An epic month-long re-organization of my files unearthed several unpublished posts from ancient times…like this one from January 5, 2005
Bauhaus to Bartley’s Burger Cottage, my aesthetic and gustatory senses are overloaded. Today’s pt at large adventure covered three square blocks of Harvard Square that house treasures of art history and one award-winning college hangout that’s in no danger of being put out of business by some upstart yuppie establishment selling concept coffee and croissant confections.
I don’t recommend this concentrated tour for those without sufficient random access memory to hold, categorize, and analyze mammoth amounts of color, shape, text and texture. My three hour tour was the equivalent of a three credit college course in art history. Images, bits of information, historical data, impressions, conversations with informed docents are spilling out from the edges of my brain like the lettuce on the Bartley’s Best Gourmet char grilled hamburger I ordered for lunch (that hamburger, seven ounces of choice ground beef, ground daily, could be the subject of an essay all by itself).
My first tour began with a 12:15 pm “Art Encounter” in one of the Fogg Art Museum’s modern art rooms. A museum docent, a middle aged woman with specious opinions about art, parked us in front of wall sized James Brooks painting titled ‘Triptych’. We five observers shared our interpretations of Brook’s painting. Being merciful, I’ll spare you the details of our musings but the painting is actually fun to look at.
Muted primary colors, a sort of settled organic composition which had a recognizable flow and was a counterpoint to the other abstract impressionist paintings in the room which were much more rigid, geometric, and linear. I didn’t know that artists could be anal as well as organic; there was alot of primary colored left brained painting by Morris Louis and Ken Noland. The paint surface makes a difference. Pollock, de Kooning, Klein, and these guys discovered that unsized canvas absorbs paint, affecting the visual result. Hans Hoffman, who painted in NYC and Provincetown, a precursor of these painters, was one of the first to use unsized canvas.
After thirty minutes of this, I was becoming aesthetically inebriated. I succumbed to a huge Jackson Pollock (1902-1950) piece that was framed in the doorway leading to the next gallery. The mixed media piece about 3’ wide, 10’ high, on canvas stapled onto black ground and framed in simple black was a gorgeous implosion of spattered, dripped, caked paint. Who knew black and beige could be so elegant?
Total trivia: acrylic paint was discovered in 1957.
I ricocheted from the Fogg to the Busch Reisinger right next door, where I bumped into another docent. This lady knew the history of German abstract impressionism like guys from South Boston know the names and batting averages of every Red Sox player for the last century.
This next paragraph is my memory of her spiel. Germans may be evolved in design and mechanics but they were slow on the uptake of European impressionism. Manet got that ball rolling in 1863 with his painting subject matter. The Germany psyche was not ready to indulge in color rhapsodies like French. They needed to have a social component to their new art, depict angst and social concerns more consciously than the French.
German painters arrived in Paris in about 1888, though, and began to catch up. Louis Corinth’s painting, a big canvas portrait of sculptor Friederich, 1904, shows brush strokes, classic pose, the man being the controller of his art, implied by the small sculpture he holds in his hand. Note the interplay of light on the man’s back, his strength, dignity, and Roman nose.
Parked next to this is Corinth’s painting of Salome looking at the head of St John the Baptist, the Salome theme familiar to many Germans from the Straus opera. The left side of the painting has the traditional Madonna arc, but the middle is pure budding Salome, teen aged and nubile, luminous pink nippled breasts, full red lips...and a power to be reckoned with.
“Now you will look at me John,” she says as she reaches into the basket holding his just severed head and opens his closed eyelid. Some interpret this as a comment on the movement of women’s rights in Germany at the time (divorce laws were being loosened). I am personally relieved that the women’s movement in America featured bra burning as opposed to beheading in order to make a point.
Max Bechmann was an impressive German painter, writer, shaker and mover. His self-portrait, assured, standing in full formal attire, implies an artist’s importance in society. His broad brush strokes show the classic observer. The composition flows left to right from opaque to full light. Is this a comment on the nature of the society he observes?
Around the corner and I see the influence of Walter Gropius. In the late 1920s, early thirties, he early founded the Bauhaus movement which spread to architecture, furniture, painting. He was the Henry Ford of art, wanted to make art and aesthetics, an elevated sense of design, more available to the common person, a departure from the strong baroque influences earlier in the century.
The chrome and canvas Breuer chair on display there could be mass produced.
You can see its offspring in modern furniture stores today.
Ah, and there’s a painting by Feininger, who, I discovered, was a boy wonder musician who abandoned music in favor of art, which overwhelmed him when he traveled to Europe to study music.
At this point, my brain cells were close to melting with information overload. It was time to visit Bartley’s Gourmet Burger Cottage on Mass Ave across from the ‘yard’. At 1:30 pm on January 5, 2005, I tasted a hamburger that ascended the heights of hamburger heaven. It is the measure by which I will assess ground sirloin for the rest of time. I will create a paean to that establishment in another edition of pt at large.
Fortified with red meat, I walked two blocks to the Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Target: Marks of Enlightenment, Traces of Devotion: Japanese calligraphy. The main surprise of this exhibit is the demonstration of how Japanese calligraphy evolved during the centuries from extremely disciplined to free flowing and artistic.
I conclude with a poem from the exhibit, complementing the inclement day I ventured out, an aesthete amongst the snowflakes.
Muso Soseki 1275-1351, Japan
From heaven fall icy petals;
In the sky not a spot of blue remains.
A dusting of jade covers the ground
And buries the blue mountains.
The sun rises over the mountain peak,
The chill pierces my bones.
Silence prevails.
Comments