Degenerates on Display

We popped over to the Neue Gallerie today to take in the new show on "Degenerate Art" under the Nazis--which was not the best ever but good enough--and also the goulash, which was up to par.

The show builds on a defensible premise: to show some comparisons/contrasts between the art of which the Nazis approved and the dreadful modern stuff that came before.  By "dreadful modern," I mean the stuff you will have seen and enjoyed at--and will cherish from--your previous forays to the Neue.  By "Nazi," think Hitler, or Mussolini or Stalin, except in various ways I think maybe the competitor-scoundrels came up with a more interesting and varied product than the little man in the mustache itself.  Mussolini, after all, fancied himself a sort of modernist, at least in his early days, at least as long as there were lots of choo-choos and suchlike.  Stalin's contributions to the arts may be regarded as slender but the Soviets did keep grinding out those gloriously, yet oddly compelling, posters, right on into the post-War period (statement of interest: at Chez Buce, there is a Soviet kitsch poster on the bedroom wall, along with an array of mama in a selection of hats, and a photo  of bedful of babies).

Worth the price, as I say, and it seems to have found its audience:  at 11 am, the line ran around the corner onto Fifth Avenue and I tell you it was pretty chilly.  Someone in the line said something about their being extra security, so I guess the anti-degenerate party lives.

Still, I'm not sure the project works as a museum show.  Most of the goers will have seen the degenerate part--mostly right here at the Neue-- and the Nazi art doesn't deserve a second look (which is the point, of course, but still).  The comparisons themselves aren't immediately enlightening.   I suspect maybe the trouble here is that the real story is in the back-story: the particular machinations that led the Nazis (or really, Goebbels) to crack down on the degenerates as hard as he did.  Did Goebbels, or Hitler (or anyone) really care?  Or was this just posturing on the path to power?  The point is, perhaps, that I should have done my homework, or at least that I wish I had.  I suppose there was good stuff available on topic in that lovely museum shop.  But the stack is already high and other topics press their demands.  And, of course, as the Jews are said to say of any major holiday: we won, they lost, let's eat.

Only Once

We were playing an amiable conversation game around the TG dinner table last night when I faced the question: is there something that you have done only once in your life that you would like to do again (I quote from memory)?

At first I said:  no, sorry, nothing, I don't think that way.  Might be an age thing. Lots of things I'm glad to have done, would enjoy doing some over, hope to do new things.  But no.

Then on second thought:  well, now, for example Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew, in the San Luigi die Francesi, just off the Piazza Navona in Rome.  I'd love to go see it again. Wait, but you've done it before more than once (half a dozen times, I would guess).  So you can't say you've seen it only once.   Yes, but I did it only once for the first time, and what I'd really like is to do it again for the first time.

You can see where I'm going here.  Good as it was, it will never get any better.  Now that I think of it, I suppose there are a thousand things in my life--maybe tens of thousands, to  which I would give the same treatment.

Update:  but then, one of my co-conversationalists asked: you've been to Rome more than once?  Oh yes, I love Rome.  When you went the second time, did it seem like the first?  Actually no, it was quite different.  So even though not the first time, it was the first second time, not so?  And we wandered off happily arm and in arm into the vale of infinite regress.

The El Greco Burial: Who Knew?

sS

We beguiled the time yesterday puzzling over El Greco's Burial of Count Orgaz in the San We beguiled the time yesterday puzzling over El Greco's Burial of Count Orgoz in the San Tomé Church in Toledo.  It's impressive enough to the untutored eye (i.e., mine) although it invites some explication.  Diving into some readily available sources, we find that it is remarkable, inter alia, in its challenging mix of the heavens above and the earth below--the heavens almost transparent in their otherworliness, the earth startling in its particularity (no matter that Saints Stephen and Augustine have descended to earth to help with the putting away).

It got us to considering: do the earthly dignitaries (evidently critics love to try to attach the faces to real people)--do these dignitaries understand just what sort of heavenly universe it is of which they are a part?  Mrs. Buce  says they must: she finds it inconceivable that a commission painter in the veriest black hole of Catholic faith would paint his betters as anything other than fully cognizant of their theological surroundings.

Could be that, as the fellow says, could be something else.  Me, always ready with a Shakespeare reference, I find myself thinking of the end of Midsummer Night's Dream, where the yokels present their play, observed by Duke Theseus and his bride, observed in their turn by the fairies, observed at last by us, the audience of the audience of the audience.  I like to think that maybe the painter was telling us more about the sacred space than even the truest of true believers might believe on their own.

The Early Goyas

I checked in at the Prado in Madrid today for the first time in 17 years and found myself spending more time than I might have expected in a corner where (it seems) not many people linger.  I could say "among the Goyas," but it's not what you're thinking.  I'm talking not so much about the famous ones on the ground and first floors, but the stuff tucked away on the top floor--specifically the cartoons, as they are presented, for the tapestries of some defunct prince.

They're early work and they are "country scenes," which might set you to thinking Boucher, maybe Fragonard, maybe Murillo, possibly even Poussin.  Granted there is some of each of these in reflection here, but no more than some.  It seems that even when Goya is trying to be conventional or derivative, he can't help himself: these figures are alive, with juice and sinews that leap out across nearly 250 years.

You can see it in the subjects.  There's plenty of conventional-seeming stuff: a kite, a balloon, a boy climbing  tree.  But on second look,  not so much.   The boy climbing a tree evidently intends to steal some fruit and you sense there is more than merry mischief here: he looks like he might be hungry, and might be in trouble if he is caught.  And as to playing--here are some more boys, these tormenting a young bull.  

 The figures are not all children: there's a washerwoman,  a guitarist (blind), a water drinker (blind).  Even more striking (and probably the best known) is "La Nevada," a representation of s poor family (yes?) crossing a mountain in the snow.  Why the prince would want it in his bedroom is beyond imagining but it might make a fit companion to what I'd rank is the most extraordinary in the whole set.  It's called "the injured mason" and there he is being carted away by his fellow workers after (yes?) a fall.  The scaffolding for the job is in the background and I can't imagine how anybody could look at it without seeing a Christian deposition.

The only comparison that comes readily to  mind is that scene in Shakespeare's Henry IV part 2  where carriers and the ostler banter in the morning chill outside the in at Rochester.

What have we Learned Today, Children?

Perhaps nothing. But we have relearned a lesson easy to forget: that insurgents are almost always children of the comfortable middle class, almost never the dispossessed.  Link.

Pasquale Chiesa

Holy Saturday seems to be a good time to salute the work of Pasquale Chiesa--"Easter Church," credited as the painter of two respectable oils that hang in Rome's Galeria Doria Pamphilj.  

You know about Pasquale?  Good, then you are in a club of one.  He is a painter about whom, it seems, nothing is known--zero, nada, bubkas, zilch--except his name and the attributions.  Have a good weekend, Pasquale.  Vixere fortis and all that.  At least you left a couple of creditable pieces of work behind.

Piero at the Frick

We took in the  new Piero della Francesca show at the Frick in New York last week and it came home to me for the first time what people mean when they say that Piero is an original, his own man, outside the common ruck of  his time.  I suppose what I'm saying is no more than that only now do I have enough acquaintance with his contemporaries to be able to intuit some of the differences between him and the others.

Walter Klein also discusses Piero's individuality, in his splendid review of the show, although he approaches the matter a bit differently than I do.  I was lucky enough to have the chance to make the ritual pilgrimage up to Monterchi and San Sepolocro a few years back, later to Urbino and Arrezo--so I've had the good fortune to see most of Piero's best work in its natural habitat.    I  think I've been able to intuit a sense of how Piero had rejected Firenze--in his time, probably already the center of the Italian art world--for the gnarly hill country where he was born.   View a few (in fact, there are only a few) of those exemplars and you can't escape the notion of an artist who wanted to  proceed undistracted by the fashions of his time, who wanted to do things his own way.  Kaiser speaks of the "serene immobility" of Piero figures; he quotes Zbigniew Herbert, speaking of the paintings'  "ontological indestructibility."   I'd go further: I'd say they exist almost outside of time, like the bodily essences of Cézanne (quoting Roger Fry, Kaiser mentions Cézanne).

In this I'd say Piero stands at the opposite end of a continuum from another artist I think I can understand better: Caravaggio, whose figures so often to seem to leap out at you in an electric moment.  Perhaps needless to say, I don't for a moment mean to disparage either Piero or Caravaggio--only to suggest that a fully rounded education would require the appreciation of both, and of the particularity of their achievement.

Kaiser offers superb guidance for this particular show (can't say I agree with him about St. John's feet, though).  But he also offers the best possible appreciation of Piero's importance in his own time:

In significant ways, Piero’s paintings are the quintessential artistic expression of the quattrocento humanism given definition by authors like Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Poliziano, Vittorino da Feltre, and Pico della Mirandola—much as the Pazzi Chapel in Florence is the architectural expression of those same Renaissance ideals. Describing an orderly, rational world of individual freedom and dignity inspired by the world of classical antiquity, they extol the virtues of eloquence and learning, liberty and aspiration, personal nobility, goodness, and beauty. With inherent hopeful optimism, they depict an ideal universe of the imagination in which man, endowed with unlimited capacities and encompassing intelligence, has the possibility of perfecting himself and creating a harmonious society of virtuous citizens. That ideal world is one of the noblest dreams of Western man, and it suffuses the paintings of Piero della Francesca; for they depict, as Berenson wrote, “his dream of surroundings worthy of his mind and heart, where his soul would feel at home."

 Fn.:  I'm ashamed to say Kaiser never registered on me before although it is clear he is a figure to be reckoned with in Renaissance studies.  The NYRB alone offers a modest but impressive catalog of reviews and essays, some of which I must have read when they were new.  In any event, I'm going to try to make time to read them all now.

Art for All Ages

Young man, wrangling wiggly infant at the Metropolitan Museum:

--She always gets excited when she sees men in loinclothes.

Proper adult female bystander:

--Happens to me too.

Japanese Birds Fly

Here's a quicky on a special exhibit at the Metropolitan in New York. The subject of the show is birds, paintings thereof. The takeway of this post is that Japanese birds fly.  

It must be near  impossible to paint a bird that looks like s/he is actually in motion: so much easier to let them appear as if dangling from an invisible string.  I say "must be" in the sense that I've never myself lifted a paint brush, but I've looked at a lot of pictures and I can't remember many where the birds actually fly but the Japanese seem to know how to do it.  So also, come to think of it, when they are landbound: Japanese hawks assailing  mountain lions look full of life; it is the mountain lions that look dead.

New subject: Giambattista Tiepolo the Venetian--but bear with me here, there is a sequitur.    You recognize Tiepolo, painter of lustrous blue skies attended by billowing clouds.  And people: Tiepoolo skies are full of people, in and around the clouds.

And here's the thing: Tiepolo people fly.  Or at least float in the aether as if it is their natural elemement. Any other artist, their aerie figures look like they are going to drop like an anvil as soon as the painter turns his back.  

Tiepolo, meet the bird painters of Japan. Brothers in the aeronautic arts. 

Caravaggio and Bernini: The Stillness at the Center

I know it is vain foolishness to name a "favorite artist," but I suppose if pressed I would have to name Caravaggio.   I suppose there are any number of good reasons but a lot of them are subsumed in Michael Fried's notion of the moment(s) of "immersion:" when, to put it inadequately, Caravaggio's  subjects experience the bolt of understanding, the moment that shows them that their lives will never be the same again: Judith to take just a single example, almost as horrified at her violent outburst as Holofernes himself  (in his index, Fried gives four lines to the subject of "decapitation," with a cross reference to "severing.").

Pushing absurdity on absurdity, if I had to name a second "favorite artist," the choice might fall on Bernini, not quite Caravaggio's contemporary but another product of the brilliant, perilous, anarchic world of counter-reformation Rome--and, like Caravaggio, himself a nasty piece of business.   I admit I have never really thought about any possible comparison before but reading an instructive review of a remarkable new biography I can face to face with a point of engagement so obvious I can't see how you can evade it.   That is: in Bernini at his most typical, we also see the life-changing moment: St Theresa in rapture, Daphne as she evades the clutches of Apollo, Longinus confronting the Son of God.

The drama, the dynamism of course, but also the eerie stillness at the center, the moment of equipoise,  Or maybe I am just describing what we mean by "the baroque."

The Artist and His Public: I Think I Had Too Much Caffein

 A couple of weeks back I got all kvetchy with some guy who seemed to be ordering me to pay attention to a work of art.

Maybe I overdid it.  Here's a more persuasive rendition of the original point.

[T]orpor, rather than fire, was what she had to dread. In those gloomy days that had befallen her, it was a great additional calamity that she felt conscious of the present dimness of an insight which she once possessed in more than ordinary measure. She had lost—and she trembled lest it should have departed forever—the faculty of appreciating those great works of art, which heretofore had made so large a portion of her happiness. It was no wonder. 

A picture, however admirable the painter’s art, and wonderful his power, requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it may, you must look with the eye of faith, or its highest excellence escapes you. There is always the necessity of helping out the painter’s art with your own resources of sensibility and imagination. Not that these qualities shall really add anything to what the master has effected; but they must be put so entirely under his control, and work along with him to such an extent, that, in a different mood, when you are cold and critical, instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating.

Italics mine.   So Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Marble Faun.  Odd novel, that.  It's a slender story,  a kind of Gothic fairy tale all merchandised with a kind of  Victorian archness that can be almost unreadable.  Still, after you've  had enough of Henry James' characters disporting themselves among the ruins, it can be interesting to pick up Hawthorne and understand him as the great precursor, or at least  precursor.

What Annoys Me about Art Criticism

Trying to stay out of the rain in San Francisco yesterday, we popped into the MOMA for the Jasper Johns show.  And here on the wall is a curator's intro offering, inter alia, this line:

Johns subscribes to...the notion that an artist sets in motion a creative process that the viewer must complete.

No, dingdong, that is entirely wrong. There is no must about it. The artist may beguile, may attempt to seduce, may desire the viewer to this that or the other; he does not or cannot compel, and whether the viewer completes anything is a matter entirely at the discretion of the viewer.  In the end, I suppose the viewer may feel he must do this-and-so but it is still his choice, not the artist's.

 It's what bugs me about so much art criticism.  The curator seems to be stuck back in a hypothetical glory time back, say, the 50s--which is to say, the time when Jasper Johns burst so dramatically on the scene.  And which is to say, back when yokels from Dubuque said "my five-year-old can paint better than that"--and harbor secret pangs of unworthiness because they didn't believe what they said.   Those days are gone.  True,  that a Saatchi may still be willing to pay gazillions trying to prove to himself that he can buy something that I can't buy (though even this proposition may be less true than it was).   And true that that Big Art persists as a social network.  But its special aura has vanished, and for anyone to try to tell us that we "muist" do anything is just whistling past the graveyard,  It's marketing, bro; deal with it.

Boring afterthought:   I'm willing to grant, however, that Johns does have some interesting things to say, or show, about the relationship between the abstract and the concrete in art, and that the MOMA show offers a helpful and instructive introduction to his thought.

After-afterthought: I see the inclusion of a Mona Lisa in a Johns is offered as an "homage" to Leonardo.  Wonder if Leonardo would see it that way.

Paris: Degas Nudes

Who said of the Folies Bergère girls--"ah zair faces are so sad, mais zair bottoms are so 'appi!" It's the Paris we dreamt of--men, anyway--back before we realized we could get naked and get wasted without every leaving home. There's another kind of French allure on display right now at the Musée_d'Orsay, France's national treasury of Impressionist (and kindred) art. It's Degas and the Nude--room after room of them, plenty of paintings, lots of drawings, a few sculptures. And even though it is (nominally) only one subject, it's one of those shows that lets you consider the whole arc of a career.  For who more than Edgar Degas, when you stop to think of it, ever observed the female body--sitting, standing, lying down, climbing out of the bath, toweling down, whatever--with such patient attention?

Of course you want to say this is art and not porn and you'd be right, but that doesn't mean it is not erotic.  I tried to say something about abstraction, timelessness, essence, like Cézanne. But Mrs. Buce says this misses the point: she said their never was an artist who inhabited the body with more convincing particularity, all the bones and joints in the right place, always the right balance between equipoise and action. I suppose we could both be right in the sense of Hegel's god who had to live through the particularity of the world, else be doomed to an eternity of abstract possibility. Anyway, it is here until July 1. Special ticket although it does come included in those multi-day passes. Definitely worth a side trip, perhaps even worth a transcontinental flight. 

The Loneliest Place in Seattle

... or so it was last Friday morning.  We had a few hours to kill; it was misty and chilly and we didn't want to go far.  But we found ourselves more or less next door to the Seattle Asian Art Museum.  As luck would have it, this was "seniors-get-in-free" day, so we joined the H-- no, actually, it wasn't quite that.  In fact, so far as I could see, we two seniors were the only two visitors of any sort for the first hour or so after opening, two of only a dozen for the next hour.

Kinda makes you wonder what Dr. Richard H. Fuller would think--he being, it seems, the seedbed donor behind the whole enterprise.  Would he have preferred to take his beneficence to San Francisco, say, or maybe Shanghai?


Can't answer that one, of course, but I kind of feel for him: this collection is small but for its size surprisingly diverse and representative.  Also well curated: instructive labeling of a quality that would not disgrace the best of museums.  That's a Tang horse at right, unencumbered by the dramatic pigmentation you expect from Tang statues, but how many artists before Bernini can capture so much dynamic energy?  At left is a Buddha at the moment of Enlightenment; perhaps he just discovered that the Vietnam War was not fought between North and South Koreans.  Anyway, definitely worth a side trip, even if you are not just killing time.

The Calling and the Calling

Just noticed something intriguing about my favorite painting.  We call it "The Calling of Saint Matthew."  I only now realized that the name in the original Italian is "La Vocazione di San Matteo."  So it's pretty clear that what we have here is "calling:" in two senses:  Jesus calls Matthew ("Yo Matteo!")--with his extended hand--"vocation" in the vocative, a form of address. But Matthew receives the call  ("You talkina me?"):   He receives the call, and while we can't quite say that he accepts the call--not just yet--he seems to know that he will accept it, and that his life will be forever changed.

It's an ambiguity that runs through (at least) the English language. When the form instructs us to list our "vocation," we write down what it is that we do for a living: hop picker, or bus driver, whatever. We may not feel "called" to either of these jobs (although I wonder about bus driver: of all occupations, surely not the worst--the bus driver is, after all, in some sense the captain of the ship). We go to "vocational school" in lieu of studying "the liberal arts." "Professional school" is ambiguous: "just barber college," the English professors will say of the law school, annoyed no doubt in part that those lawyers get paid so much.

But a "calling" is clearly something more than a "vocation." Preachers may be "called," and the preacher on the street corner will assure you that it is no mere metaphor. Yo, Matteo. Yes, I'm talkina you.

The SFMOMA Serra Show and the Past/Present of Modern (?) Art

Mr. and Mrs. Buce took in the Richard Serra show at the San Francisco MOMA today and it stimulated some thought on the past and present of modern (if they still call it that) art.

Specifically, start with audio. SFMOMA provided helpful and instructive audio (and some video) to provide guidance for the viewer, much of it in the voice of Serra himself, as undertook to explain what he was trying to do and why.

Does this surprise?  Should it?  Perhaps not "surprise" exactly, but it may be worth reflecting on how much has changed in the table stakes for this kind of game.  Fifty years ago, if you went to a "modern" art show, you were pretty much on your own--left to guess what and why. For the cognoscenti, this was no problem but the common ruck was left more or less bewildered, without so much as a point of reference to know where to begin.    This bewilderment yielded a lot of belligerent backchatter of the "I don't know art but I know what I like" variety--and truth be told, I think the insiders rather liked it: part of the fun of doing art in those days was the way you got to look down your nose at the yokels.

But the flat truth is that a lot of what passes for modernism simply does not explain itself; it needs interpretation if you are going to engage with it.  Take a simple example: there's a Serra piece called "heir."  Unless you are previously plugged in--or an extraordinarily good guesser--you are bound to find yourself muttering "un hunh" and wondering (sotto voce), "so who's the heir?  And to whom? And of what?"

Serra does a perfectly adequate job of explaining: he called it that because he felt he was working in heirship to a certain influential forebear.  Well, fine. And interesting and helpful. And like I said, you just wouldn't have guessed.  Indeed, so it went through the whole show: Serra (and others) talking about how he did what he did, and why.  It was all "engaging" in the strict sense that it allowed you to engage with the material in ways that the artist might well have wanted you to engage.

But next point.  The corollary is that a show like this winds up being almost entirely about process: why I chose this kind of material, where I got my stuff, what I was trying to accomplish with it.  There's nothing intrinsically wrong with process but I must say this is at least a radical departure from what art used to be. How would our museum trip be different if Michelangelo (for instance) whispered into our ear, telling us where he found the marble, why he chose this piece rather than that, why lavished so much attention on the torsos of young males and suchlike.  I'm not trying to mock this approach; maybe our experience would have been worse, maybe better.  But it certainly would have been different.

And a corollary.  It seems that one of the perks of being stipulated an "artist":in our world is that you get to talk about yourself in almost infinite duration while others stand by in respectful awe.   Really, does life get any better than that?  Wouldn't every one of us just love to have an attentive auditor, willing to absorb any amount of detail about our internal ructions (or whatever?).  Indeed that in itself might be reason enough to be an artist: the sheer thrill of being listened to, all the time and on demand.

A final point, which I will try not to develop at too much length.  At one point, Serra remarks, of a particular installation, that "the viewer becomes the subject"--or at least that such is his hope.  When you stop to think about it, wouldn't you say this is always the way with these artist-fellers--they are always messin' with your head?  I don't suppose there is anything really new here: I suppose Michelangelo again wanted to thrill, to awe (etc.)--messin' with your head is a venerable craft.  And as I think if it, I suppose that most occupations, at least most social occupations involve messin' with your head to some extent (think: teachers, priests, used car salesmen, lawyers, politicians, whatever).  I just can't remember hearing it stated with quite as much directness and sophistication before.

I note that I haven't really talked about the show itself here, so much as the meta-show.  Suffice to say it's worthwhile on its own terms, as an exploration of work by an artist with his own tastes and concerns. Perhaps the most interesting thing you can say by way of substance is to note that Serra, by his own account, worked as steel worker in San Francisco in his youth--that must have been the early 50s.  How many people could make statement today?   I know...

So, worthwhile, although I have to admit  that at the end of the day I still feel a bit of the old insecurity; a bit of the sense that if I take it with undue solemnity, then all of a sudden Peter Sellers will rip off the mask and I'll find myself standing in the middle of a circle of my friends as they sing "Happy Birthday."

Metsu

We took in the Gabriel Metsu show at the National Gallery today.  Gabriel who?  Oh, you  know.  Metsu.  The great contemporary of Vermeer, both influenced and influenced by.  Apparently for a long time he was more famous than his now-more-famous contemporary.   Why have a Vermeer, says a collector (I quote from memory) when you can have a Metsu?

It's a worthwhile and instructive way to idle away a couple and it helps to enrich one's understanding of the golden age in Dutch Art.  But do not be misled: Metsu is not a patch on the master.  Looking at a Metsu after a Vermeer is like reading Fanny Burney after Jane Austen: entertaining in its way but a stern reminder of why the other is so much admired.

Which invites the question--how could an earlier age have made such a mistake?  It's a question that deserves an answer but on reflection, I suspect any answer may be found. Specifically: isn't it almost always the case that the producer is on one track and the consumer another--that the artist (to be specific) is tracing out lines of inquiry in which the audience isn't really interested (yet?).   Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying the artist is a superior being on a plane apart from the riffraff.  I will say he may have thought about some issues, puzzled over some problems that the riffraff hasn't considered--but merely because the riffraff hasn't got there yet.  Back to Metsu: clearly he learned about light and color and form from Vermeer (and other great contemporaries). But he's also a superb story teller and thus perhaps more accessible than the more austere and closer-to-abstract Vermeer.  Maybe it just took time for Vermeer's particular, if somewhat arcane, virtues to shine through.  Shine through I think they do but don't stick up your nose at the Metsu show: it's a valuable  addition to any enthusiast's knowledge of the period and its style.  

Cézanne at the Met

We spent a happy hour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this afternoon in the company of  Cézanne's Card Players.  It's  a show built round a single painting except that it's not: it's an elaborate study of the painting in the context of a tradition and a career.  You get to see a history of card-playing and of its companion, smoking; you get to see some of Cézanne's many ventures into the same or closely related subjects. You get to reflect on (though this may not have been a primary purpose) some of the resonances between Cézanne and more-or-less contemporaries like Van Gogh and Modigliani.  In the end you get to understand the painting as an episode in a continuing conversation and you get a vivid insight (one of the clearest I've ever enjoyed) into what makes Cézanne so much himself.    The show is a delight on its own terms but I love the concept.  I'd cheerfully go out of my way for any show that undertook to treat so interesting a work such a spirit of tactful inquiry.

Art and Politics Watch

We took in the post-impressionist show at the de Young in San Francisco today.  Lots of world-class stuff, no doubt about it, although it was pretty crowded -on a scale where "King Tut" is ten, maybe a 6.5 or a seven.  No surprise in that this was the next to the last day (the audio commentary, FWIW, was perfunctory at best).

In long queues to see the superstars I found myself idling: we have neo, proto and crypto fascists, but when it comes to impressionists, we only have neos. Well: I suppose we do have protos although they are more often called "precursors."  Cryptos are, I suppose, something you can have in politics but just can't have in art: if one wanted to represent a particular movement but to conceal his representation, just how would he do it (for "crypto-impressionist," Google gives me one hit, which is the Google equivalent of zero--I did not linger to figure out just what the writer could be talking about).

Footnote: these last two days have been, weatherwise, about the mot pleasant  I have ever spent in this often-pleasant city.  I came home tonight to read about the prospects of a 45-day rainstorm.  Am I feeling like they felt in August, 1914?

When Man Bites Dog...

Mrs. Buce is not at all impressed that the Met has recommissioned a long-languishing portrait of Philip IV as "really" a Velzaquez.

One more Philip IV?  Who needs it? There must be 40 of them.* Now, if it were Philip III, maybe.  Or Philip V.  Or a portrait of Velazquez by Philip IV, then we'd be getting somewhere.

--
*Wiki counts 11, though if you throw in portraits of the family, you'd get a lot more.  Still an ugly dude, though, wouldn't you say?