BERLIN — Sometimes on a whim I stop into the Bode Museum here to commune with a tiny clay sculpture of John the Baptist.
It’s
in a corner of a nearly always empty room, a bone-white bust, pretty
and as androgynous as mid-1970s Berlin-addled David Bowie. The saint’s
upturned eyes glow in the hard light through tall windows. Attributed to
the 15th-century Luccan artist Matteo Civitali, the sculpture is all
exquisite ecstasy and languor.
Sometimes it’s not the saint I
check on but a sculptured portrait in the same room of the banker
Filippo Strozzi — stern like a Roman emperor, the face of rectitude and
power — by Benedetto da Maiano, Civitali’s contemporary. Then I usually
climb the stairs to admire Houdon’s bust of Gluck, the composer, and
ogle a towering pair of craggy German knights, relics of Renaissance
pageantry made of painted wood, each taller than the N.B.A. star Dirk
Nowitzki.
Mostly, though, I go to the Bode for the silence.
Like
a sentry commanding the northern tip of Berlin’s Museum Island, its
back turned to the busier Pergamon Museum, the Neues Museum, the Altes
Museum and the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Bode seems to attract just a
few handfuls of visitors a day. Some go there to see the paintings,
coins and Byzantine art. The sculpture rooms are mostly abandoned.
Is
it me, or do we seem to have a problem with sculpture today? I don’t
mean contemporary sculpture, whose fashionable stars (see Koons,
Murakami et alia) pander to our appetite for spectacle and whatever’s
new. I don’t mean ancient or even non-Western sculpture, either. I mean
traditional European sculpture — celebrities like Bernini and Rodin
aside — and American sculpture, too: the enormous universe of stuff we
come across in churches and parks, at memorials and in museums like the
Bode. The stuff Barnett Newman, the Abstract Expressionist painter,
notoriously derided as objects we bump into when backing up to look at a
painting.
A few minutes’ walk from the Bode, the
Friedrichswerdersche Kirche, the rebuilt neo-Gothic former church
designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in the 1830s, houses its own sublime
assortment of 19th-century sculpture. It’s usually even emptier than
the Bode, and it is free to boot. I’ll occasionally spend an hour or so
there, feeling small and unimportant before the portraits of Kant and
the great German archaeologist Johann Winckelmann. Except for the
doleful guards, I rarely encounter another living soul.
I grew up
with the smells of plaster dust and clay in my mother’s sculpture studio
on Third Avenue. Making a figure out of stone or metal retains its
childlike wonder for me. But sculpture skeptics from Leonardo through
Hegel and Diderot have cultivated our prejudice against the medium.
“Carib art,” is how Baudelaire described sculpture, meaning that even
the suavest, most sophisticated works of unearthly virtuosity by
Enlightenment paragons like Canova and Thorvaldsen were tainted by the
medium’s primitive, cultish origins.
Racism notwithstanding,
Baudelaire had a point. Sculpture does still bear something of the
burden of its commemorative and didactic origins. It’s too literal, too
direct, too steeped in religious ceremony and too complex for a
historically amnesiac culture. We prefer the multicolored distractions
of illusionism on flat surfaces, flickering in a movie theater or
digitized on our laptops and smartphones, or painted on canvas. The
marketplace ratifies our myopia, making headlines for megamillion-dollar
sales of old master and Impressionist pictures but rarely for premodern
sculptures.
Critics bow to fashion and a legacy of lazy disdain,
largely avoiding the topic — I’ve done it myself, so I know — and
museums only perpetuate the cycle, offering a steady flow of Botticelli,
Monet and Rembrandt exhibitions, before which we genuflect like
medieval pilgrims praying before sculptured shrines. But sculpture shows
that might broaden our horizons, being costly and difficult to mount,
are almost rarer than genuine newly discovered Michelangelos.
In
an age of special effects, we may also simply no longer know how to feel
awe at the sight of sculptured faces by the German genius Tilman
Riemenschneider or before a bronze statue by Donatello. We can’t see
past the raw materiality and subject matter. Never mind that Donatello
may have been the greatest creative genius until Picasso; he long ago
got lapped in the public’s imagination by Madame Tussaud, who has given
way to “Avatar” in 3-D and Alexander McQueen’s trippy costumed
mannequins.
I read the other day that the Metropolitan Museum had
decided to stay open late to accommodate the bewildering crowds for its
McQueen extravaganza. Mass hysteria is how a friend described it to me.
It clearly became the height of fashion for people to stand in the
endless line, if only to have been able to say that they stood in the
endless line. How many of those people, I asked myself, stopped to look
at any of the
Met’s sculptures while they were there, or ever had?
How wonderful, I also thought.
I have the Bode to myself.
