The Photography gallery at the Chicago Art Institute had a large show of Paris photos from the late 19th century to mid 20th. All the expected names were represented: Steiglitz, Atget, Kertész, Brassai, and many unfamiliar ones. There were photos you have seen a thousand times—Cartier-Bresson’s self-satisfied boy with the two huge bottles of wine, Doisseau’s lovers in mid-kiss on a busy Paris intersection. Atget’s photos have a feeling of detachment about them, a melancholy loneliness. Brassai’s are lusty and full of life, even when they’re not portraits of prostitutes. What surprised me is how moved I was by André Kertész, and one photo in particular: Rue des Ursins, 1931. Everything I like about the sense of space in a photograph and how it is inhabited is present in this image. A woman approaches a cat at the curb. The line of the curb gracefully curves to the bottom of the café entrance, with two men and a dog in the cropped-off doorway. A portion of a bicycle wheel anchors the corner. Everything is exactly where it is supposed to be in the image, but it is only a moment, and when the moment is past the possibility of that photograph is gone.
Upstairs I joined the throngs in the vast Impressionist galleries. Room after room was devoted to Monet and his ilk. I found myself drawn to the Renoirs, which is not usual. Today Renoir was speaking to me.
Here is my strategy for coping with the visual cornucopia of an art museum. Face it, there is too much to see. Any given painting, if it’s good, has enough in it to sustain lengthy attention. Some you can revisit for the rest of your life. You can’t give that kind of reading to more than a few. I walk into a gallery, and see which one of them is calling me. And I go to it and see if I can figure out why it called. I only glance at the rest.
Such was the case with a Matisse, "The Geranium, 1906." This one got me in my gut. I don’t know how or why. Much of my reading of art is analytical. I parse the structure and the color, I see how the effect is being achieved. None of that happened with this painting, a loose one for Matisse, abandoned blips of hovering color and fragments looking lightly sketched and incomplete. I walked up to the painting, and I fell into tears. I wanted to weep, and I had not a clue why. I stayed in its thrall, and let the feeling saturate me. I found that by standing about 4 feet away the feeling was strongest. It felt like the painting emitted a field of energy, and that by standing in its aura I could be taken in.
In another room of Monets and Cezannes, a toddler tottered up to me, stood, and stared. A few minutes later he did it again, to the embarrassment of his mother. I think I still carried the Matisse with me, and he was drawn in too.
Comments