Connections/Borders

I'm Helen Evans, I'm a curator in the department of Medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum, and I'm talking about "Borders." Borders

are a great variety of things, a border is the border between England and France

between time and place. What gives you authority in one culture and does or does not in another.

And how all these borders come together. It's the friction that makes art very exciting and interesting.

Perhaps I'm interested in borders because I grew up in a border city. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee which is on one side of the Mississippi. Johnny Cash was on the other side of the Mississippi.

New Orleans, where I went to college, it was French, it was Spanish, it was English, it was Indian. It's had almost everybody roll through it

and leave a real mark. Some of the connections are very easy to see and

some of them are more complicated. Ruben's great self-portrait with his young wife and child, I'm always drawn to the bird

at the upper right. It's a statement of where all of his wealth came from, where all the lace

that his wife is wearing gets its source. It's the wealth of the New World.

Portugal found its way to the New World by going around Africa. There's a charming little body of a Portuguese merchant as seen by an African. Art

is filled with images of power. If you have the money to have an image of yourself made you're projecting yourself in your most powerful position.

Images of pharaohs are meant to show how in command of the world they are, that they provide their country with a balance and a stability. It's less you than the role you're playing.

Roman portraiture is closely aligned with a real portrait of the individual. The head of Agrippa, his eyes are deeply penetrating, and he looks like he is getting ready to judge you, and he is a great general, he's a great leader. Ultimately, a great loser.

An African head of a king: a very similar use of elements brings the attention directly to the eyes. You have a sense of power emanating from the figure. The

Jerome portrait, it's an incredibly gorgeous work, if for no other reason, the self-confidence in the face is wonderful. The body turning, caught in a moment, and given the date of it, the artist is actually in Egypt, quite possibly in and around the time of the Suez Canal. And Empress Eugenie

comes to see the opening of the Suez Canal and stays in a palace built for her that is now the Marriott Hotel, where I stay when I'm in Cairo. The Temple of

Dendur, you think of it as great Egyptian art, but of course it wasn't built by the Egyptians, it was built for the Roman conquest of Egypt. And centuries

after it is built it will be transformed into a Christian church.

My favorite work is Brancusi's bird in flight. The artist, a Romanian, brings, quite consciously, his roots in the east Christian world. That twisting, that effort to fly, to soar, goes

with the sense of the Holy Spirit as something that emanates and is an

extended ray of light in which the little bird travels in most art. I'm excited by where

traditions touch, of time, of place, of style, of skill and

how can one sort out those threads. When you reach that border how do you reach across it and what do you do with it? I don't think

anything is ever without contact beyond its border.