An exhibition of Mesopotamian copper sculpture and another of Lucas Samaras’s pastels at the Morgan Library and Museum gives evidence of the museum's large ambitions.
The exhibition Founding Figures, which includes seven sculptures and two cylinder seals from ancient Mesopotamia, has a title that suggests some assumptions about the influence—or at least the age—of these objects.
The title also conjures up associations with the Founding Fathers, the Americans who wrote the US Constitution, yet here we have objects with far deeper roots. Figures in metal with bodies of stunning naturalism carry boxes or bowls of building materials to temples honouring their gods.
This small gem of a show is conceived and structured around an object from the collection of John Pierpont Morgan, who acquired a copper alloy statue, now titled Foundation Figure of King Ur-Namma (2112-2004 BC), before 1908. The skirted figure has his head and beard shaved in piety (normally gods and rulers wore beards) and carries a bowl on his head with two hands in an act of servitude.
More substantial than delicate to the eye, the small naturalistic figure (it is just over a foot tall) has the empty-gazed face of an icon, yet its realistically defined musculature from the torso upward is more universal, a flexed human body cast in bronze alloy.
An inscription identifies the figure as “Ur-Namma, King of Ur, King of Sumer and Akkad, Who built the Temple of Enil.” Enil was the deity whose temple was in Nippur, in southern Mesopotamia.
The depiction of the bare-chested king can be seen as an expression of ruler-as-slave reverence rather than pride, since we now know that these sculptures were never intended to be seen except by gods. They were destined for burial in the foundations of buildings, usually temples. Reverence aside, regal privilege is still at work here, since rulers’ likenesses were presumably what the gods would see if they deigned to look beneath those temples.
One figure, the oldest on view (3300-3100 BC), is a muscular, bearded man, with a hat (suggesting authority) kneeling in an asymmetrical position that required a complex modeling of the body. The greenish Figure of a Priest King, clothed in nothing but a belt and with his head leaning forward to suggest concentration, reflects a more naturalistic approach to depicting the human form, if compared to the forward-facing Egyptian figures from that time.
Other figures of horned and long-haired gods on ceremonial nails or spikes are thought to have been made as objects that attached divine spirits to temple sites that they protected. Another hypothesis holds that the spikes confined godly forces to those burial spaces and kept them from fomenting mischief in the world above.
Architecture connoted authority when these objects were made and “carrying the basket,” the act of bearing materials to build these temples, was the lowest job in the building hierarchy. Today, with those sites covered in centuries of dirt, the figures are evidence of a culture’s skill at making art that outlived its grandest monuments.
Upstairs from the sculptures, the pastels of Lucas Samaras are as delicate as the metal figures are durable.
In Dreams of Dust: The Pastels of Lucas Samaras, we see Samaras’s connection to the art of the past, and to styles that might not necessarily be associated with an artist whose media of choice (happenings, boxes with protruding pins, photo-collages) tended to be indelicate. Samaras and his dealer Arne Glimcher of Pace Gallery donated the pastels to the Morgan.
The small, mostly untitled pastels range in style from contemplative abstraction to tactile self-portraiture to phallic long-necked creatures. Color is a constant. Some are haunted by the French masters Edgar Degas, Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. Samaras has a feel for the rich overlapping tones of the post-Impressionist Nabis group of artists and he puts his own twist on their intimacy with over-intimate glimpses of a man sitting on a toilet or a woman urinating while standing in shallow water.
Samaras is also out for eroticism in these private scenes, as in a Bonnard-inspired nude, legs spread apart, from May 1960, with a lustrous flesh-tone despite its green hue. Small narrative scenes seem to mimic the votive stories told on the borders of religious paintings, until they bring you down to earth when you see, for example, that a couple is having sex, and the sex may be rape.
Always more interested in grabbing your attention than in making new friends, Samaras is reminding us that, if you can’t escape the past, you might as well exploit it.
The pastels are personal, not necessarily in the sense that they reveal a secret world—Samaras has already done that for decades—but insofar as they offer a sense of intimate experimentation, variation and improvisation. Different as they are from Samaras’s other work, they have been exhibited in museums and at Pace for decades.
One picture likely to get attention is Head #16, a 1981 self-portrait in which Samara’s black hair and beard surround a greenish face and eyes with a fixed gaze. It’s an homage to Matisse, but also a vision of a bust left to disintegrate. The piles of colour here and elsewhere make you think of a ceramic glaze exploding.
Two more portraits from the same year each come with a scowl from Samaras, as if he’s warning whoever’s looking that these are not your grandmother’s pastels. Patterned wallpaper designed by the artist ensures that nothing here feels too harmonious. Shown together at the Morgan, the pastels have the jumbled feel of a private sketchbook, the diary of a rebel’s journey through a seductive medium.
• David D’Arcy is a correspondent for The Art Newspaper
• Founding Figures: Copper Sculpture from Ancient Mesopotamia, ca. 3300–2000 BC and Dreams in Dust: The Pastels of Lucas Samaras, Morgan Library and Museum, New York, both until 21 August