Connections/Gesture

I'm Denise Leidy, I'm one of the curators in the department of Asian art, and I'm going to talk about gesture.

My default position is to read gesture to figure out who I'm looking at and what they're doing.

It's what I see first and how I begin to understand almost everything I see.

I'm a mom, and also the eldest of a very large family. I have very fond memories of watching babies

discover their hands. It must be this very human thing to look up and realize that you've got these great things that move and you've got an opposable thumb and you can do things with them.

And I suspect that a great many of the world's babies begin by sticking their hands in their mouths.

One of my favorite sculptures in the Medieval department is the Virgin Mary meeting her kinswoman, Elizabeth, at a moment when they're both pregnant. And you don't actually have to remember the story, I think, to understand the sculpture, because you see two women, they're standing very, very close to each other

they're touching, and one is actually placing her hand over her heart. Any woman might look at the crystals in the bellies of these women, and guess that perhaps they're supposed to be pregnant. And I think

gesture creates both intimacy and passion in this wonderful Persian painting of two lovers who are in the middle of nowhere, who've just finished eating and drinking, and have obviously moved on to the main event, and are having a very romantic time.

And I find the gesture of this unknown, and in my opinion, horribly arrogant Italian young man, very interesting. He's standing there with his hand on his hip, he's staring out at you, and he's holding a book. He's not only holding the book, he's very clearly using his fingers to mark the place. So what is he saying? "You interrupted me while I'm reading, how dare you?" or, "Hey, I can read, whoopie!" Exactly what is going on in this painting?

The hands of this Japanese actor, and particularly the fingers, appear boneless. It's like there's very little power in them. But, I think because the gesture is so exaggerated, you can imagine those hands moving out and grabbing you around your neck, and ending your life.

If I hadn't spent so much of my life learning to read gesture in one artistic tradition

I might not see them quite as much as I do. In this

poem page, you read the actual moment of writing in the way in which you can

read the brush drying out as the artist writes, and then he fills it up again and you have darker ink.

So I think one of the things that happens is that you always see gesture at work. For example

in this bowl, you have to acknowledge that someone made it, and someone painted it, and that same someone wished us all happiness with the writing in the bottom of the bowl.

And then I mean, if hands moving around, made everything in this building, and made the building itself

the Met exists on human gesture.