At the Met

Yesterday I was in New York to get my NYU ID and went to the Met where I saw a big exhibition of Childe Hassam, and liked some of his things a lot– the snowy and rainy street scenes in NYC and Boston best, actually, and also his Barbizon-style blocky dark countrysides.
But I am feeling tired of the art of the wealthy–I understand that in as far as art is a luxury, there has to be added value in someone’s economy or bankbook to support it-- thus the Church in the Middle Ages, thus people wealthy enough to buy the paintings of an entrepreneurial artist like Hassam in the Gilded Age. Hassam was explicitly avoiding poor people in his later work.
But, exciting and new-to-me was was the photography of August Sander’s huge project of indexing German people. All those face on people in the brown prints. A group called “People who came to my door” included a beggar, a peddler, and a bailiff! Also revolutionaries and the odd Nazi. What an amazing collection. I bought 6 or 7 postcards as samples, butit was the sheer mass of art work as well as the individual portraits that got to me.