Monday, April 10, 2017
people stream past it
Walking through the Getty Center last weekend I caught sight of a painting that I recognised without knowing how I recognised it or why, and as I was recognising it I had two impressions at the same time, one, that that it was important and intelligent, and, two, that it was mediocre or ordinary.
I knew why I thought (without seeing it clearly yet) that it was mediocre or ordinary, because it was neither huge nor small, there was nothing in the picture that tried to impress you; the colours were low-key blues and browns and there was a lake in the middle; it looked like an ordinary landscape, not Dutch, but with a similar placidity. And it seemed especially flat because I had been looking at Rubens' green and red Entombment, c. 1612, which was at the opposite end of the same room.
Then, although I was not seeing any more details, I realised that it was one of the two paintings I had been reading about only a few weeks before in T.J. Clark's 2006 book The Sight of Death: an Experiment in Art Writing.
The idea that this was the same painting I had been reading about did not interest me very much. I could remember some of the things Clark had said about it but they did not change, I thought, my way of looking at the work now; and primarily I remembered how irritated I was at the end of the last chapter when he waited in the last rooms of the National Gallery recording cutting thoughts about visitors who were ignoring the other painting he describes in the book, Poussin's Landscape With a Man Killed by a Snake, 1648. "[F]or several hours during the day thirty-plus people stream past it, one or two of whom give it a passing glance."
Too often at the end of gallery visits I have used up almost all of my time on other work and the terminal rooms have to be sprinted through against my desires. At the end of that visit to the Getty I wanted to stay longer with Lorenzo Lotto's The Madonna and Child With Two Donors, c. 1525-30, and also Jacopo Bassano's Portrait of a Bearded Man, c. 1550, which has an enigmatic grey shape ballooning in from the left side of the canvas. To the artist this must have been the shadow of the man's head but there is no pictorial evidence that the greenish background is actually a surface that would enable a shadow to exist and instead it looks as if someone has laid in the canvas flat on the ground and dropped a cup of grease on it. The man is looking away. Another painting in a different Getty building shows you a group of clean middle-class people gathered in a public place to enjoy the sight of a multi-coloured featureless biped performing an unidentifiable action on the paving in front of them. The label identifies it as a puppet but it might as well be a monster and I picture it as one.
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I gotta get to the Getty.
ReplyDeleteI loved the hand-wringing, however many years, or decades, ago about the nine seconds museum-goers spent in front of a word on average. As if there were some agreed best practice about the time spent in front of a painting; as if dividing the time in a museum by the number of works meant something.
The final rooms, especially at a crowded show, are brutal. Look, the soothing lights of the gift shop beckon, just through that door.
Getty's good. They have a terrific Degas, The Milliners, and the gallery with the Lorenzo Lotto was almost empty because everyone was photographing Van Gogh in another building. Nobody loves the 1500s any more unless they're being funnelled through them on the way to somewhere else.
DeleteThat nine second factoid is virtually its own metaphor by now. It's a shepherd peasant under a tree with a flute: "Don't rush, be content with slowness, be sensitive."
This reminds me of two experiences we had in the Louvre: first, we went into the Salle des Etats and everyone was of course crowded around the "Mona Lisa", ignoring such superior works as Jouvenet's "Descent from the Cross," which is what? 15 feet tall and 9 feet wide or something, an immense spectacular painting full of life and color and movement, and everyone was instead taking selfies with Mona. I'm not sure any of these people were actually looking at the painting itself. On the wall behind the Mona Lisa, on the opposite side of the wall, I mean, we stumbled across Titian's "Man With a Glove," one of my favorite paintings. I was much more pleased to see him than Mona. About an hour after this, I think it was, we realized that the museum was closing and we hadn't seen the "Venus di Milo," so we ran down to the Greco-Roman sculpture room to catch a look, and then we jogged through the rest of the sculptures, so my impression of that whole gallery is of stern Greeks made of marble, storming past me on their way to an after-shift drink. Those gigantic collections can't be taken in all at once, or even glanced at in one visit.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, Seattle has a wee little art museum downtown, that doesn't so much repay return visits for long. We get good traveling shows, though, giving me the opportunity to long for that gift shop a couple hours in.
That Scannabecchi Flagellation looks interesting, and I wouldn't mind taking a look at their Vuillard. What's worth seeing in Seattle, if I'm ever over that way?
DeleteAt the Seattle Art Museum, I like the Renaissance room a lot, and if it's out of storage, I always like to spend time with Katharina Fritsch's "Mann und Maus" sculpture. There is some interesting contemporary African art upstairs, but mostly a smattering of stuff from all over, like someone has pilfered from random closets of better museums.
DeleteThe Asian Art Museum has a solid collection and is worth seeing. I have mixed feelings about the Olympic Sculpture Park, but overall it's a good space and it's right by a nice park on the bay.
What else? There's a Chihuly museum at Seattle Center. I despise Chihuly but you might not. The Fry Museum has a nice collection; nothing surprising but it's pleasant and a good space. The Steinbrueck Gallery has a lot of Native art. The Henry Art Gallery is on campus and has contemporary pieces and a lot of changing exhibitions; small but usually worth seeing. It reminds me of the modern art wing of the Albertina in Vienna. And of course there's CoCA, the serious contemporary art space in Seattle, not to be missed.
The Vuillard is a really nice painting; we make a point of visiting it whenever we're at the museum. The Scannabecchi is part of the wee religious art collection (really, it's all in a short hallway) that isn't bad. Some nice painted carved ikons. Some Durer prints that are never on view.
DeleteThank you. This is useful. The Henry (I'm at its website now) looks interesting. I can live without Chihuly. The Bellagio Hotel and Casino lobby is ceiling'd with him. (The Vegas casino aesthetic is a contradictory thing I'd describe as "tastefulness without restraint"; it's very specific.)
DeleteSeeing "short hallway" and "Durer prints" close together reminds me of the Durer print exhibition at LACMA just now. "Masterworks from the Collection!" they say. Massive, stern advertising picture of Knight, Death, and the Devil! "Setting standards rarely matched in the history of printmaking"! Etc, etc! You wouldn't guess that the prints are hung down a narrow little betweenway corridor near the elevators, but lo.
The way that everybody in the Scannabecchi looks as if they are both flying and not-flying is fascinating me. They're associated with this brown, horizontal form that can only be read as the ground or earth that should support them, but then they appear to be disassociated from it & levitating.
DeleteNone of the figures cast shadows, though they are themselves shaded in. I've seen a couple of paintings of the Ascension that have that feel, Christ going up like a weird balloon. I wish I could remember the name of the painting (it's in the Louvre, a huge canvas) where Christ is floating above the Marys, a look of surprise and delight on his face, as if he's a kid in one of those trampoline things they have a birthday parties. "Hey, Ma, look at me!"
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