STRANGE SHORE: London
and Rome
SUNDRY LAND: United
Kingdom and Italy
WANDERING WAY: A
Pan-European Art Extravaganza…with a lot of Americans representing abroad!
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887 – 1986) @ The Tate Modern, William Eggleston (b. 1939) @
The National Portrait Gallery, and Alex Katz (b. 1927) @ The Serpentine Gallery
in London. AND THEN Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598 – 1680) @ Galleria Borghese and Two
Anonymous Ancient Romans (~20-60 CE & ~150-199 CE) @ Musei Capitolini.
That’s right! Today on “Strange and Sundry,” you’ll be
treated to a whirlwind tour of five major
art museums (three in London and two in Rome). You’d expect this Pan-European
spree to offer a pretty decent estimation of the European art scene…except that
Londoners seem to be stuck on contemporary American artists.
As an American abroad, I should’ve felt unmitigated pride
to see my countrymen and countrywomen lauded with such fanfare, but I was a
little annoyed that I travelled all the way to Europe to see stuff that I
could’ve viewed in NYC. And so it goes.
Georgia O’Keeffe @ The Tate Modern (
The most amusing aspect of The Tate Modern’s retrospective
of Georgia O’Keeffe was the museum’s decision to plaster O’Keeffe quotations
all over the exhibition’s walls, insisting that her paintings do NOT depict female genitalia. THEY ARE
FLOWERS!!! Or more specifically,
“When people read erotic symbols into my paintings,
they’re really talking about their own affairs,”
AND
“Well – I made you take time to look…and you hung all
your own associations with flowers on my flower and your write about my flower
as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don’t.”
Against the explicit (if not unconscious) intentions of
the Tate’s curators, these annotations had the peculiar effect of making the
flowers look even more like vaginas…
If a flower is a flower and “a cigar is sometimes
just a cigar” (Sigmund Freud, apocryphal),
aren’t we doing away with the symbolic titillation of museum-going? That said, paintings
are also just oil on canvas (gasp!); as Rene Magritte notes, “Ceci n’est pas
une pipe”(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images). With this meta-critical dictum in mind, I did my best to
appreciate the paintings according to O’Keeffe’s post-mortem instructions. Every
time I noticed a vulva peeking past an iris pistil, I could very nearly feel
the artist’s grave-bound annoyance that critics still discuss her paintings
using the outmoded psychobabble of 1918.
After a little while, I revived in spirit remembering that
as a good literary critic, raised on Roland Barthes’s perceptive insight that
“THE AUTHOR IS DEAD”(http://www.tbook.constantvzw.org/wp-content/death_authorbarthes.pdf), I needn’t give one hooey how O’Keefe or how any of her early critics
interpreted these paintings. As Barthes noted, anyone who waits around for a
painter (or author) to explain away every aspect of a great artwork is going to
wait a good long while. To put it another way, according to the largely-obsolete
but ever-useful logic of Sigmund Freud, even the artist doesn’t know why she
does what she does. Interpretation is always up for grabs. On this point, the late, great
Umberto Eco observed the "openness" of art in noting, "every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it, because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective of itself"(The Open Work, p. 4: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674639768).
Whew! So basically, I can think what I want? Without
worrying about the weighty words of the artist or her over-sexed contemporaries
or the fusty curators of the exhibition? Thanks Roland Barthes! Thanks Umberto
Eco! After mulling over the philosophical implications of art interpretation,
what did I, Sharon Fulton, think of this glorious retrospective of Georgia
O’Keeffe’s oeuvre, which quite impressively spanned her entire 98-year life?
O’Keeffe was a canny colorist who knew her way around a
composition... Although I no longer care about the opinion of the artist (since Roland Barthes killed her, theoretically-speaking), O'Keeffe did say, "I paint because colour is a significant language to me." This is the language that still speaks to the contemporary viewer.
Accordingly, I found the autobiographical tidbits (O'Keeffe was married to Alfred Stieglitz in the years before she went gaga for the New Mexico desert) and symbolical
commentaries (vagina, desolation, etc.) equally uninteresting, but I found O’Keeffe’s
alignment of blues with greens fascinating. One reckons that visual medleys dedicated
to the synesthetic exploration of musical colors may not be the easiest to put
into words, but I’ll try to explain my adoration of “Music, Pink and Blue No.2
(1918)”:
Full disclosure: As a good little American aesthete, my
early art instruction (in high school) involved copying this painting. Almost
needless to say, it’s rather peculiar to encounter a painting that you spent a
month copying in loving detail at the age of 15/16 – one might even expect to
spiral into Proustian rêverie of temps
perdu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time). Don’t worry! I wouldn’t bother you with my own pretentious
autobiographical musings just when I’ve spared you by glazing over Georgia
O’Keeffe’s life and times.
Let’s concentrate on the painting itself.
Color and composition: O’Keeffe guides the eye into blue
depths along the lower-right by positioning swells in pink, orange, and green
that sweep the viewer through a spectrum towards azure. The contrasting colors
harmonize disparities into a whole, bringing the flat planes into a third
dimension. O’Keeffe shades in gradient tones along the ridge of each wave,
suggesting convexity and concavity at once – the translucent meets the
saturated, offering the impression of light traveling through colored glass.
Most importantly, IT IS NOT A VAGINA.
Ha.
William Eggleston
Portraits @ The National Portrait Gallery (
Whenever I visit London, I always make a point of visiting
The National Portrait Gallery. (I cannot tell you how happy it makes me that I
can write that sentence in good faith.) So suppose my surprise and joy when I
happened upon an unexpected William Eggleston portraiture exhibition in that
Anglo-Saxon realm. I believe these words popped out of my mouth, “William
Eggleston? I love William Eggleston!”
(Let’s not get into how weird it is that I’ve started to talk to myself in
public.)
Yes, the photographic raconteur of the American Southern
Ordinary Life has taken London by storm, and English art critics have been
falling over themselves to praise Eggleston, the artist who picks out beauty in
the gaudy excesses and mass-cultural banalities of the 1970s Stateside. (As a
side note, London critics turned up their noses at O’Keeffe, which is quite a
laugh coming from a sect that reveres David Hockney.)
With any luck whatsoever, this exhibition will be touring New
York forthwith, and I cannot recommend it enough. Eggleston’s most arresting
portraits are reproduced in enormous, glossy prints, so lifelike that you want
to reach out and touch the polyester of that bygone era.
Walking through the Eggleston exhibition was oddly similar
to the moving experience of watching the new Netflix series, “Stranger Things”(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4574334/). In both, the minute details of my youth were rendered with such care and warmth
that I felt myself propelled into an idyllic version of that earlier time –
without knowing why, a reclamation of temps
perdu appears to be trending. Why all this nostalgia? Are we all just sick
of using pop-jargon like trending?
The most compelling moment of the past hurtling into the
present was effected by “Untitled, c. 1970 (Devoe Money in Jackson,
Mississippi)”:
When I saw this photographic, I rubbed my eyes and gasped,
“Granny?!” The other art patrons looked around at the mental case who kept
muttering to herself, but I didn’t mind, too mesmerized by the clashing
yellows, oranges, reds, and blues to be bothered.
No, this is not a photograph of my grandmother, Pauline
Fulton, but it very well could be. I think she had that dress…or was that the
print of my wallpaper growing up? Haven’t I seen that couch before? In any
case, I was raised in an atmosphere where eye-searing patterns piled up in
gross yet magnificent cavalcades of mass-produced color. Eggleston gets it just
right. Plus, well, how many older women dressed in those three-quarter-sleeved sheathes?
My grandmother sure did. As for the composition, Eggleston juxtaposes the
fallen autumn leaves with the oranges and yellows of that broken-down couch,
rendering a whole world where people smoked on faded terraces waiting for the
seasons to change.
A different kind of memory game tweaked my brainpan when I
saw, “Untitled, 1974 (Karen Chatham, left, with the artist’s cousin Lesa
Aldridge in Memphis, Tennessee)”:
Where had I seen it before? Finally, it occurred to me
this photograph (one of Eggleston’s most famous pieces) graces the cover of Sigrid
Nunez’s “The Last of Her Kind”(https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004M8T0UW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1), a novel about women coming to age in the
late-sixties and early-seventies. You hardly need to read the novel to
understand the experience of women living in the 60s and 70s, as the photograph
overhears the relaxed intensity of two women talking during the early days of feminism.
These are only two examples of Eggleston’s amazing
capacity to capture emotion, atmosphere, and even aroma through image, and his
portraits of New York clubbers in the 70s must be seen by anyone and everyone
who’s stayed up all night past the point where youthful glamour twists into the
seedy, sweaty comeliness of tomorrow.
Didn’t I see someone wearing that dress yesterday?
Alex Katz, “Quick
Light,” @ The Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens (
I’ve never seen Alex Katz’s paintings displayed more
beautifully than in the sunlit galleries of the Serpentine in the middle of
Kensington Gardens. In the exhibition’s commentary, Katz “describes these
paintings as ‘environmental’ in the way they envelope the viewer,” and abstract
blotches of color interact with the “temporal qualities of light, times of day
and the changing seasons” outside in the gardens. More than anything, the
exhibition reminded me of the way Claude Monet’s waterlily paintings envelope
visitors at l’Orangerie in Paris, which is praise indeed (http://www.musee-orangerie.fr/en/article/claude-monets-water-lilies).
The atmosphere shifts as you walk from canvas to canvas,
and it feels as if all the moods of Kensington Gardens have been gathered
together in a single suite. One gazes upon a reflective pond,
the light of dawn,
shimmering grass,
It was nearly impossible to photograph these canvases
because of their massive scale, but so many viewers sat down to gaze at the
paintings that I managed to take a few snaps.
Alongside these evocative landscapes, the exhibition
offered a few of the portraits for which Katz is most famous. Too famous in my
opinion – I’ve gotten rather tired of looking at the seemingly endless supply
of Katz’s enigmatic men and women. Be that as it may, Katz offered two light-hearted
pieces of women in swimsuits, which complemented the summery landscapes to a
tea.
Although Katz is an American, the whole exhibition evinced
an appealingly English vibe.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s “Apollo and
Daphne”(1622-25) and “Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius”(1618-19) @ the Galleria
Borghese (
Ah, Roma! Rome is so beautiful that even the most quotidian
tasks (such as typing one’s blog entry) are translated into breathtaking
endeavors. Consider, if you will, the pleasure of writing in the Biblioteca
Angelica (http://www.bibliotecaangelica.beniculturali.it/index.php?en/1/home), which became the world’s first public library in 1786 (although
the librarians at the Oxford Bodleian Library and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in
Milan might contest the title). Glorious book cases take root in marble floors
that stretch up to Romanesque vaults, enveloping one in erudition and history
(much as Alex Katz enveloped the viewer in quick light). Or today, I find
myself typing in the ornate reading room of another eighteenth-century wonder, Biblioteca
Casanatense (http://www.casanatense.it/en/), where I look up at delightful frescos whenever I bore of
gazing at the sun-drenched view of the Piazza di Sant’Ignazio as breezes gently
graze my computer keys.
“A Room with a View,” indeed. Sure, the Wifi
might be described as spotty-to-nonexistent in both locations, but who cares
when ancient bells toll along with thought, and Rhetorica herself watches over
you?
Strolling around Rome is an artistic education unto
itself, but the galleries and museums display such miracles that I keep
wondering why anyone would bother going anywhere else. Like the books at
Biblioteca Angelica, Rome’s beauty appears to stretch into infinity.
As I tour these beauties, I keep recalling dialogue from
one of my favorite movies, “The Great Beauty” (La grande bellezza), directed by
Paolo Sorrentino (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2358891/).
In accounting why “Rome makes [him] waste a lot of time,”
the film’s protagonist Jep Gambardella grasps for an answer, finally admitting
in a rare departure from his customary cynicism, “I was looking for the great
beauty.” In an essay about the film, Phillip Lopate asks,
“Is ‘the great beauty’ of the title quite simply
Rome, that courtesan who saps the energy of ambitious provincials with a
thousand and one diversions? Or is it some hoped-for aesthetic pattern, some
Platonic form underlying our seemingly pointless, soul-wasteful experiences
that will finally reveal the transcendental grandeur of life on earth?” (https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3109-the-great-beauty-dancing-in-place)
After experiencing the enchantment of Rome, one hardly
questions why Lopate would jump from describing the city’s beauty to discussing
the possibility of transcendental, Platonic forms that explain human life on
earth – it feels like a natural leap of logic.
All of these ruminations lead to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s
sculptures, awe-striking delights that define today’s Roman landscape as much
as the Forum and Colosseum. For the most obvious examples, see the Fountain of
the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona and the baby elephant in Santa Maria sopra
Minerva: (http://www.reidsitaly.com/destinations/lazio/rome/sights/bernini_tour.html).
I walked by all of these splendors on my way to the Galleria
Borghese – what a pleasant amble! Yes, I’d visited the Galleria on my last trip
to Rome eleven years ago (so long!), but it was still my first stop after I
landed. I yearned to see Bernini’s “Apollo and Daphne” at the first available
opportunity, partially because the sculpture had become part of my subconscious
since it appears on my teaching-edition of Ovid Metamorphoses: (https://www.amazon.com/Metamorphoses-Penguin-Classics-Ovid/dp/014044789X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1473445526&sr=8-1&keywords=Ovid+Metamorphoses+penguin).
The gallery requires advance reservation, which keeps the
crowds at bay, and so I managed to take several decent photographs of the masterpiece.
It seems impossible that Bernini could’ve carved marble
with such fine precision: Daphne’s laurel leaves are lucent – light glints
through the marble. The grandeur of the sculpture is counterbalanced by
Daphne’s fear, most palpably realized by her feet metamorphosing into
roots and fingers transforming into branches. It’s difficult to stop looking as
the narrative drama of the statue unfolds – it’s so life-like that you expect
the figures to spring forward.
Many years teaching classical literature enlivened my
viewing of another Bernini sculpture, “Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius” – I
cannot even recall how many times I’ve had to teach Virgil’s Aeneid (https://www.amazon.com/Aeneid-Virgil-Bantam-Classics/dp/0553210416/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1473445935&sr=8-9&keywords=Vergil+Aeneid).
Here, Bernini adapts the
famous episode when Aeneas carries his father Anchises and leads his son
Ascanius from the burning ruin of Troy; the sculptor renders an exploration of
the three ages of man (boyhood, adulthood, and old age) as so famously riddled
out by Oedipus and the Sphinx, “What is that which has one voice and yet
becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed”(Apollodorus, Library: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0022%3Atext%3DLibrary%3Abook%3D3%3Achapter%3D5%3Asection%3D8).
Ascanius’s baby fat softens a boyish face; Aeneas’s
musculature distinguishes a hero in his prime; Anchises’s skin droops and folds
in demonstrable evidence of advanced age. In capturing these human details, the
21-year-old Bernini flourished his chisel with the remarkable skill of a
prodigy, demonstrating his incredible gift to sculpt children, adults, and old
men with equal assurance. The sculpture is the calling card of a young genius
who would be selected for the most prestigious commissions throughout his
entire career.
“Statue of a Child
with a Mask” 1st Century (20-60 CE) and “A Boy as Hercules Strangling
the Snake” Second half of the 2nd Century (150-199 CE) @ Musei Capitoline (
It takes hours to walk through the enormous Musei
Capitolini because its spectacular rooms (architectural artworks in their own
right) display hundreds of Ancient Roman sculptures, any of which would be a
collection centerpiece anywhere else in the world. I cannot even imagine how
long it would take a commentator to appraise each and every extraordinary piece
in the museum, and so I had quite a difficult time selecting one for the
enjoyment and edification of the dear readers of “Strange and Sundry.” In the
end, I resolved to review two slightly-less-famous sculptures of naughty
children. Why not? It’s notoriously difficult to sculpt (or paint) children
with convincing accuracy since their features are delicate and undefined; as
evidence, consider how many medieval and renaissance illustrations of baby Jesus look, well,
creepy: (http://www.viralnova.com/creepy-renaissance-babies/).
Plus, these sculptures are funny, suggesting that Ancient
Romans had a lively sense of humor when it came to babyish antics and childhood
discovery. I prefer thinking of the Ancient Romans as enlightened
humanists…instead of blood-thirsty sensualists who enjoyed watching gladiators
rip each other apart. (Both
characterizations are true.)
As a theatre-goer who goes to the theatre all the time, how could I resist this
piece, “Statue of a Child with a Mask”?
A boy peeks out from under a theatrical mask, the type used
to characterize an “old man” (or possibly Silenus) in Roman New Comedy (https://www.amazon.com/Comedies-Penguin-Classics-Terence/dp/014044324X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1473446886&sr=8-2&keywords=Terence+Roman).
In contrasting the smooth skin of the child with the unruly beard of the old-man-mask, the anonymous artist juxtaposes youth with age, suggesting the brief flash
of human life in one comic pose. Instead of conveying a portentous mood
(endemic to art in this “ages of man” genre), this sculptor suggests the
life/play in which wrinkles of age come to mask the youthful face deserves a
laugh (and not a tear). It’s an insight worthy of New Comedy.
Although “A Boy as Hercules Strangling the Snake” was
sculpted over a hundred years later, I came to think of it as a companion piece
to “Statue of a Child with a Mask” – it too registers the brave face of youth,
which looks into the symbolic eyes of death undeterred and unafraid. In fact, the kid's sorta rolling his eyes.
Despite everything that could go wrong when a boy plays
with a venomous viper, this sculpture conveys the comic, partially because
the viewer remembers that young Hercules strangled the snake (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Herakles/bio.html) and partially
because the snake looks rather annoyed that the day took this unexpected turn.
It’s a very approachable, almost anthropomorphic, serpent, one who seems chagrined to be playing the heavy in a memento mori (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori).
Speaking of memento mori, I’ll leave you with a couple photographs of The Roman Forum.
I've been reading
the excellent book, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, and its author Jérôme
Carcopino praises the Roman Forum by gushing,
“Here is a
masterpiece indeed, which has survived successive ages without ceasing to stir
each in turn to enthusiasm. The Romans of old were aware that neither their
city itself not the world outside offered anything finer to man’s admiration.
Ammianus Marcellinus has recorded that when the emperor Constantine, in company
with the Persian ambassador Ormisda, made his solemn entry into Rome in 357 and
for the first time trod the pavement of Trajan’s Forum, he could not restrain a
cry of admiration and the regret that he could never construct anything like it”(p.19, https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/12607/daily-life-in-ancient-rome/).
Although this description may sound a bit purple, I
understand the author’s perspective – the glorious view of the Forum took me
completely unawares, too. I was about to call it a day when I noticed a
light at the end a long corridor, one of many corridors in Musei Capitolini. My goodness,
am I grateful that I decided to take a few more steps towards the Forum, the preeminent display of Roman might and engineering. I love, love, love the Roman Forum, but so does
every other person who’s ever seen it.
As evidence, I'll leave you by
quoting one of my favorite poems, Joachim du Bellay's Les Antiquités de Rome (1558):
“Newcomer,
who looks for Rome in Rome,
And little of Rome in Rome can perceive,
These old walls and palaces, yet believe,
These ancient archways; are what men call Rome.
What ruin and what pride, temple and dome!
Now she, of whom the whole world once asked leave,
Who tamed all others, tames herself: conceive,
She’s prey to Time, a leaf from some old tome.
Rome now of Rome’s the only monument,
And over Rome alone Rome wins ascent;
Only the Tiber, flowing to the sea,
Remains: of Rome. O, this world’s transience!
That which stands firm, Time ruins silently,
While what flows, against Time shows resistance.”
“Nouveau venu,
qui cherches Rome en Rome
Et rien de Rome
en Rome n'aperçois,
Ces vieux palais,
ces vieux arcs que tu vois,
Et ces vieux
murs, c'est ce que Rome on nomme.
Vois quel
orgueil, quelle ruine : et comme
Celle qui mit le
monde sous ses lois,
Pour dompter
tout, se dompta quelquefois,
Et devint proie
au temps, qui tout consomme.
Rome de Rome est
le seul monument,
Et Rome Rome a
vaincu seulement.
Le Tibre seul,
qui vers la mer s'enfuit,
Reste de Rome. Ô
mondaine inconstance !
Ce qui est ferme,
est par le temps détruit,
Et ce qui fuit,
au temps fait résistance.”
(http://damienbe.chez.com/antiquites.htm#r3,
Part III)
I tried my best to come to grips with the tragic transience
of human life (like Joachim du Bellay) as I beheld the expanse of “these
ancient archways,” but I felt too happy. Fresh pasta makes it nearly impossible
to act the tragedian.
Such a wonderful entry - I have soo many comments and questions that I think we should do a phone call. Love love love the art commentary. And you of course. 😉 Have fun with Elizabeth!
ReplyDeleteYes to a phone call, but maybe one or two comments online too? Just so others (if there are others) can feel encouraged to comment, too! 😄 Love you too!! Yes! Elizabeth's arriving this morning!
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