London 27.12.2010: Bus-top Views and Droll Children

And what I forgot to say about yesterday: there was a tube strike, so we could get only as far as Hyde Park Corner on the tube, and then had to switch to the bus.  Outside the Earls Court tube station was a transit employee who told us how to get into the city using the buses.

And so we had the unexpected treat of being able to ride the bus, sitting in the top, from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, inching along Piccadilly Street, which was very congested with Boxing Day shoppers, both in cars and by foot.

Washington, D.C. 24.10.2009: Luminous Turners and Fake Gelato

Steve had two meetings today near the National Gallery of Art, so after the meetings were finished, we walked to the museum. Didn’t have any particular objective in mind in going there. That is, there wasn’t a current exhibition that had particularly caught my eye.

If anything, I wanted to have another look at the Turner seascapes, which never tire the eye. And it occurred to me that I had never tried to find the few Winslow Homers that are at the National Museum. I don’t have a thing for Winslow Homer. But I realize as I age that I haven’t done as much to familiarize myself with American painters over the years as with European ones, so I wanted to fill in some of those gaps.

We found the Winslow Homers, and they were nice to look at. But what really caught my eye in the same series of rooms in which the Homers hang were Thomas Eakins’ paintings.

He hasn’t been on my radar screen, though now that I know a bit more about him, I realize he did the famous homoerotic “Swimming Hole” work that has appeared—I think—on some editions of Whitman’s poetry. In fact, Eakins and Whitman were friends, something I surely must have known already somewhere back in my mind, since I’ve read a number of Whitman biographies.

“Swimming Hole” isn’t in the National Gallery. But several other of his works there rang a bell for me—to be specific, a homoerotic bell. I’m not sure what it was in the sensibility and composition of these works that said “gay” to me, but something did, and I wasn’t surprised, as a result, to see in the Gallery bookstore a number of biographies of Eakins noting a debate about his sexual orientation. I bought one of these, William McFeely’s Portrait, and have begun reading it with great interest.

We did happen on the Judith Leyster exhibit, and I am glad to have seen it, though I can’t say I was bowled over by her work. It’s technically superb, but derivative in a way that most of the Dutch old masters seem to me—derivative, in particular, of Rembrandt and Vermeer, though Rembrandt was almost precisely Leyster’s contemporary and Vermeer somewhat younger than she was, so she can’t have been imitating their work.

That’s not precisely what I mean by “derivative.” What I mean is that when you’ve seen what Rembrandt and Vermeer excel at—the play of light and shadow in precisely drawn, evocative portraits of people posed in interior settings—any other painters of their time and place employing similar techniques seem less imposing. Worth looking at; technically astonishing. But not world-shaking in the way Vermeer and Rembrandt are.

Leyster reminded me, strangely enough, of some of her Spanish contemporaries—Velasquez in particular. I don’t believe there was any intersection of influence between her and Velasquez or other Spanish court painters of their period. But something about the way that they pose their subjects and then study the play of light on their countenances seems similar. Not surprising, I suppose, to find interplay of Spanish and Dutch cultural influences in this period, given the political ties between the two countries.

What will long remain in my mind, though, from this visit are Turner’s seascapes, with their luminous, gloriously transcendent blues. I will never grow weary of looking at them.

After our stroll through the American and British 19th-century galleries and the Leyster exhibition, Steve and I had coffee and gelato in the café below the museum. As we sat near the waterfall that cascades down outside a window there, it struck me how essential places like this are to the human spirit—how they ought to exist in every city.

Places to sit amidst and look at art in various media, to hear and watch the play of water and light, to have coffee and pastry, listen to music, talk, dream. Humane cities and towns build such spaces into their cultural landscapes as a matter of course, as essential needs of the human spirit.

I wish I could recommend the gelato that accompanied this restful, soul-building experience. It was horrific, though. Without my prompting him to comment on his raspberry-cherry choice, Steve exclaimed, after tasting a spoon, that it was totally artificial. As was my dulce de leche choice, with its cloying synthetic (and probably petroleum-based) rum flavoring.

Why, I have to wonder, do we Americans produce such monstrosities and then try bill them as “authentic” culinary compositions? Why try to pass off what is so screamingly fake as the real thing? Why do we not demand better—especially in our national capital, in a place people from many different cultures will be visiting in the expectation of having an iconic American experience?

I have to conclude that we don’t ask for better because we don’t know better. And because sham often attracts our attention more than the real thing does.

Washington, D.C. 23.7.93: Angelic Messages and Green Shutters

At Barnes Exhibit, National Gallery of Art: Van Gogh, “Joseph Etienne Roulin, 1889,” is van Gogh himself—red eyes staring out frankly, the unappreciated artist, with a stylized iconographic background moving from yellow-green to yellow, with flowers and flourishes—the angelic message is the artist’s reward.

Picasso, “Acrobat and Young Harlequins” (1905): and so another harlequin to add to my imaginative collection of that fascinating image . . . .

The Matisses: the great surprise. Color used to idealize rooms “decorated” as an ideal statement of how life should be—people bleeding green light, decked in garish colors no one can even possibly imagine, sitting in rooms suffused by lavender light through green shutters.

Washington, D.C. 18-19.2.1993: Drowning Dreams and Watching Angels

At the Hirshorn Museum, after a morning in the National Archives, and very weary, dissociated.

All night, I dreamt I was writing some kind of “breakthrough” letter to the college, saying now is a time of national debate, and also of crisis for the college.

For both reasons, discussion of the college’s identity seems imperative. Yet it’s being blocked, often by demonizing of the new, and by sheer refusal to discuss, as we manage conflict.

This is unjust. A college is a community—bound together, etymologically—and requires free shared discourse to be what it purports to be. Moreover, refusal to discuss covertly privileges a few, and allows power centers to manipulate, rather than invite discussion.

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At National Gallery of Art. Very moved by a series of allegorical paintings by Thomas Cole, 1842, on the four phases of life. In each, a guardian angel—in childhood, with the child; in youth, on the shore as the youth’s boat pushes off on the river of life; in midlife, watching solicitously from the clouds as the boat shoots dark rapids to a dark ocean; in old age, rejoining the boat as it enters the ocean.

There’s a type of thought about pictography. Not a new notion, I know—evident to anyone who looks at any primitive” art, that we depict in order to think. And yet think very differently from anything commonly called rationality now.

This is thought of the dark, moist, fertile self below rationality. Because it’s powerful thought, we need to suppress art in our “civilizations” of technocratic managerialism.

I don’t know how to give myself to the thought of the dark, camera oscura, pictographic self. It kills me to do so. I do so only in painful and voluptuous dreams in which any sense of self I have is so painfully fragmented and shattered, that it’s almost a violent wrenching of my body—literally so, some days—to awake. I drown in dreams, in a stream that seeps simultaneously into every crack and crevice of my being, showing me mad illuminations of the many facets of my experience that I simply cannot tolerate, or seem to connect in daytime without actually going mad.