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Circumnavigating the Quincentennial
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20166 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
1,720 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
Behind every exhibition there is a set of ideas and aims. Most prominently, there are the museum's notions of what the exhibition itself should cover, and what the museum wants the public to come away with. But as often as not there is also the institutional agenda, what the museum wants the exhibition to tell the public about itself.
In the case of Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, the National Gallery's exhibition commemorating the Columbus quincentennial, the institutional agenda was unusually apparent.
It arose from three concerns. The two principal ones were, first, how to somehow deal with the "Columbus problem," and second, how to come up with an exhibition of a scale and scope appropriate to the National Gallery and its image of itself. Voluntarily, the museum took on another issue, that of multiculturalism. To some extent this grows out of the Columbus quandary. Still, the National Gallery could have skirted multiculturalism if it had wanted to. The fact that the museum chose to confront it head-on suggests a more than disinterested involvement in the issue.
Circa 1492 is an immense and, in certain ways, immensely satisfying exhibition, one that brings together hundreds of objects from around the world. It is an attempt to give one not only an idea of what was happening in the visual arts of the world around the time Columbus set sail, but also how man viewed that world and his place in it at the time, and how those perceptions changed under the impact of exposure to other civilizations.
Thus Circa 1492 doesn't merely display drawings, paintings, and sculptures. There are maps and scientific instruments--many of these--as well as textile, ceramics, gold jewelry, and manuscripts. It is divided into three sections. The first focuses on Europe, on the cultural and political climate that gave rise to this "Age of Exploration" and on the artistic endeavors under way at the time. Section two is devoted to Asia, and lays out the art that Columbus might have seen had he gone where he thought he was going. The final part concerns the Americas, mostly what is now known as Central and South America, but also the art and artifacts of the Indian tribes in the southeastern part of the continental United States.
There are undeniably some dazzling moments in Circa 1492, among them its juxtaposition of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer--exemplars of a new breed spawned in the fifteenth century, the
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