Adventures at the Nelson-Atkins, and a son's penance

El Greco, The Penitent Magdalene, 1580-85. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. Click the image to enlarge it. Image found here.

Just a quick note to post this new-to-me painting I saw at the Nelson-Atkins this past Saturday, to say in addition that the newly-reopened American art galleries are truly worth the trip there all by themselves if your tastes run that way, and to relate the following tale as further confirmation of my theory that you can learn an awful lot about a person you thought you knew well if you take him/her to an art museum.

Peter, one of my students, brought a friend with him. There at the museum, this fellow seemed interested in being there, but I thought at the time that perhaps he was just being polite for the instructor's benefit. Besides: Kansas City was just a stop for them; after they'd seen what I wanted them to see, they'd be shoving off for Manhattan KS. But tonight in class, as those of us who were there performed a post-mortem on the trip, I asked Peter what his friend really thought about the museum. Peter said, "He actually called his mom from the museum, told her where he was, and said, 'The next time we're in Kansas City, I want to come back here to visit.'" Peter said he was dumbfounded, that he had no idea that his friend was even interested in art, much less so interested that he'd do something like call his mom right then and there about it. Bear in mind: these guys are, to all outward appearances, your typical early-twenties males, alternating easily between apathy and jokiness (itself a sort of apathy, as deployed by Kids These Days, now that I think about it).

And yet.

To witness moments like this, a tank and a half of gas for the round trip is a small price to pay.

I have mentioned in this blog in the past that things like this happen all the time on these trips. My favorite version of this story is from a couple of trips ago, when one of my students was accompanied by his father. The dad talked with his son at real length about several works; it was fun to watch. When I mentioned all this to my student, he said that he'd never before heard his dad talk about art, had never known that he was even interested in art. My favorite version, but it's also personally poignant: when my brother and I were much younger, my dad liked to take the family to the U. of Texas' art museum on occasion. I confess to not having especially fond memories of those trips. And now that my father's been dead for almost 30 years and, now, I've developed a real fondness for museum-going, it'd be really wonderful to roam a museum with him, to talk with him about what we're seeing, to tell him that I finally see what the big deal is, that it took a college education (which he insisted on) and a few years, but I get it now. Finally.

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A note for Kansas City-area folks

Caravaggio, John the Baptist. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Image found here.

This is short notice, I realize, but I'll be at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City this Saturday with my Intro. to Humanities class. We'll be looking at paintings (we'll be there chiefly to see the pre-20th-century European and American collections), but you and yours are more than welcome to tag along.

We'll be meeting at the parking garage entrance to the museum around 10:00. You can't miss me: I'll be the one who doesn't look especially professorial.

I hope to see some of you there.

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The Architect's Brother: Photographs by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

From top: Kingdom (image found here); Pollenation (image found here); The Passage (image found here).

Monograph

Website

The man's name, we will learn from the helpful little cards accompanying these pictures, is Everyman. He is almost always alone. In other pictures, we see him trying to fly by tying himself to a dozen or so large birds, cultivating a field of light bulbs, clinging to a pole high above the clouds and using what appears to be a sextant. We never see the Architect referred to in the series title, so we never learn whether, in these pictures, Everyman is faithfully executing his brother's vision, whether, if he is, that vision is some sort of joke, or whether Everyman is striking out on his own as he pursues his own peculiar vision (and sure, you may read that last in all its various senses). As we look, we see that the means at Everyman's disposal seem hopelessly inadequate to his apparent ends--humorously, quixotically so, but not despairingly so. As the gallery guide puts it, "The emphasis is on the doing of the action, not the outcome. There is hopeful reassurance in [Everyman's] constant and varied attempts to right seemingly overwhelming wrongs" (italics in the original). Another way of putting it: These pictures aren't religious, but they are spiritual. They are something like fables of faith in action: a surface-seeming futility but, beneath, an affirmation of the good that is working in anticipation of the Good.

The actual making of these pictures is worth quoting from the guide in full:

[T]he ParkeHarrisons printed their photographs from large paper negatives made by cutting and pasting a variety of images together. The underlying mechanics of this technique--including the seams between individual images--are carefully painted out in the negative. A photographic print is then made, which is often painted with a layer of varnish or beeswax. This genuinely original technique, combined with their elaborate process of set construction, crosses many creative boundaries. The result is a fascinating hybrid of sculpture, performance, painting and photography.

These pictures, along with a selection from another series called Gray Dawn, photographs in color that also employ the Everyman figure, are part of a show by the ParkeHarrisons called Restoration that's on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art till February 8th. The Mrs. and I went the museum last Saturday on a whim (we hadn't been since the new wing opened last summer), and while we were disappointed that the photography gallery dedicated to the museum's permanent collection of pictures seems awfully small (only a couple dozen works are on display at any one time), we felt really fortunate to have happened onto these pictures. Those of you in the area who haven't yet seen them should do so.

Added bonus: Robert ParkeHarrison (who is the Everyman in the photos) is originally from the Kansas City area. Who says the heartland isn't fertile ground for cool--and thought-provoking, even inspiring--weirdness like these pictures?

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Rembrandt, Portrait of a Young Man

[Note: This post will be familiar to some of you; it originally appeared at my now-moribund blog, Admiring Baroque Art. I've been finding myself thinking about it of late, and I thought I would re-post it here. I hope no one minds too much.]

In its gallery, it is not front and center on the wall directly opposite the entrance, as you might expect. It hangs on one of the shorter walls, and then not even in the center of that wall. It's in a semi-shadowy corner, in fact, the sitter's white collar being the first thing to catch the visitor's eye there in its penumbra. (Note: the actual painting is not quite this dark.) You almost have to be looking for it to see it: an odd thing to say about a museum's choice in hanging a Rembrandt.

As a general rule, portraits leave me a bit cold. I don't know these people; why should they hold my attention? Of course, there are exceptions, and those I will happily stand in front of, trying to get to know them--it is, after all, as though they have introduced themselves to me, rather than I to them. I think that's the initial paradox of this painting for me: off in the corner like a wallflower in the Dutch Baroque gallery, as though intimidated by the older, more-worldly man in the 3/4-length Hals in the same room, it's Rembrandt's young man that I want to spend time in front of. The Hals, as good as it is, is dead to me--just another portrait. No offense, sir. Even so, the intensity of the young man's gaze is such that I have to move away from it for a while and then come back to it.

Why is that?

As you can see, information is sketchy as to the sitter's identity or his precise station in life. Whoever this man is, he is just starting out on the adventure called adulthood. Not so his painter, though: Rembrandt would be dead 3 years after painting this portrait. By this point in his life, he knows a thing or two about how to get his viewer to pay attention even to someone who has yet to make his way in the world, at the expense of his more-accomplished companions.

Part of the explanation is "just" technique, which the Nelson-Atkins' website mentions:

Rembrandt has used the butt end of his brush to make incisions in the still-wet paint of the hair to provide a richer sense of texture.

This is certainly true, but it's not what I'm drawn to when I approach the painting for a closer look. What I notice is that Rembrandt also used that butt-end to create a slight depression in his subject's pupils, giving them a 3-dimensional quality. It's the sitter's white collar that initially catches my eye; it's his eyes that hold it.

Tiny wells, "just" minute displacements of pigments on the canvas, nevertheless draw me into the sitter's mind and heart and not just look at his face. I have no choice but to look at this fellow and take seriously his steady, quiet, confident optimism. Whether student, graduate or aspiring artist, Rembrandt certainly seems to take him seriously as well.

But here's where looking at this painting becomes not merely an aesthetic experience but a personal one for me. As so many have said regarding Rembrandt's self-portraits, the directness, the honesty of this fellow's gaze has the effect of not just regarding the viewer but implicitly putting a question to him/her: "And you? What have you to say about your spent time?" A good question, and one that, depending on the day, can be an uncomfortable one to consider. You can't rebut this fellow: he will always be quietly confident, optimistic, damn him. His life remains perpetually ahead of him. But what about yours?

What else to do, then, but promise to amend your life?

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