An Ancient Egyptian Show That’s Low on Bling but High on Beauty

By Holland Cotter
OCTOBER 8, 2015

Ancient Egypt is box office gold: Do a show, and people will come. Why? Mummies, Hollywood and Queen Nefertiti certainly contribute to its allure. Also, we tend to identify with Egyptians of thousands of years ago. In art, they look exotic, but not out of reach. They drank beer, collected cats, and wore flip-flops. They yearned to stay young and to live forever, with loved ones nearby and snack food piled high. Who can’t relate to that?

At the same time, they were foreign in ways we can barely imagine, ruled by kings they referred to as “junior gods,” and by gods who had power over all, but had to be flattered, pampered and fed. As for art, they had no word for it. What to us is gorgeous, to them was useful, a ticket to the other side, the life beyond.

Few institutions have done a better job at illuminating that art than the Metropolitan Museum. And it returns to the subject in “Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom,” an exhibition notably low on King Tut bling and high on complex beauty. Opening on Monday, it’s a classic Met product. It assembles some 230 top-shelf objects from more than 30 international collections, with about a third from the Met itself, to tackle an impossibly broad and complicated piece of history.

Oddly, given its central place in Egypt’s past, the Middle Kingdom (circa 2030 to 1650 B.C.) has never had a comprehensive museum showcase till now. Maybe “middle” sounds unsexy, implies incomplete, in progress, unformed. But that wasn’t the case. The Middle Kingdom was a time of specific change and accomplishment. And in a sense what’s most distinctive about its art is precisely its in-between-ness, its demonstration, within a culture that wanted to believe otherwise, that all is flux; nothing is stable; the only reality is change.