H and I went to the John Singer Sargent (
http://jssgallery.org/ ) exhibit at the seedily pretentious Chrysler museum in Norfolk today.
"What a dump!" I exclaimed as we entered the building, and indeed, I was right. The experience was akin to having tea in your great-aunt's living room, though your great aunt probably has better taste in paintings. And won't try to bully you into buying a year-long membership. I had been to the museum once before, and though I had found the experience to be displeasing, I figured "Well it couldn't be as bad as you remember..."
But it was.
H's lithium was interacting with her sleep deprivation and her general agoraphobia. "Do you feel that?" she whispered as we crossed into the dim foyer that led into the Sargent exhibit proper. "Is the floor sinking up and down?"
"No," I whispered back, and guided her to the first wall of paintings. Her pirate beret lent an air of beatnik absurdity to her combat booted shuffle.
The paintings were, of course superb. My love of Sargent's work stems from his mastery of what are oft regarded as seperate and noble genres of painting, genres he transcends and sublimates into individual creative achievements that are among the most subtly beautiful I have ever experienced. This exhibit, though limited to his depiction of children (and mainly via portraiture), none the less conveys a degree of his transcendant adeptness.
The gallery was dim, and that, my dears, greatly helped to quell the mounting head ache that had been threatening all morning. And the dimlight too helped to soothe H's nerves, for she was able to relax, the floor stopped undulating, and her green eyes gleamed more surely behind her small, black framed glasses. The paintings we initially encountered were of nude boys on a beach. H and I had been whispering, but apparently there was no need.
"Holy cow, things have sure changed! Times have CHANGED!" crowed a middle aged bearded man to his nodding wife who pursed her lips. "That'd be scandalous today!" the man continued, pressing so close to a painting of a young nude boy that I at once feared and hoped that he would wet him with his spitty lips.
(SEE THE PAINTING!
)
Many of the works in the first 2 rooms were Impressionistic in their renderings, and they served to reinforce what I have always felt, which is that Impressionism is a far more impressive theory and technique than it is an end in and of itself. I can appreciate the Impressionists, and their efforts to capture light as it is seen are technically brilliant. But Impressionist art has always been, to me, emotionally uninspiring. Sargent's mastery of Impressionist technique and theory ,and his subsequent ability to apply these to his own paintings are, I believe, a far more impressive achievement.
As I contemplated these ideas, H and I standing before a painting of two children watering a garden (
) a group of three large black men rolled through the room. They were laughing amongst themselves and one yelled to his friend "Y'all are too stressed! Y'all need to chill out! Y'all need to go hang with those kids in the picture there and relax!"
They laughed all the harder and continued on their way out the room. I glanced to H. She was shaking with laughter, or perhaps the shaking was from my laughter, or perhaps because the room really was undulating by now.
Sargent 's singular achievement, which is extremely evident in an exhibition such as this one, is his ability to manifest the human person so indelibly upon the canvas. Few artists (and at the moment only Rembrandt comes immediately to mind) have been able to render the human PRESENCE with such uncanny, nearly preternatural acuteness. Turning the corner into the next room of the exhibit H and I were confronted with this: (
), which so perfectly conveys the essence I am trying to explain. So many of Sargent's works contain this absolute sense of the human person's ontological presence, and this painting, especially when confronted in its true size and color, is more sublime than beautiful.
"Aaahhh, look at that bull!" I stage-whispered to H, exaggerating, but not manufacturing the suprise in my voice. This was a painting I had never seen before in any book. H had been looking at a painting of a boy swaddled in a black loincloth, and resented my intrusion, but even she was compelled to admit that the small painting we were looking at (
http://www.jssgallery.org/Paintings/Shoeing_the_Ox.htm) was pretty cool. She snorted loudly, shrugged her shoulders in the air, and moved in that jerkily fluid manner that is her bull pantomime. "By the way, " she muttered as she walked to the next painting. "That's an ox."
The next painting caught me quite be suprise, because I had not been expecting (
) to see HER (in the red) here. And me with my wife and all. Awkward...
I had been in love with Essie since the first time I saw her, and had pored over this painting as an addict soaks in his porn. He long dark hair, her porceleain skin, the coquettish recline she sloped, the filmy white sash over her lip red dress. Beautiful. Divine. Erotic. I hastily explained all of this to H, who considered a moment and then replied "She looks sort of like that 'Dita' chick you like". And you know what dear readers? She actually does. (
http://www.dita.net/galleries.php)
Around the next corner, the bearded man waited. His sour faced wife still pursed her lips. They had found another pair of pasty looking geniuses to ally themselves with. The two women of the party read aloud from a descriptive plaue that supplemeneted one of the paintings (no image available). They sometimes spoke simultaneously, other times they heeded subtle cues and took turns. As they read, their voices became more and more frenzied and were punctuated with emotional asides: "... the younger brother was later wounded in World War I -OH MY GOSH!- while his sister went on to marry industrialist..."
As they reached the climax of the placard I knew for sure security would have to come in and bring this chaos to an end, because by now they were almost screaming, and at the very last sentence one of them actually did emit a shrill of desperation: "Tragically, the oldest brother ended his own life with the discharge of a handgun - THAT'S TERRIBLE! OH GOD!- in 19...". H and I were laughing again, but this time my laughter was tinted with overtones of disgust. Both women were absurdly shaken by their reader's theatre, but their husbands seemed blissfully unaware, cattle who have already taken that mad and very final run into the funnel of the abattoir.
The sky outside the window was grey, but the promised rain still had not arrived. My headache was slightly more sinister now, overtones of a long night brushing their feathers across my brow. I could also tell the exertion of the day was taking its toll on H, and as we walked through the last room we slowed our already frame by frame pace. These final paintings were the last redemptive bastions we would pass before re-entering the secular, mundane American landscape, but to dwell on this too long is to reduce art to escapism- exactly the sort of philosophical swindle the Black Iron Prison is built on. No. H and I would have none of that. We stopped at the final painting in the exhibit. No one else was in this hallway with us. (
).
!Max Q!