This is one of my favorite art museums in the world.
I take an art museum hard. They overwhelm me. Paintings are not like books. In a bookstore you can ignore all the books except the three you’re looking for. The ideas in books need time to get their hooks into you, and if you don’t give them the time, they’re just dead trees on the shelves.
Physical art, on the other hand – painting, sculpture – is like an odor. Unless you’re blind, you can’t ignore it. It assaults you.
I like going to new museums, but I love returning to one. Knowing a collection makes it easy to do what I like, which is put my head down and make straight for what I’m interested in. Only after digesting what I came to see am I encounter something new.
I go to the Musee de Beaux Artes for the Bruegels. More than just simple celebrations, Brueghel’s paintings present an alternate history, like Don Delillo’ Underworld, which posits that what’s really happening is what’s happening in the layers deep beneath what’s reported as happening.
In this small but (and) wonderful collection, Bruegel says: We want to dance with our ugly townsfolk, because we are the ugly masses ignorant of Icarus and other big dreams.
Says, turn off the TV, the Icarus of Fortis and Lehman Brothers et all aren’t all that important to you and me.
Says, go to work (plough or sail), play, drink, go forth lustily and lust after fat wenches – as Jordaens in the next room down says, you too can be KING (but don’t forget to change the brat’s diaper).
Says, to mash-up Gary Snyder and Tom Waits: Fuck the noisy machinery on the boob-tube, get behind the mule in the morning and plow.
Says, let the angels have their battles with the world’s absurdities. Maybe even kick back with a beer and watch it on a quiet Sunday, while the kids ice skate and build snowmen. But don’t fret it. It’s their fight, not yours. You and they both shall pass, and you’ve got better things to worry about.
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After Brueghel I checked out one of Cravach’s Venuses (Venusi?), poked around the collection of adoration imagery, and spent some time checking out the temptation of St. Anthony. But I decided to skip most of the older works, including Reubens, and headed downstairs to the modern wing.
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Delvaux:
Look what flesh does to bones, yes, but like St. Anthony upstairs will tell you, flesh turns to bone as well.
And his train coming in the night, with the girl hiding behind the fence that she’s outgrowing… it is adolescence arriving in the spooky night, and it’s also an appreciation of the heavy feeling of a night train arriving at an empty provincial station.
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Seurat inventing the pixel.
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Dali’s St. Anthony resisting his giantess temptations. He kneels and with wiry arms holds up the most pathetic simple cross. Making a firm & what appears to be a final stand in the middle of the mind’s broad plain, no kind of defensive position.
Left me laughing, thinking hell, resistance? 21st Century American doesn’t even try. 21st Century American asks the elephant where to stick his credit card. 21st Century American sits making snide, ironic comments about stilts while his wants trample him to mush.
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But finally the best – Khnopff and his Caresse! (Has to be said in French, ‘luh caw-ess’, to realize that it’s an onomatopoeia, in our integrating it into English we’ve managed to trample the romance out of the word – certainly not the first time it’s been done.)
The Caresse is like Leda and the Swan reversed. It had me scribbling a poem, which I’m leery about posting here, since it’s not really fleshed out much beyond a first draft at this point, but here goes:
In or Out?
Like when, handling our staff
we find our other hand
finger-deep in a tuft
of coarse fur, feeling
another strange heart beating
the ribs & teats of a long & lean torso
& a face in our face
whispering “Like to?”
A silly girl.
Her taut thighs ripe for the spreading
if we’d like to.
But watching that long, thick tail throb
and the points of claws on a belly
we remember being bitten by a kitten
who’s line of play didn’t align with ours
and would a cat care how we answer?
All the ways she has to shred a swan
if she’d like to.