A Saturday Afternoon Visiting the National Gallery of Art

Some Background

I'm remembering back to the fall of 1979 when I began graduate school at the University of Oregon and Prof. Richard Stein, in a Victorian Literature course, assigned us to read some art criticism by John Ruskin and we spent one day in class looking at slides of different paintings from the 19th century and Prof. Stein read passages from Ruskin about those paintings.

I'm fairly certain we looked at some Pre-Raphaelite paintings that day and I'm hoping, but I can't remember, if we looked at some of Turner's paintings.  The details don't stick with me.  But, in a general way, that day in class made paintings come alive to me in a way literature already had.  While I've forgotten what Ruskin was explaining in support of painters who were his contemporaries, I haven't lost the change in my own mindset that occurred that day when it comes to looking at paintings.

I was 25 years old when I took that class.  Back then, I dreamed of doing what writers I admired were doing, and, so, back then I imagined myself going to art galleries and writing about paintings just like Ruskin did, with a sweeping historical knowledge, a keen sense of aesthetics and beauty, and penetrating insight.

Ha!  That dream never came true.

What has come true, though, is that I love visiting galleries and I love looking at art, all art, from two-dimensional Medieval representations of the crucifixion to the baroque three-dimensional glorifying of the human figure that followed to the Shakespearean complexity of characters in Rembrandt's portraits to the landscapes of Reynolds to the slow disappearance of representational pictures as Impressionism and Cubism and Expressionism and the Abstract came into being.

So, today I strolled into the National Gallery of Art with the intention of going to an El Greco exhibit. I didn't know where the exhibit was and I didn't find out because I enjoy what happens when I wander semi-aimlessly around looking for what I think I want to see.

II.  Three Women

Today I wandered into the galleries holding French paintings of the latter part of the 19th century (and one Italian painting of the early 20th) and the paintings intoxicated me.

It's hard to put to words how or why the one nude portrait by Amedeo Madigliani and the two portraits, one nude, one not, by Auguste Renoir stirred me so.

I think what's going on is that I carry the plays of Shakespeare with me everywhere and I see the complexity of his portrayals of different characters with me everywhere and with this mindset I looked at these three women.  It wasn't really my desire that was stirred, but I was stirred, in the first painting, by the desire portrayed in the painting.  In Madigliani's "Nude on a Blue Cushion", I experience the woman as a more erotic than seductive, sure of herself, as much full of desire as desirous. Madigliani did not represent her in a photographic way, but with shape and color that brings the pleasure she takes in her desire alive.

Renoir's nude, "Bather Arranging Her Hair" is painted with a soft focus, as if Renoir were photographing with a soft focus lens.  The painting is more dreamy, more idealized, but not a fantasy. The bather's clothes strewn about her keep the portrait grounded in the world and her concentration on fixing her hair means that she is oblivious to being seen and so her face does not communicate to the viewer the way Madigliani's does. In fact, as viewers, we might be voyeurs. I'm not titillated by being a voyeur. What I do enjoy is the sensuous roundness of the painting's composition. It is as if she is painted within an oval and within this roundness is the circle of clothes around her, the roundness of her figure, and the round shape her arms form around her head.

Renoir's other painting against this wall is entitled, "Odalisque, Woman of Algiers".  An odalisque is a concubine, a member of a harem.  Renoir, much more than in the bather picture, paints this woman with depth and complexity.  She is voluptuous, especially in the folds of the various colors and fine fabrics she wears and her pose is sensuous, especially her legs, slightly opened.  Unlike the bather, we make eye contact with this woman and all that is physically voluptuous about her is in tension with her look of fatigue and of contempt.  If we were looking to see a portrait of an exotic, sexual concubine, Renoir subverts that expectation, This woman is at once portrayed as living in physical luxury and is hardly enriched by it, but is rather weary of what she does and who she is.

III. Burnt Out Ends of Smoky Days

I thought of the woman in "Odalisque" as I spent time with the world of prostitutes and barrooms in the handful of Toulouse-Lautrec paintings on view.  I stared at these pictures and the first thing that came to mind was that I was experiencing a painter who, in my mind, is as good as Rembrandt in his ability to reveal human character through the face.  Much like the woman in "Obalisque", the women who populate Toulouse-Lautrec's world are cynical, burnt out, participants in the world of sex and booze they occupy, but weary of it, and scornful of the men who buy and sell them.  Lines from T. S. Eliot's "Preludes" sprang to mind:

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps	5
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,	10
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

In Eliot's metaphors of "ends" and "scraps", and "withered leaves", in "broken blinds" and "lonely cab-horse steams and stamps",  I have a pictorial way of experiencing the the death of spirit, the hollow, soulless life of these characters in Toulouse-Lautrec's sordid world.  Even when there's vitality, as in "Marcelle Lender Dancing the Bordello in 'Chilperic'", the vitality is a scene in a staged operetta, and, to my eye, the performer, Marecelle Lender's face is full of ambiguity and uncertainty, even as she dance sensuously.  What unsettles me in the painting is the man (or the character) to her right, as we view the picture.  I don't know the story of "Chilperic", but I think the man looks like a pander sizing up Marcelle Linder and his gaze might be why she cannot fully enjoy the dance, but is dubious about her performance.

IV.  Tiny Dancer

It's performance that dominates the current Edward Degas exhibit called "Tiny Dancer".  Degas was especially interested in painting scenes of ballet dancers behind the scenes, slumping in fatigue, receiving instruction in ballet classes, getting ready to go on.  In one painting, he captures this variety in a wide angle shot that I coveted, wishing I could use my camera in the same way.  On picture especially puzzled and thrilled me.  I enjoy non-realistic paintings and "Four Dancers" portrays its subjects abstracted from the studio or the stage.  It is as if they have become members of nature, their tutus looking like bunches of leaves on trees and they are in circular motion in the foreground with in front of a hedge with, what?, boulders?  haystacks? something in the background.  It is a beautiful Impressionist painting and I don't know if Degas was painting a dream or what.  Maybe it's playful, giving us the swirl of dancers as if they were being swirled by winds whistling through trees.

I don't know.

(I just read they are preparing to go on stage.  That means what I called the natural world, stylized, is a stage set, a painted background.  Ha!  Okay.  It's fun to read what's actually in the painting side by side with what I experienced looking at it!)

V.  Darkness in America 

I went back to looking for the El Greco exhibit and wandered into a room of American painters from the early part of the 20th century. I ended my visit among these American painters.

I'd heard of two of the ones who knocked me out and one of them I'd forgotten about and one I didn't know at all.

The first painter I was familiar with:  Edward Hopper.  However, I hadn't previously seen his painting "Cape Cod Evening".  At first glance, I thought it was an idyllic scene that Norman Rockwell might have painted.  In the foreground, in the midst of a grain field, is a handsome border collie and in the background a man is sitting on the porch , looking as if he's beckoning the dog to come back to the lovely house.  A woman (is it his wife?) stands by.  Upon closer examination, there's something cold going on between the husband and wife, and, what looked an American Dream scene, is really a portrait of emotional distance.  Her arms are crossed and whatever pleasure the man is taking in the dog, she's feeling none of it.  Then there are the trees to the left of the house.  Rather than verdant, they are blue, shooting melancholy through the house.  And, lastly, the dog ignores the man.  The dog's head is turned away, as if wanting nothing to do with the alienation back there.

A few months ago, the Andrew Wyeth painting in this room was a part of an exhibit of Wyeth paintings, all painted from inside a room looking out a window.  I took some pictures at my mother's house last month from inside her TV room.  The window was closed, so unlike this picture, the lacy curtain wasn't blowing into the house.  But, I owe the concept and what ever was good about those photos to Wyeth's "Wind from the Sea". "Wind from the Sea" is gorgeous and, in this room, is a break from the other darker pictures along with being a fun study in perspective.

The last pictures I had the energy to absorb were by two artists I can't remember ever knowing about, John Sloan and George Bellows, although I am very familiar with two of Bellows' boxing pictures -- I just never knew who painted them.

Sloan's single painting in this room, "The City from Greenwich Village", continues the room's realist them.  Ever since I visited NYC back in 2012, I've been following scores of photographers who take pictures in Manhattan and a favorite subject is the Flatiron Building.  To a person, everyone of these photographers' pictures presents a romantic view of the unique architecture of the Flatiron, presenting it as one of NYC's coolest buildings.  From Joan Sloan's perspective, the Flatiron is a grimy pile, standing in a benighted, dark Manhattan, hardly grand, hardly distinguishable from the other griminess as viewed from The Village.

The George Bellows painting I had seen many times without know who painted it depicts the violence of the stunning moment when Luis Firpo sent Jack Dempsey flying out of the ring in the first round of their championship bout in 1923, a fight Dempsey won. This painting is not in the National Gallery, but another boxing painting is, "Both Members of this Club"  Painted in 1909, it portrays a boxing ring in a fight club as an integrated place.  Like the Firpo/Dempsey painting, the moment captured is violent. The white boxer's face is bloodied, possibly by a head butt, and the energy of both boxers is violent, forceful.  Moreover, the crowd watching the fight is delirious, glorying in the blood and muscular mayhem of the fight.

Bellows paintings of New York City do not flatter Gotham City. They focus on crowded living conditions, social inequality, chaos, and the pressures endured by the poor.  Like Hopper and Sloan, Bellows' paintings contest the idea of the American Dream and after I spent time with these American Realists, I found the El Greco room, took a quick glance at the dark paintings with their emaciated figures and often ghoulish settings and decided it was time to do other things in our nation's capital.