Paul Cezanne “Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants” 1890-4
Allison Katz “Poires Noires” (2009)
Allison Katz “Black Pears” (2009)
Dana Schutz “Reclining Nude” (2002)
Brooke Moyse, “Green Triangles,”2010, oil on canvas, 20 x 16.”
Charline Von Heyl Untitled (3/00), III, 2000
mrkiki: Josephine Halvorson. Pink Stripe, 2010. Oil on linen. 23 x 18 inches. 58.4 x 45.7 cm
Paintings, like poetry or music, are essential nutrients that help people sustain healthy lives. They’re not recreational pleasures or sidelines. They are tools that help us grasp the diversity of the world and its history, and explore the emotional capacities with which we navigate that world. They illuminate, they humble, they nurture, they inspire. They teach us to use our eyes and to know ourselves by knowing others. If New York’s legions of irresistible paintings could sing, these hills would be magnificently alive with the sound of their music.
— Roberta Smith, “Landscape and Still Lifes of New Territories,” New York Times December 30, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/arts/design/31smith.html?ref=design
Since, of the charm, the grace, the forms of nature, the public knows only what it has absorbed from the cliches of an art slowly assimilated, and since an original artist begins by rejecting these cliches, M. and Mme. Cottard, being in this sense typical of the public, found neither in Vinteuil’s sonata, nor in the painter’s portraits, what for them created the harmony of music and the beauty of painting. It seemed to them when the pianist played the sonata that he was randomly attaching to the piano notes that were not in fact connected to the forms they were used to, and that the painter was randomly hurling colors onto his canvases. When they were able to recognize a form in these canvases, they found it heavy and vulgarized (that is, lacking the elegance of the school of painting through which they viewed all living creatures, even in the street), and lacking truth, as if Monsieur Biche did not know how a shoulder was constructed or that women do not have lavendar hair.
— Marcel Proust Swann’s Way in In Search of Lost Time (Penguin’s Lydia Davis translation.)
Swann had always had this peculiar penchant for amusing himself by rediscovering in the paintings of the masters not only the general characteristics of the real world that surrounds us, but what seems on the contrary the least susceptible to generalization.
— Marcel Proust from Swann’s Way in In Search of Lost Time
Hemingway at the Met
Pg. 479 Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by Carlos Baker
Pg. 57-61 Portrait of Hemingway by Lillian Ross
When Lillian Ross arrived at Ernest’s suite late Thursday morning, she found him wearing a plaid bathrobe and drinking champagne. He said that he had been up since dawn working on his book, and launched at once into further autobiographical reminiscences, heavily larded with boxing terminology. It was fun to be fifty and about to defend his title again. He had won it in the twenties and defended it in the thirties and forties. Now here he was coming into the ring once more. “I am a strange old man,” he murmured, as if to himself. But he knew that Miss Ross was listening. The program for Friday morning was to visit the Metropolitan Museum. When Lillian arrived for her third interview session, Patrick had come down from Harvard, Ernest was wearing his new Abercrombie and Fitch topcoat, and they set off in a taxi through the rainy streets.
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When we drew up at the Museum entrance, a line of school children was moving in slowly, Hemingway impatiently led us past them. In the lobby, he paused, pulled a silver flask from one of his coat pockets, unscrewed its top, and took a long drink, Putting the flask back in his pocket, he asked Mrs. Hemingway whether she wanted to see the Goyas first or the Breughels. She said the Breughels.
“I learned to write by looking at paintings in the Luxembourg Museum in Paris,” he said. “I never went past high school. When you’ve got a hungry gut and the museum is free, you go to the museum. Look,” he said, stopping before “Portrait of a man,” which has been attributed to both Titian and Giorgione. “They were old Venice boys, too.”
“Here’s what I like, Papa,” Patrick said, and Hemingway joined his son in front of “Portrait of Federigo Gonzaga (1500-1540),” by Francesco Francia. It shows, against a landscape, a small boy with long hair and a cloak.
“This is what we try to do when we write, Mousie,” Hemingway said, pointing to the trees in the background. “We always have this in when we write.”
Mrs. Hemingway called to us. She was looking at “Portrait of the Artist,” by Van Dyck. Hemingway looked at it, nodded approval, and said, “In Spain, we had a fighter pilot named Whitey Dahl, so Whitey came to me one time and said, ‘Mr. Hemingway, is Van Dyck a good painter?’ I said, ‘Yes, he is.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m glad, because I have one in my room and I like it very much, and I’m glad he’s a good painter because I like him.’ The next day, Whitey was shot down.”
We all walked over to the Rubens’ “The Triumph of Christ Over Sin and Death.” Christ is shown surrounded by snakes and angels and is being watched by a figure in a cloud. Mrs. Hemingway and Patrick said they thought it didn’t look like the usual Rubens.
“Yeah, he did that all right,” Hemingway said authoritatively. “You can tell the real just as a bird dog can tell. Smell them. Or from having lived with very poor but very good painters.”
That settled that, and we went on to the Breughel room. It was closed, we discovered. The door bore a sign that read “NOW UNDERTAKING REPAIRS.”
“They have our indulgence,” Hemingway said, and took another drink from his flask. “I sure miss the good Breughel,” he said as we moved along. “It’s the great one, of the harvesters. It is a lot of people cutting grain, but he uses the grain geometrically, to make an emotion that is so strong for me that I can hardly take it.” We came to El Greco’s green “View of Toledo” and stood looking at it a long time. “This is the best picture in the Museum for me, and Christ knows there are some lovely ones,” Hemingway said.
Patrick admired several paintings Hemingway didn’t approve of. Every time this happened, Hemingway got into an involved technical discussion with his son. Patrick would shake his head and laugh and say he respected Hemingway’s opinions. He didn’t argue much. “What the hell!” Hemingway said suddenly. “I don’t want to be an art critic. I just want to look at pictures and be happy with them and learn from them. Now, this for me is a damn good picture.” He stood back and peered at a Reynolds entitled “Colonel George Coussmaker.” which shows the Colonel leaning against a tree and holding his horse’s bridle. “Now, this Colonel is a son of a bitch who was willing to pay money to the best portrait painter of his day just to have himself painted,” Hemingway said, and gave a short laugh. “Look at the man’s arrogance and the strength in the neck of the horse and the way the man’s legs hang. He’s so arrogant he can afford to lean against a tree.”
We separated for a while and looked at paintings individually, and then Hemingway called us over and pointed to a picture labelled, in large letters, “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe” and, in small ones, “By Cabanel.” “This is where I got confused as a kid, in Chicago,” he said. “My favorite painters for a long time were Bunte and Ryerson, two of the biggest and wealthiest families in Chicago. I always thought the names in big letters were the painters.”
After we reached the Cézannes and Degas and the other Impressionists, Hemingway became more and more excited, and discoursed on what each artist could do and what he had learned from each. Patrick listened respectfully and didn’t seem to want to talk about painting techniques anymore. Hemingway spent several minutes looking at Cézanne’s “Rocks—Forest of Fontainbleau.” “This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and the woods, and the rocks we have to climb over,” he said. “Cézanne is my painter, after the early painters. Wonder, wonder painter. Degas was another wonder painter. I’ve never seen a bad Degas. You know what he did with the bad Degas? He burned them.”
Hemingway took another long drink from his flask. We came to Manet’s pasted portrait of Mlle. Valtesse de la Bigne, a young woman with blond hair coiled on the top of her head. Hemingway was silent for a while, looking at it; finally he turned away. “Manet could show the bloom people have when they’re still innocent and before they’ve been disillusioned,” he said.
As we walked along, Hemingway said to me, “I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cézanne. I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cézanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Paul was around, he would like the way I make them and be happy that I learned it from him.” He had learned a lot from Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach, too. “In the first paragraphs of ‘Farewell,’ I used the word ‘and’ consciously over and over the way Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach used a note in music when he was emitting counterpoint. I can almost write like Mr. Johann sometimes—or, anyway, so he would like it. All such people are easy to deal with it, because we all know you have to learn.”
“Papa, look at this,” Patrick said. He was looking at “Meditation on the Passion,” by Carpaccio. Patrick said it had a lot of strange animals in it for a religious painting.
“Huh!” Hemingway said. “Those painters always put the sacred scenes in the part of Italy they liked best or where they came from or where their girls came from. They made their girls the Madonnas. This is supposed to be Palestine, and Palestine is a long way off, he figures. So he puts in a red parrot, and he puts in a deer and a leopard. And then he thinks, This is the Far East and it’s far away. So he puts in the Moors, the traditional enemy of the Venetians.” He paused and looked to see what else the painter had put in the picture. “Then he gets hungry, so he puts in rabbits,” he said. “Goddam, Mouse, we saw a lot of good pictures. Mouse don’t you think two hours is a long time looking at pictures?”
Everybody agreed that two hours was a long time looking at pictures, so Hemingway said that we would skip the Goyas, and that we would all go to the Museum again when they returned from Europe.
It was still raining when we came out of the Museum. “Goddam, I hate to go out in the rain,” Hemingway said. “Goddam, I hate to get wet.”
Amy Sillman. “Some Problems in Philosophy” from her show “Transformer (or, how many light bulbs does it take to change a painting?)” up at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. on 22nd st. in NY until may 15.
