The Chinese invented woodblock printing. And in China, printing very quickly took on religious implications—Buddhism teaches that reproducing sacred texts is a way to receive blessings, so printing became a way to receive blessings while spreading the state religion.

The exhibit starts with a room of seventh-, eighth- and ninth-century prints of the Buddha with short texts. There are a few standouts, like the luxuriously painted “Banner with Bodhisattva.” But after a while, most of the prints start to take on the sameness of dollar bills—they’re spiritual currency.

The show moves on to the Ming period (1368-1644), where prints of leaves and flowers are executed with military precision. The period saw a big growth in literacy and wealth; at the same time, color printing took off. The exhibit includes many examples from the Ten Bamboo Shoots Collection of Calligraphy and Painting, a manual for artists full of lichen-covered stones and vines.

Color printing flourished into the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), whose Manchu rulers gave away prints to their guests to show off their power. The Qing period verges on the garish; loud pinks and greens, overflowing fruit plates and flower baskets all scream money.

The warmest pieces in this show are the so-called popular prints, which ordinary people bought to hang in their homes. Most are “door guardians” from the late 19th century, round-cheeked generals and kitchen gods with open, cartoonish faces. There are a few moving, expressionistic woodcuts from the revolutionary period, too. And the show does include some exciting works from the 1980s and beyond, notably Chen Haiyan’s “Dream,” an evocative swirl of animals on a black cloud, and Wu Jide’s “Fleeting Years.”

But these pieces beg the question: why isn’t The Met giving these artists an exhibit of their own? We would never see contemporary French or Italian artists wedged into a show of this historic scope. Contemporary Chinese artists deserve the same respect we give their Western counterparts.

The Printed Image in China: 
8th-21st Centuries 
Through July 29, The Metropolitan 
Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., 
212-923-3700, www.metmuseum.org.

Do women have to be naked to get into the museum? The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest photo show suggests that—in 2012—the Guerilla Girls are still on target.

From kitschy Victorian peep show prints to mid-20th-century studies of the body’s geometry, there are memorable images in the show. Several of the finest photographs here are also among the best known. Two of Edward Weston’s pictures of his lover Charis Wilson, sprawled naked in the sand dunes at Oceano, Calif., (1936), have been admired for more than half a century. Despite their familiarity, they remain fresh, fierce and sensual.

But ultimately, The Met’s assembly of more than 60 photographs from the museum’s big collection serves up a narrow slice of a very wide field, heavily favoring male photographers and female models. “Naked before the Camera” is a survey that pays more attention to soft porn and peep-show imagery than you might expect from an art museum. Any claims that the show offers a social history of the photographed nude are belied by the sparse information provided about the context of these images, including the photographers, their models and the market for these works.

The show is divided into three sections, each addressing a different topic. The first concentrates on 19th-century photographs made as aids for painters. The second focuses on medical, ethnographic and erotic photography. Only the last focuses on 20th- and 21st-century images that would generally be considered art in their own right.

In all three groups, the vast majority of pictures were posed in studios or studio-like settings and present the nude body detached from the world beyond. In many, the face of the model is partly or completely hidden.

All too often, what remains are studies of anatomy and composition, some more beguiling than others. A beautifully composed “Ariadne” (1867), by English photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander, recreates a pose from Titian’s “Venus and Adonis”—an attempt to measure the painter’s anatomical accuracy, according to wall notes from the curator.

Irving Penn’s intriguing “Nude No. 57” (1949-50) plays with foreshortening to highlight both the elegance and awkwardness of a female torso, knees and thighs, while Bill Brandt’s “South Kensington” (1979) offers an extreme perspective on two long legs—from shins to buttocks—stretched out like the evening’s dinner on a matte black sofa.

The few male nudes in the exhibit are treated with similar detachment. “Arm” (1935), by Man Ray, frames a masculine shoulder, bicep and elbow like a piece of abstract sculpture. A wasp-waisted male torso from the 1930s by fashion photographer George Platt Lynes twists toward the viewer to display his perfectly muscled back—a pretty pin-up picture if ever there was one, high on design value, low on content.

Most disturbing is “Sharkey” (1980) by a photographer named Jim Jager, who published soft-porn magazines featuring black men. Jager posed his African-American model with a large, wooden staff, as if he’d just emerged from the jungle with his spear. Strangely, the curator’s wall text provides no information about the race of the photographer or his clients, nor any comment about the racism inherent in the image.

One of the things missing from this show are images of naked people going about the everyday activities of their lives—swimming in lakes, diving into fountains, sunbathing, getting dressed for parties or changing out of costumes backstage. With a few notable exceptions—which include one Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell’s blurry shots of 10-year-old girls frolicking in her garden (circa 1916); Garry Winogrand’s memorable image of a streaker, “Easter Sunday, Central Park, New York” (1973); and John Goodman’s compelling 1976 portrait of a naked couple standing in front of their Commonwealth Avenue apartment building in Boston—there is little to suggest the wide variety of situations in which photographers have recorded people naked.

But the show’s most glaring omission is one of gender. Only eight of the more than 60 photographs in the show were taken by women.

Predictably, Diane Arbus is represented by two images, including her sourly satirical “Retired Man and his Wife at Home in a Nudist Camp One Morning, N.J.” (1963), which shows a self-satisfied, middle-aged couple sitting naked in an ordinary American house. The sags and wrinkles of their flesh offer stark contrast to the airbrushed curves of a girly picture hanging on their wall. If ever a black-and-white photo embodied a grayness of spirit, this is it.

The dramatically lit torso of a slender woman with her head thrown back, by French-Polish photographer Germaine Krull (1897-1985), offers a tantalizing glimpse of one female photographic vision that flourished in Europe between the world wars. But without other images by the artist, we are unable to make sense of the work or get an idea of what Krull might have been up to.

The same can be said for the photographs of Hannah Wilke, who is represented by two prints of herself posing in an abandoned building in Queens. Both are part of her “Snatch Shot with Ray Gun: So Help Me Hannah” (1978) series. Wilke, as the wall text in the exhibition informs us, “was one of a number of artists in the 1960s and 1970s who began manipulating their own bodies in photographs and performances to call attention to rituals of self-presentation.” However, the two images chosen for the show aren’t enough to convey the context or the radical nature of what she was doing.

“Maybe female photographers simply aren’t interested in the naked body,” an elderly woman standing next to me at the exhibit mused, when she heard me exclaiming over the pitifully small number of female artists in the show.

“Do you believe that?” I asked. “No, not really,” she conceded, laughing.

Imogen Cunningham. Ruth Bernhard. Eve Arnold. Lola Alvarez Bravo. Susan Meiselas. Nan Goldin. Sally Mann. Francesca Woodman. These are just eight of the hundreds—probably thousands—of accomplished women who have photographed nudes. Each has her own, individual vision of the human body. Yet none of these important artists were included in The Met’s history of the nude in photography.

Rarely has that famous 1989 observation by the Guerrilla Girls been more apt. Women, it seems, still have to be naked to get into the museum.

Naked Before the Camera 
Through Sept. 29, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., 212-535-7710, 
metmuseum.org

—Tom Allon, President and CEO
—Josh Rogers, Our Town contributing editor

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Educator, Merryl Tisch

Educator, Matthew Goldstein

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Real Estate Royalty, Joseph Mattone and Scott DeMatteis

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Emily Rafferty used to roller skate by the Metropolitan Museum, where she is now president.

By Paulette Safdieh

Visitors come to the Upper East Side from all over the world for a bite to eat at Serendipity 3 or a carriage ride through Central Park, but most of all to spend some time visiting Museum Mile. Our famed museums along 5th Avenue keep our neighborhood bustling with culture and give our children some of the greatest educational opportunities outside of the classroom. Our biggest museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, dates back to 1866.
Current president and OTTY Award winner Emily Rafferty makes sure The Met continues to thrive and contribute to our community.
Raised on Park Avenue, Rafferty, 63, developed a love for The Met at a young age.
“I would roller skate by it on my way home and it was a part of my life to come to the museum,” said Rafferty. “I remember going to The Cloisters for the first time and being overwhelmed by its beauty. It was part of my neighborhood and I definitely embraced it.”
Rafferty attended grade school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on East 91st Street, where she later served on the board for 15 years, four of those as chairwoman. While there, she fundraised and worked with city agencies to have the building’s façade restored. She attended high school at the Chapin School on East 84th Street and graduated from Boston University in 1971. During her college years in Massachusetts, she returned for a summer to work at the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House. She moved back to Manhattan for good in 1975.
“I’ve been very involved in the community,” said Rafferty. “My siblings and I are all very, very tied to the neighborhood.”
Rafferty started working at The Met at just 25 years old as an assistant director in the development office. Museum executives noticed her hard work and knack for fundraising and she continued to gain responsibilities. She became the first female vice president of the museum in 1984 and became president 20 years later. She now manages the over 2,000 employees and volunteers who serve 5.6 million annual visitors and take care of 2 million pieces of artwork.
“The greatest challenges are just the scope of what goes on at the museum on a day-to-day basis—everything from activities to visitors and what happens beyond the walls of The Met,” Rafferty said about her job. “It’s establishing priorities and making sure that problems get solved.”
Beyond her work at The Met, Rafferty chairs NYC & Company, the city’s tourism office, and serves as a member of the board of directors of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
To get some breathing space, Rafferty walks through Central Park each morning to get to the museum from her West 77th Street apartment, where she lives with husband of 25 years, John Rafferty, a partner at Ernst & Young.
Since she moved from the Upper East Side over 20 years ago, Rafferty said the area has changed greatly with regard to its popularity and increased tourism industry. However, she said that the same core values of family and community from her childhood still characterize the neighborhood.
“There were a lot of very qualified people nominated for this award and I feel honored to receive it,” said Rafferty. “I don’t quite know why I emerged out of everyone else.” n

The Department of Parks and Recreation is to be commended for proposing to restrict the number of “expressive matter” vendors in parts of Central Park and all of Union Square Park, Battery Park and the High Line Park. The numbers of vendors in these locations has skyrocketed to the point where the physical and visual clutter of their kitschy souvenirs and often derivative and copycat wares are a serious detriment to the use of these parks for passive enjoyment and as a restive retreat from the hustle and bustle of the city around us.

Much has been made of the vendors rights under the First Amendment. I heard those same arguments made by those that defended graffiti on our subways in the 70′s and 80′s. Clearly the city has the authority to regulate expression when that expression defaces and degrades our public property. I think few would argue for a return to the days of free expression on the walls of our subway cars. The city has the same authority and obligation to maintain our parks free from the clutter of an unregulated number of vendor tables. Besides, “expressive matter” vendors are not being forced out of these parks completely; rather the regulations achieve a better balance between the rights of the few and the rights of the many by limiting their number.

Opponents of these regulations also raise the specter of a Parks Department that wants to force vendors away from these locations so that they can be auctioned off to concessionaires. Yet I have not heard a shred of evidence to suggest that the city has any plans to do this. Could it be that the city is simply trying to fulfill its duty to its citizens by reclaiming our public park land for public use?

When I visit Union Square Park I expect to be able to enjoy a relaxing experience, sitting on a park bench enjoying the plantings and monuments. Instead I have to run a gauntlet of commercial detritus that rings a good portion of the southern half of the park on a daily basis, forcing me to stay within a narrow path instead of allowing me to cross the plaza at a point of my choosing or enter the subway at my leisure. Anyone who wishes to visit a flea market or crafts fair has plenty of opportunities to do so in a wide variety of venues that don’t impinge on my rights to enjoy some peace and quiet in our parks. Should I be forced to squeeze my way between vendor tables to get to the seating near the Gandhi statue in the southwest corner of the park?  Bombarded by all this visual clutter how can I even begin to contemplate the simple life that Gandhi espoused? As I sit on the grand stairs outside the Metropolitan Museum about to see or having just seen the great works of art within, should I be forced to confront a sea of souvenir tables all around me?

It’s not just me. The interests of millions of tax paying citizens and their constitutional rights to enjoy our city’s parks for what they were intended to be, tranquil oases in the midst of the busy city, cannot be allowed to take a back seat to the commercial interests of a relatively minuscule number of “expressive matter” vendors.

Brad Taylor is a Morningside Heights resident.