My
mother, a retired schoolteacher, is an accomplished watercolorist, and I recall
her not-all-that successful attempts a half-century ago to instill in my
brother Matt and me a love of painting. When we were quite young, she drove us
to the north side of our city, near where the fishing boats were moored, and
when I came home I painted a rust-colored box car. Some years later, in
elementary school, I executed a passable football player. But whatever
enthusiasm I had for drawing and painting soon was eclipsed by my obsession
with sports. It wasn’t until my senior year in college, when I spent the autumn
term in Cologne, Germany, that I discovered art.
At twenty-two, I was not a discriminating viewer. It was
the sheer oldness of the things that
attracted me. One weekend, near the end of my term, I took a night train to
Paris, and my initial destination was the Louvre, the superstore of art museums.
It was as if I were a contestant in the late-sixties TV show Supermarket Sweep—the ostensible goal
being not 16-pound frozen turkeys but to visually consume as many masterpieces
as time allowed. And it was here that I encountered the Mona Lisa, smiling
thinly through her bulletproof glass. Seven years later Paula and I shared an
apartment in Hamburg, close to one of the city’s many canals, for the better
part of a year. In just about every city we visited—Berlin, Amsterdam, Heidelberg,
Strasbourg—we went to a museum or art gallery.
Last September, thanks to the generosity of a friend, I returned
to central Europe, almost certainly my last trip beyond North America. While my
friend and I were in Berlin, I visited the city’s museum devoted to Salvador
Dali, the Spanish surrealist best known for his melting timepieces and other jarring
images. The work that most drew my attention was an ink-on-paper drawing
depicting Jesus on the cross being buffeted by a storm of nails, as if his
crucifixion was being carried out by hand grenade.
Despite Dali’s reputation as a whimsical genius, and his
many paintings of voluptuous nudes, he also inherited from his Catholic mother an
appreciation for Christian iconography. One of Dali’s most admired paintings is
Christ of Saint John of the Cross.
The perspective of the painting looks down on the saint’s long muscular arms
and shoulders. At the bottom of this steeply vertical painting, Jesus’s
disciples are casting their nets on the Sea of Galilee. According to a website
devoted to Dali [dalipaintings.net], the painting was inspired by a sixteenth-century
drawing, preserved in the Convent of the Incarnation in Avila, Spain. Keep in
mind that this is an artist who titled another one of his paintings The Great Masturbator. Dali’s
imagination encompassed multitudes.
Last
Friday, Paula and I, along with several other people who have Alzheimer’s or a
loved one who does, visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibit “Making
Modern.” The tour was organized by the local chapter of the Alzheimer’s
Association, which regularly organizes trips to cultural institutions as well
as arranging outdoor activities. After breaking into groups, we were provided a
guided tour of modernist painters, starting with Pablo Picasso and Jackson
Pollock. We spent a good deal of time discussing vaguely similar paintings from
the two masters. As our docent pointed out, there are tonal similarities among
the two painters. Pollock, the most famous of the abstract expressionists, was
the first painter to splatter paint onto a canvas, rather than painting with a brush.
In the ensuing discussion, we were asked to find commonalities between one of
Pollock’s works and Picasso’s. One thing we came up with was the use of similar
pale-greenish earth tones.
The “Making Modern” exhibit also includes paintings by such
well-known artists as Georgia O’Keefe, who did much of her painting in the arid
southwest, as well as the great Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Lesser known to me
was Arthur Dove, now regarded as America’s first abstract painter. But as our
docent pointed out, his influence has been broad. The docent also introduced us
to a new piece in the MFA’s collection by local African American artist Lois
Mailou Jones, a work that is half collage and half painting, portraying the
famous African American dancer Josephine Baker. We ended with a viewing of
Kahlo’s double portrait, which was the first painting she ever sold. Holding a
party to celebrate the painting’s sale, Kahlo asked her friends to sign the
back of the canvas, and their signatures can still be seen, very faintly,
today, thanks to the museum’s display of both sides of the painting.
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