rather a basis, a setting forth of the possibilities for Miro’s artistic process. However, creativity and change occur as well: not only are the rooster and earthen vessel combined, but the newspaper on the table is French, indicating the artist’s move to Paris and his immersion in French culture. The Catalan table from 1920 is his origin, yet it is does not subsume his present. His work, as it stands in relation to the previous painting, functions as a material representation of his own life story and the commitments therein.
In ‘Still life II’ 1922-23, Miro presents the sliced tomato, which we already saw in the 1920 work. The curators note that this item was indicative of objects on Miro’s home farm in Montroig, Catalonia, and that Picasso considered this work to be “pure Poetry.”[1] We see here, in the nod to Miro’s home of Catalonia and in Picasso’s love of the work, that the depiction of produce can be seen as a reference to the beauty of Miro’s homeland (shared with Picasso)—his origins, his past. So too with the earthen vessels, those which are formed out of the soil of his home and which are set upon the table with his bounty.
The hare is also a motif in Miro’s work. It appears on the table in 1920, but also in one of his most famous work, ‘The Hunter (Catalan landscape.)’ This 1923-24 work, which saw Miro engage with the surrealism of his countryman Dali, is an homage to their shared homeland as much as it is to artistic radicalism. The rabbit of the Catalan woods is one of the only discernible shapes and it stands out as a recognizable form, a fulcrum for the viewer trying to make sense of a confusing world. So too for Miro, whose homeland remained a source of inspiration for his work abroad in Paris, a grounding in is home-ground as he worked from afar.
Thinking about Miro’s Catalan table from 1920 and how the images and themes from that work capture who he was and who he would become inspired me to delve into thinking about how the past and present inform one another. It was then that I came to realize what I was looking for: The Sackler wing is Miro’s table, but for New York City.
As a capital of global culture, New York is full of diversity and variety. This can often lead to confusion and discord, but hopefully more often, creativity and collaboration. We learn from Miro that a creative future must be grounded in a heritage, a past. The Hellenistic world which produced the Temple of Dendur is one such heritage that New York City inherits. Further, the legacy of African post-colonialism which brought the Temple to Manhattan is also preserved and offered by the wing. The architecture of the Sackler wing, with its novelty and openness, creates a space in which both of these heritages can reach new heights and engage in new projects. It is the analogue to Miro’s move to Paris. Just as Miro was challenged to be a better artist, be more creative, and more insightful as an expat, exposing himself to the new and the different, the Sackler wing challenges New Yorkers to be grateful for the Hellenistic and African heritage of Dendur, while charging us to be more open, more welcoming, more sensitive to those whose voices have not yet been lifted up. Dendur was a table of bounty, and Kevin Roche’s designs have created a space in which we are challenged to invite and let flourish all the global bounty which New York holds in its embrace. Spread forth a table, anoint our heads with oil, our cup overfloweth.
[1] Curator’s notes.
//YONA BENJAMIN is a junior in the School of General Studies and List College and Literary and Arts Editor of The Current. He can be reached at ynb2001@columbia.edu.
Photo courtesy of https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/curatorial-departments/egyptian-art/temple-of-dendur-50.
Photo courtesy of https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/curatorial-departments/egyptian-art/temple-of-dendur-50.