"The millennium says change, Egypt says permanence," is how art historian Rita Freed summarizes our zeitgeist fascination with the art and culture of ancient Egypt. As museums inundate us with a flood of retrospectives and blockbusters while the calendar clicks toward 2000, two major exhibitions of ancient Egypt are attracting attention this fall on the East Coast, mounted by the two institutions with the greatest American collections of that period.
Coincidence or kismet?
Or maybe just smart programming. Egypt is a perennially popular subject that is, as Freed suggests, finding poignant allure in our shifting times.
"Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened in September and traces the development of the art, politics and religion of the Old Kingdom, 2649-2150 BC, five centuries during which Egyptian civilization reached a zenith and the great pyramids on the Giza plateau were built.
"Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen" opened last month at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and provides a close-up of the Age of Amarna (1353-1336 BC), an extraordinarily creative and distinctive era during which the multi-deity nature of Egyptian religion was nearly toppled. (The show will come to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in March.) Both exhibitions boast blockbuster proportions--each with some 250 objects from more than 30 museums and collections all over the world, including Cairo's Egyptian Museum, London's British Museum, Paris' Louvre and Berlin's Aegyptisches Museum. And of course the Met and the Boston museum have culled material from their own vast holdings and, indeed, from each other.
On the face of it, the two exhibitions seem competitive. But in fact they are complementary, for they are about macro and micro visions. "We tend to look at ancient Egyptian history by the span of centuries," says Freed, Boston's curator of ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art, "so our focus on the Amarna Age, which lasted only 17 years, is really just a blink."
Still, it is quite a blink.
While the New York show conveys the dynastic continuity of ancient Egypt, the Boston show presents the cultural and spiritual efflorescence that often results from schism with the moldy past, a schism usually fueled by the force of individual belief and personality. Continuity and change--the arc of history is created by those very dynamics.
Boston and the Met are two of the largest encyclopedic American museums under one roof, and they also happen to have the best collections of ancient Egyptian art in this country.
That is because they got into Egypt early--sending regular expeditions there in the early part of this century, at a time when Egyptians themselves lacked the technical expertise and facilities to preserve and store the treasures being unearthed in the desert. The Egyptians willingly cooperated with foreign institutions that funded digs and generously divvied up the finds--the Egyptians made the first selection, the rest was offered to their guest archeologists.
Things have changed. Today, when these two American institutions send expeditions to the field, it is for research, and the objects found are left in Egypt. "As they should be," adds Dorothea Arnold, the Met's curator of Egyptian art.
The Met exhibition came out of a series of international Egyptology conferences in the 1990s. Christiane Ziegler, chief curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre, invited Arnold and Krzysztof Grzymski of the Royal Ontario Museum to collaborate. "This is the first time the Old Kingdom has been done in a major exhibition--anywhere in the world," Arnold says. "A show of such magnitude can only be done through cooperation; it's financial, it's also the ability of these institutions to put such a thing together."
*
"Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids" is presented chronologically, starting in the Third Dynasty (2649-2575 BC) and ending in the Sixth (2323-2150 BC); 29 pharaohs are recorded in this five-century span. While some of the objects come from daily use, such as jewelry or bowls, the most impressive stuff tends to come from tombs, temples and monuments--the exotica of canopic jars, wall decorations and reliefs, statues and sarcophagi. Like most ancients, the Egyptians were obsessed with life after death; they stand out because of the breadth of their imagination and their adeptness at expressing and codifying this obsession.
