Last weekend the teenage girls that attend my church had a full agenda from Friday after school to a sunrise(ish) service on Sunday. My current calling, or job at church, is to work with these girlies, so I helped coordinate, and then attended all the activities. It was an opportunity to bond as a group (sometimes, time's benefits come as much from quantity as quality) while looking at things in the city a bit differently. They had a presentation from a fashion expert, watched An Affair to Remember, participated in a service project, ate breakfast at Norma's, had a private tour from a brilliant docent at the Met, attended a concert at Juilliard, learned about travel photography, consumed crepes, walked part of the Brooklyn Bridge and got to have dinner in a design studio in SoHo while learning about the nuances of design. Whew. My kids were well taken care of while I was out and about taking care of others' kids, but they felt that by attending the Met without them I had committed parentery (I just made that up -- instead of adultery... instead of an adult being unfaithful... a parent being unfaithful... oh, just bag it...). So with brand-spankin' new sketchbooks we headed over to the Met today so I could tell them "exactly" what the docent told me...
Our theme of the weekend was: "What is Beauty" (Beauty is Service, Beauty is Art, etc...), so the docent very obligingly used our theme as the structure of her presentation.
On our way to the elevators we stopped by a Kongo Power figure (I forgot to take a picture, but here's the link) -- a squat wooden fellow with pieces of metal sticking out of him. Our docent asked if he was a good representation of "beauty." Of course it was a trick question. She explained his purpose in a society: he was revered because of his ability to keep order. When somebody had done something wrong, he/she would go before this figure and make a pledge, or a promise, to not do that action again and then seal the pledge by driving in a piece of metal. This figure's job was to stand as a reminder for people to keep the peace -- he improved people's lives. The docent posited that because the figure was so admired he could be defined as beautiful.
Upstairs we started with Bougureau's work completed in 1873 -- the perfect example of academic art. Flawless and created with invisible brushstrokes, the academic artists used light and color to direct the eye of the viewer. With academic art there was usually a character-driven moral (in this case: don't spy on wood nymphs bathing, or they might find you out -- you filthy satyr -- and try to drag you into the water where you will drown because of your goat legs).
And then came the Impressionists. She took us to what she said was one of the Met's treasures: Monet's La Guenouillere. The Impressionists sought to capture, and in so doing ennoble, real life. Here was a scene like one we have all seen, with no one character standing out, but yet all characters being important in that strangers/those we share space with, are a part of our reality. Further: nature. Nature played a large role in the Impressionist movement. Huge, deep brushstrokes to capture the refraction and reflection of light and movement; not an idealization of water, but the actual feeling of water. This brought on a movement, and changed the way people thought about not only art, but beauty.
Degas. Beyond the sculpture are the paintings of ballerinas that Degas is so well known for. His ballerinas were not porcelain-perfect, but rather real gals hitching up their wrinkly tights. He captured them, not as ideals, but as real working people who were often damaged, or tired (and according to a movie I saw about Degas, he contributed to the working gals being damaged and tired). Cad or not, he was an artist that championed the beauty to be seen in the real details (said a different way: the turning away from the thought that beauty was something created, rather than captured). Like Uncle Walt (Whitman), he found sweat and the modern world art-worthy. (Note: his ability to carry the theme of humanity being reflected in details, and vise-versa, was brilliant -- In Dancers Practicing at the Barre you can see how the dancer on the right has the same lines as the watering can (which would have been there to keep down the dirt and dust).)
We stopped by to look at Van Gogh's Wheat Field With Cypresses and learned that cypresses represented eternal life and were often planted around cemeteries. A detail that Van Gogh would obviously have known, as he was obsessed with cypresses. In this picture he also painted wheat fields, which was symbolic of life with its many cycles/seasons, and poppies -- symbolic of the resurrection. Our docent pointed out the wheat being pushed by the wind to the right, and the olive trees being pushed to the left... and the cypresses standing tall and straight. The brush strokes, true to Van Gogh's style, are thick and deep. She said that the painting had a sculptural quality -- something that cannot be reproduced -- thus requiring trips to the museum to see the actual work in order to get a true sense of the movement and energy. Capturing life and vitality. And beauty.
By way of conclusion, our docent stopped us by a movie playing on a large screen. James Nares took thousands of photos of the streets of NYC and created an hour long movie of kids running, and people looking grumpy (or thuggish, or vacant, or amused, or ethereal), and signs, and piles, and garbage cans. The music, as well as the soothing rhythm of the stills sliding along as a video are mesmerizing. Our guide said that she was ending the tour with this exhibit because it was a contemporary take on the Impressionist ideal: art is about capturing and celebrating the small details of real life, as well as the eternal qualities of the natural world.
Thanks to my notes, I was able to give my kids a fairly comparable tour. They were satisfied, we got some soup and rolls at the cafeteria in the American Wing, did a couple of sketches, and then had to leave in order to make it to their last science class.
While the kids liked the science class, we will not miss the forever-long weekly schlep to the location. As if the subway trip wasn't long enough, in order to gain sunlight again we had to go up what we called "the escalator of despair." While I know that London's tube has some crazy long/steep escalators, for NYC this one was pretty despairing.
We became acquainted with Washington Heights, an opportunity that we probably would not have had otherwise. And the kids really liked the final activity of the class today -- dissecting owl pellets. We now how two random baggies of rodent bones hanging around the apartment. The small details of life.
Balzac asked: "What is art?" He answered: "Nature concentrated."
