This Is Our Present

Misia and I took an afternoon break to see Midnight In Paris, the new Woody Allen movie.  Which, by the way, does everything that Inception tried to do but with a 20th of the budget and is a good movie rather than a bad movie (like Inception.)  Sorry, fans-of-things-that-we-wanted-to-be-good-but-actually-suck-when-we-really-think-about-it.

I’m not going to spoil Midnight In Paris if you haven’t seen it, mainly because I didn’t know anything about the story line and it was delightful to watch the magic roll out. But, it did articulate something I’ve felt since graduate school, and that is this: whatever you take as inspiration, be it writing or film or dance or painting, you need to think of all of the work that came before you as contemporary.  If we think of art history as history, it dampens its impact on our understanding of its importance.  BUT! If you view art history as all present tense, as work made by fellow artists, it helps to strengthen the notion that all art made is a part of a larger continuum.  There is no difference between paintings made 500 years ago and paintings made yesterday.  Good work takes hard work, and those that rise above the fray are all good in the same way.  Great work has magic to it, and that magic-making hasn’t changed in forever.

So.  We were at The Louvre looking at Tintoretto’s self-portrait (pictured above) hanging next to Titian’s own self-portrait.  The tension on the wall is palpable, even 450 years later.  They each had their own swagger, their own magic.  It was always my feeling that Tintoretto is every artist’s choice between the two, though no one will ever deny Titian’s talent.  It’s Letterman and Leno, and while Leno gets the ratings, Letterman gets the respect.

The day after we went to The Louvre, we saw the Manet retrospective at the Musée d’Orsay.  I fell in love with Manet in grad school when I formulated the theory that he and Tintoretto have the same swagger, the same magical love of painting.  They wink, they pull pranks, they love painting above all else.  These are my kinda guys, I thought to myself.  THEN, as I was walking through the gallery, I saw a painting of Manet’s that I had never seen before:

Holy.  Shit.  The sonofabitch did it!  He believed the same thing I do, that he and Tintoretto are on the same wavelength!  This moment for me was a total face melt on so many levels.  Manet is doing a shout-out across the centuries to Tintoretto that essentially says, “we’re all present tense.”  Great artists look at art.  They look at a lot of art.  Manet, with this painting, tells everyone before him and everyone after that this is how it’s done.  To be great, we do our homework, kids.  Do yours and not only will you have a chance to be great, but you’ll also be a part of the club.

This was the greatest present that Paris gave me.  To re-affirm vis-à-vis my two favorite boyfriends that there is only the present.

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June 22, 2011 | Amy | Tags: , , , , | 2 Comments »

Notes From Paris

Our vacation was magical, and as you might expect, we saw a tremendous amount of art.  Seriously, I saw nearly every artwork that has graced all of my art history books from childhood to today.  London and Paris have a lot of history, but they were also quite clever about stealing the best paintings and sculptures known to humanity.  Huzzah to them, I guess.  This (mainly pictorial) post is all about Paris; I’ll write a London wrap-up very soon.

This is the view from The Pompidou Center, which is a weird and wonderful place.  Built ostensibly as a salute to French ingenuity, the most memorable feature of this building was a sound installation piece that echoed throughout the Habitrail-like escalator enclosures of Sacred Chants of the Gyuto Monks Tantric Choir.  I highly recommend clicking on the link and listening to it.  Mesmerizing, as well as an enjoyable walk down a Pompidou hallway.

This is The Luxembourg Gardens.  I’ve included this photo because I took it with my iPhone.  Can you believe phones? (Note: I took all these photos with my phone, but this one is particularly postcard-esque.)

Here are some Space Invader tags we found around Paris.  We also saw a few in London.

Because we’re in Paris.

The top of the tower was magical, but the best part of the day was lounging in the park afterwards.  I drew the tower while Misia alternately napped and took photos of cute Parisian kids playing soccer.  Oh, and we had hot dogs and beer.

How pretty are the Metro stops?

I laid a flower at Chopin’s grave in Père-Lachaise Cemetary.  I also said a silent word or two at Seurat’s family plot.

Of course we went to The Louvre.

Staircase at The Louvre.  The French know how to do majestic.

We passed this little gem, and I couldn’t believe no one was around.  here is essentially a holding pen for art that is usually stored in the basement.  These sculptures were moved in anticipation of flooding (or renovations, I can’t remember) and they looked magnificent.  So spooky, so pretty.

Venus.  My tattoo.

The most annoying painting in art history.  Don’t believe me?  Take a look at the room:

Is there anything more vulgar than this?  I mean, seriously.  This painting is more infamous than good.  It’s behind bulletproof glass.  You can’t get closer than 12 feet from it.  And what on earth are people going to do with all those photos of this painting?  And the kicker of this room (roughly the size of a high school gymnasium) is that some of the best paintings in the world line the walls.  No one is paying any attention to them!  Which is good for someone like me, but I mean really.  You’re at The Louvre! Get your 15 euros worth!  Look around!  To wit: look at the paintings in the background.  Do you see what’s happening?

That’s Titian on the left and Tintoretto on the right.  Two of my biggest influences, hanging next to each other.  And they hated each other!  It’d be like if in 400 years, the Red Sox and the Yankees were hung next to each other on a wall somewhere.  But there they are.  Fucking amazing.

At The Musée d’Orsay, they had a Manet retrospective.  Manet changed my life, so despite the crowds, I needed to spend a lot of time in this gallery.  Afterwards, I couldn’t even look at anything else.  I have a maximum memory capacity when it comes to museums, and once I’ve had my fill, I can’t spoil it with other stuff.  I will argue, until the day I die, that Manet’s work will always look just as current and just as exciting as anything made right now.  His stuff is magical.

Sneaky pic of the Musée d’Orsay.

And that’s my wrap up of Paris!  I’m not going to bore you with our fun vacation-ey photos.  But I do add this one, because it’s from the famed Café de Flore in the St. Germain district.  If you want an eight Euro cappuccino in the same cafe that Sartre, Picasso, Camus, and Gertrude Stein held court, this is your place.  But for real, what price to sit on the most beautiful corner in Paris, thinking your thoughts, existing in the world, would be too much to pay?

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June 10, 2011 | Amy | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Que Seurat, Seurat

Today I took a break from cleaning the basement (which smells and feels like a pool) to catch a matinee of The Art of the Steal, a documentary about the ownership and location of The Barnes Foundation in Lower Merion, five miles outside of Philadelphia.  Dr. Albert Barnes was a poor kid who grew up to be a doctor and an art lover.  He cultivated his collection based on his tastes and not the art market, and arranged the galleries like a true art fan.  He liked paintings because they are made by hand in the age of machines.  Watching the film, I realized that he was one of the few non-artists to see all art and art history as contemporary.

I first leaned about The Barnes Foundation when I was in grad school and writing a paper on Georges Seurat’s Poseuses (pictured).  I never much cared for Seurat’s style, but I fell in love with his process (there is a terrific article on Seurat and his Poseuses by Linda Nochlin in Art in America here).  He developed pointillism as a means to re-create how the eye saw, in pixels.  He was certain that if he could create a painting exactly how the eye sees, he would create the ultimate painting.  What makes Seurat great is that when he realized he could neither achieve that goal nor make the ultimate painting, he kept painting anyway.  This is why Seurat is one of my boyfriends (I refer to all my favorite artists as “my boyfriends,” regardless of gender).

I haven’t been to The Barnes Foundation, but now I really want to see the collection in situ.  There aren’t a lot of museums that are laid out and/or presented the way it’s most beneficial to view the works.  Most of the bigger museums show off the work like drive-by trainwrecks, we as the viewers slow down just long enough to stare and point.  Museums are institutions; therefore, the works are institutionalized.  My favorite museums are The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here in Boston, The Phillips Collection in Washington DC, and the Titian and Tintoretto rooms in The Uffizi Gallery in Florence.  I spent a summer in Italy as an undergrad, and ten or so times I got to the Uffizi at five o’clock in the morning, even though it didn’t open up until seven.  I did this so that I would be the first in line, and when the doors opened, I raced up the long red staircase and into the Titian room.  I would have on average ten minutes by myself in that room, and it was a thrill to know I was the only person in the world standing in front of those paintings.

The good museums slow down the viewing process.  It takes a lot of time to wholly absorb a picture.  It’s best to see a painting in a small, normal-sized room, rather than an airplane hangar that most museums favor.  Art matters, and so does the viewing space.  In the Gardner, frames remain on the wall where thirteen paintings were stolen in an art heist twenty years ago.  I love those frames.  They look like wounds, serving as reminders of their erstwhile paintings’ absence.  If that were to happen at The Met or Smithsonian or the Louvre, you can bet they would cover up the crime just as quickly as it happened.

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March 17, 2010 | Amy | Tags: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »