Category: Grand Adventure

Friday afternoon in Chicago, mid-April.  My friend Patti, her husband Norm, and I are at the Art Institute of Chicago.  I have asked that we see the new modern art wing, and we have been wending our way through the galleries, finally arriving on the third floor.  Looming ahead of us in all its majesty is a painting, Bathers By A River, (1909/1910, 1913 and 1916-19170 Henri  Matisse.  Photo courtesy of Wikiart.org, here. 

The painting is huge.  These figures are far taller than I.  At first, my mind already beginning to be overflow with sensory input, I pause, slightly as if unable to completely register what I am seeing. I haven't read the plaque.  I see a blending of images, I see reflections of the lush tenderness seen in Three Bathers with a Turtle,  I see echoes of the lyricism of Dance; But I also see cubism, and intense feeling of danger. I wonder if it is a modern painting "after Matisse" but of course it is not. I've seen pictures of this painting before.  I should recognize it from that alone, but I am unprepared for the impact of the painting itself.  The painting seems to overwhelm me with the fractured lines of human experience, the sharp edges of innocence and experience overlapping each other.  I try to back up far enough to take a photo but I cannot get the right perspective. I want to stop here, not to rest exactly, but to be pulled in, to simply exist for a moment in the space this painting creates.  The finish on the canvas itself, the depth of the colors — the pure presence of the piece is far more overwhelming than a mere picture can convey.  But of course I cannot stop here.  The gallery is just beginning.  There is no place to sit, no wall upon which to brace myself, only the doors, which keep opening when I want nothing more than for time to stop.

 

So of course I wander.  Eventually I find a room with a bench.  I see paintings by artists whose work I love, but, having already been in the galleries for some time, I am dangerously close to being overwhelmed, close, in fact, being inundated in a tide of sensory overload. There is too much beauty, too much power and I feel like a small child in a candy store,  my eyes unable to find a suitable place to rest, as everything around me is competing for their attention. I momentarily catch a glimpse of an ethereal Picasso, although I am not quite sure that "ethereal" and "Picaso", have ever merged so coherently in my imagination before.  I need to stop and I find a place to sit, briefly, calmed by this landscape by Heinrich Campendonk.  My nerve endings feel slightly less frayed, but I realize I can absorb nothing further, so I leave the gallery to sit and wait by the elevators.

 

It has been a good visit to the museum.  We started with Rembrandt portraits.  I am not a lover of portraits generally, but these are exceptional, each with a character, and a point of view, each subjects gaze filled with humanity, either inviting you in or holding you at bay.  Either way the portraits are compellingly human, and one wishes to get to know each of these characters better.  Aside from the portraits themselves however, I was struck by a comment in one of the notes. Tthe curator was discussing Rembrandt's use of costumes, and mentioned that in the artist's time, painters were considered mere craftsmen, not artists, and this struck me in light of my own recent post on self-definition, art and the role of art and craft in creation.  I was struck by the idea that Rembrandt also might have struggled with that idea of artist vs craftsman.  Of course this should be no surprise, because Rembrandt was also human, because this struggle is one of the basic human struggles, just as it is a basic human characteristic to judge and categorize, and perhaps to idolize the past, forgetting that our heroes were indeed just like us.    Today, I think I am not alone in thinking of painters as artists, and yet I am also pretty confident that there are layers of perception and categorization, and we too categorize painting into "craft" and "art", dismissing out of hand broad categories that we deem closer to the former than the later.  It seems that this is one of those questions to which there are no firm answers.

 

(Barbara Hepworth, Two Figures (Menhirs), 1954/1955.

 

After Rembrandt we had moved over to the modern wing and starting with contemporary works, some of which seemed breathtakingly beautiful while others were more puzzling.  Some pieces seemed very dependent on having a basic understanding of the intent and process. Other pieces were more transparent.   I took more pictures downstairs, mostly to remember, but I learned long ago that taking photos and actually looking are often mutually exclusive.  The struggle to find the balance point between recording and experiencing, between movement and stillness seems to be the ongoing struggle.  How does one manage?  I remain uncertain.  

 

 

Sometimes what really struck me, and what I remember, cannot be captured by photographs at all; the photographs simply serve as a memory cue of sorts.  The Brice Marden above, (Study for the Muses, Eaglesmere Version 1991-94/1997-990) seems to float in space, to almost dance across the room.  In my photo you can see some of the layers of paint, of color of movement.  But the effect in the afternoon sunlight is magical.  And yet, as much as this painting alone is worth entry into this gallery, it is only one player in a complex dance.  As Brice Marden's painting shimmers and floats, it shares a space with the sculpture shown below (Katharina Fritsch, A Woman With Her Dog, 2004).  At first the light softness of the painting and the feminine pink sculpture seem to go together, at least upon initial impression, perhaps merely due to color alone and subject matter, but where the painting is soft and yielding, the woman is simultaneously soft and yielding in color and form but hard and brittle, like the shells from which she appears to be formed.   Easily broken perhaps, but not without causing pain.

 

 

And yet there is more.  Also in this room are some smaller works, strong and singular in their line and impact, occasionally stark.  Although there may have been works by other artists, I specifically remember two works by Gerhard Richter, Davos, 1981, and Venice, Staircase (1985). The harsh simplicity and tension in the smaller Richter works  stood both in opposition and in harmony to the Marden and Fritsch.  Standing in this room I felt challenged by the contrast of  permanence and impermanence, hard and soft, yielding and unyielding, dance and isolation. It is exactly this, this conversation, this play of art and ideas, of emotion and space that struck me about that particular afternoon, that I remember to this day.  In retrospect, I wonder how the effect of this room, these works affected my reaction to the Matisse seen at the top of this post,  as shortly after this we left the second floor and rose to the third.  Next time I walk into the gallery and see the Matisse, will my reaction be different?  How does the conversation between art and viewer evolve over time?   Echoes of previous encounters remain a part of us, but time shifts, our emotions and understandings change, and yet art to continues to pierce through our defenses.

 

 

I  wrote this post last night when it was late and I was tired. I did read it this morning, and fix glaring errors but avoided reading too closely.  I got in late.  I slept late.  I need to wrestle Moisés into a carrier for his annual trip to the vet, and bring Tikka home from boarding. I decided somewhere along the line it is better to just post.

It is late in Atlanta's Hartfield-Jackson Airport and I am waiting for my plane.  It is well past my bedtime, and I was supposed to have been home hours ago.  I am sure that my face looks as punch-drunk-tired as I feel.  But mine is but one exhausted face in a crowded gate filled with exhausted faces, all waiting hopefully and patiently for any news that we may indeed be flying soon. This is not the first time I've been stuck in this airport, or on this airline, (Delta) but I am continually grateful for the airline staff that go the extra mile to keep us updated on what is going on (and what is not), cheering us onward, and making sure that there are snacks and plenty of water at the gate. I have just learned that we are being moved to another gate and another plane, a plane that was originally scheduled to go to a different city.  We will get home tonight. I hope the people who were scheduled on the flight we usurped make it home tonight as well, although at the moment that seems iffy, as ice conditions in their city has reduced traffic to a trickle..  

But exhaustion aside, I had a lovely weekend visiting may aunt in San Antonio.  It was cold in San Antonio and I did not walk along the river as much as is my wont, walking as necessary exercise rather than indulging in lazy strolls. I used  the hotel gym on one particularly windy and sleety morning.  I stayed in a new place for me, a place that felt like a home away from home, which had a lovely library where I spent one morning drinking coffee, journaling and browsing through an interesting selection of art books.

I had great visits with my aunt. I did walk along the river walk when the weather warmed slightly and the biting wind calmed.  I wandered the farmer's market. I ate at a restaurant I have been wanting to try for a few years.  I even managed to spend extra time in one of my favorite museums, and how can that not be a boon?

 

In fact, it seems to me that every time I go to the McNay I see something different.  It feels simultaneously familiar and yet new.  Sometimes I wonder even if I love the place itself as much as the art.  I'm not always sure I can tell the difference.

I enjoyed being at the museum but I can't say that anything leapt out at me, at least not art specifically.  On this morning I was somehow struck by the way the gray heaviness of the light outside the windows reflected into my vision of the art in the museum. I was almost more entranced by the light and the placement of the art, the way one picture played off other works in the room, the rather dark day and the stead gray light through the windows. I had wandered through half the museum, not quite aimlessly, but in a foggy bubble, noticing the space, the play of light, the artful placement of create a sense of conversation between art and space, before I saw this painting by Robert Rauschenberg, Black Mail.  I suppose it too is rather dreary, but it really captured my attention.  After I sat down to look at it further I noticed that the mirror was actually a mirror.  That it is both a painting and a collage and I that tickled me even further, that little bit of reflection, of peering inward and outward simultaneously in the middle of this painting.  

But then I noticed the floor, and the way the muted colors of the floor complimented the colors of the painting, and I was once again fascinated by the intersection of art and space and light.  I sat on the bench thinking about floor and painting and the window in the corner, a window with a sculpture in front of it, thinking about all of this together and how it made something more than any one piece. I kept staring at the corner, at the floor, and the painting. I took a picture of the floor.  I took a picture of the window.  That was not meant as insult to Rauschenberg, but somehow everything came together in a way that made me very happy, as if something was shifting in my perspective.  The Rauschenberg lightened as if in conversation with its setting.  Walking back out through the museum it was, once again, like seeing something old become new again.