KAREN WILKIN
At the Galleries
A diverse group of engaging exhibitions, ranging from ancient reliefs to
Baroque drawings to present-day paintings and photographs, was on view
in and around New York City this winter, if you braved the mountains
of snow, the lakes of slush, and the Arctic cold. Some of us persevered -
which is more than you can say for the postmen.
If
you were willing to
navigate the embankments of snow left by the plows and bundle up
against the cold, there were rewards.
The Metropolitan Museum, for example, offered a couple of small
exhibits that were models of exacting scholarship and equally notable for
the aesthetic pleasure they afforded; twelve panels of the Telephos Frieze
from the Great Altar at Pergamon, and a selection of Poussin's drawings
from the Royal Collection at Windsor. The huge Pergamon Altar, with
its astonishing band of marble reliefs, arguably the most spectacular
monument to survive from the Hellenistic period, is usually installed in
the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The Telephos reliefs, which dramatize
the history of a mythical ancestor of the Attalid dynasty who built the al–
tar - only a fraction of the monument's sculptural decoration, but a
choice fraction - will be on view in New York through April 14 because
the Metropolitan, along with the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco,
helped to support a recent cleaning and restoration project.
In
Berlin, a full-sized reconstruction of the west side of the complex
housing the altar proper, a lavish affair of colonnades, relief sculptures,
and stairs, is surrounded by a reconstruction of the great frieze, and the
effect, while impressive, is somewhat overwhelming. (The whole mu–
seum is overwhelming; it also houses several ancient city gates and
temples, more or less whole, transported and reconstituted.) At the Met,
the twelve panels were handsomely displayed, arranged to evoke their
original setting and possible sequence, but amply spaced. Context was
provided by related sculptural fragments and coins borrowed from other
institutions, a spiffY new model of the Great Altar reflecting the latest
theories about what it must have looked like, helpful contextual drawings
that situated the exhibited fragments, and informative wall texts that not
only clarified the convoluted history of the Attalids, but unravelled the
complicated legend depicted, literally and metaphorically, and summed
up the relevant current archaeological scholarship. Before the Berlin Wall
came down, when the Pergamon Museum was in what was then East
