art, by the numbers

BY MARY GREGORY

By the time we’re through with taxes, we’ve all looked at more numbers than we care to, and probably not with a kind eye. The Met Fifth Avenue has the antidote. “Picturing Math” brings together 49 works from the Department of Drawings and Prints adding up to one delightful exhibition.

Following the department’s recent look at text in art, “Picturing Math” presents works from the 1500s through 2015 that reflect measurement, multiplication, geometry and all things numerical. In one of the most heavily trafficked galleries in The Met, connecting the main stairway with the photography and Impressionist galleries, the collection of drawings, etchings, prints and engravings on paper are filled with numbers, shapes and even magic.

One of the most famous images in art, and certainly the most famous in the exhibition is Albrecht Dürer’s “Melencolia I,” a picture viewers have pondered, discussed, debated and spun tales about since it was created in 1514. It played a supporting role in Dan Brown’s 2009 thriller, “The Lost Symbol,” due to a grid of numbers known as a magic square. While Brown might have seen alchemy and mysticism hidden in the work, others see it as nothing more mysterious than a kind of medieval Sudoku.

Theories have abounded about the symbolism in Dürer’s “Melencolia I,” which features a winged female figure holding a compass (as in compass and protractor) surrounded by measuring devices, examples of geometric shapes, architectural tools and a ladder, and in the upper right quadrant, a magic square. This foursquare grid is populated with numbers that, pretty much no matter how you approach them, all add up to 34. What that signifies and why Dürer did that is an open question. The number 34 was associated with the planet Jupiter in Agrippa’s “De Occulta Philosophia,” a book written just four years earlier that was big with the intellectual set of the day. Jupiter was the king of the Roman pantheon and signified wisdom and light. The magic square may have been Dürer’s statement on the intellect, but it was also an announcement of sorts. The right and left corners on the bottom line of the square hold the numbers 1 and 4, a code for the first and fourth letters of the alphabet (the artist’s initials) and the center two squares hold 15 and 14, the year of the work’s creation.

Nearby, a particularly lovely Italian Renaissance engraving depicts a beautiful young female, Geometria, riding a cloud, drawing a square, a circle and a triangle across the sky. It’s part of a series of 50 works documenting the intellectual prowess of a society that had, in its estimation, mastered the conditions of man, the seven liberal arts and the “scientific” fields of astrology, philosophy and theology.

Some of the more recent works in the show may be less opaque. But then again, maybe not. A striking collection of black and white prints present long, complicated equations. “Concinnitas” is an homage to blackboards in general and one in particular. Einstein’s iconic blackboard, still bearing an equation he wrote in 1931, has been preserved at Oxford and photographed countless times. Dan Rockmore, a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College, invited 10 colleagues to represent the “most beautiful mathematical expression” they had ever encountered. The result is the series “Concinnitas.” While only some of the audience will be able to grasp the meaning, we can all still marvel the way we do at the elegance of calligraphy in a language we can’t read.

The exhibition also presents fascinating juxtapositions between Sol LeWitt’s untitled cube studies in tones of gray and Peter Flötner’s cube studies from 1528. Cy Twombly’s scratchy, energetic scrawl (from the 1960s) reads more as an encapsulation of jitteriness than as the letter “F,” as in its title, while Josef Albers linear “Transformations” of 1950 have all the grace of their Renaissance forebears. Howardena Pindell is a contemporary artist whose father was a mathematician. Her “Constellations” from 2015 is abstract and elegant, and, hearkening back to Dürer’s, it’s loaded with allusion and mystery. On a blue-black expanse, Pindell charts a circle reminiscent of a sky map. Rather than stars, the curators note, she fills hers with marks like “numbers, arrows, and other personal references that reflect her influences (such as African art), life experiences, and political activism.”

The Met’s Drawings and Prints collection numbers in the hundreds of thousands. There are beloved icons and works that are rarely on view. An exhibition like “Picturing Math” offers a fresh, fun way to revisit and reconsider a collection that’s much more than the sum of its parts.