I don' usually add to this blog on a Tuesday, but this week I'll give you an expanded schedule, in order to celebrate the fulfillment of one of my New Years' resolutions for 2008 -- I had said that I would watch an opera at the Met while wearing a tuxedo. Check.
There was much else to my weekend in Manhattan too. There was the Frick collection, for example. Let me start with that.
Who was Henry Clay Frick? He was the enterprising fellow who in 1871 created the Frick Coke Company. It consisted of a beehive oven that turned coal into the coke used in turn to produce steel. Years later Frick entered into a partnership with Andrew Carnegie, because Carnegie needed a secure supply of coke for his expanding steel manufacturing empire.
The business history of that time is fascinating, but let us return to his eye for art, which would seem to have been superb.
The Frick Collection, somewhat (though it appears only sporadically) updated by his heirs remains HQ-ed where he wanted it to be, and is filled with a variety of works in many media from many countries and periods, including great works from the Italian renaissance up to those of the impressionists and post-impressionists of his own era.
One of the first paintings we saw when we walked into the place was, as it happens, a Dutch baroque work, a Vermeer that I have described on this blog before.
The painting I have in mind is "Officer and Laughing Girl" and I first encountered a reproduction thereof as the cover art for a book, Vermeer's Hat, which I read earlier this year.
I found the painting quite compelling, even as cover art, chiefly because of the map. Behind the man and woman seated at a table, and just above their heads from our perspective, there is a large wall map. I stared at that for an hour the first time I saw the book, trying to figure out what part of the world the map depicts.
Eventually, I got it. Part of the problem is that the orientation of the map treats WEST as "up." We are so accustomed in the early 21st century to seeing the north edge of a map as up that this is literally disorientating. Dis-occidentalating too.
The other problem is that Vermeer has painted the land as blue and the water as brown, rather than the reverse.
Once a viewer has made both of these adjustments, he can see that this is a map of Holland.
So I knew of this painting, and had even discussed it recently with the friend who was my companion as we walked into the Frick building. (She had used it to tweak me about my literalness, "are painters allowed to do that???") But I had no idea of its provenance, and was delighted to see it.
Indeed, nearly too delighted. I was excitedly pointing out the features of the painting that fascinate me and, in my absorption in the moment, my pointing finger must have gotten a bit too close to the painting. Some sort of alarm went off and a security guard asked me -- nicely but firmly -- to step back.
I hope the readers of this blog enjoy the painting too. And not just in the tiny pixellated form above. Get thee to Manhattan.
Still here? Okay. Anyway, I'll say something more about the Frick tomorrow and then on Thursday and Friday turn to the other elements of my trip. Including the aforementioned opera.
3 comments:
She had used it to tweak me about my literalness, "are painters allowed to do that???"
I don't know that you are guilty of literalness. North is not literally up (imagine looking at the earth from somewhere in outer space; you'd have no perspective from which to identify its top or bottom). Nor, except perhaps in some light, is water literally blue or land literally brown (Monet, with his multiple views of the same objects at different times of day, should have taught us that.) Vermeer, therefore, even if he were seeking to paint a realistic map, may have justifiably painted the map as he did. It may even be (I don't know) that the convention in his day was to place west at the top and paint land blue and water brown. Our differing practice today, after all, is only a convention.
On another matter, in the same neighborhood as the Frick (just east of Central Park) are the Neue Galerie (of German and Austrian paintings) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Frick and the Neue Galerie are small, manageable museums (you can see each in its entirety in a single visit), whereas the Met is so overwhelming, that, if my time is limited, I prefer to take in the two small ones.
Our differing practice today, after all, is only a convention.
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Homer's epithet for the sea was "wine dark."
I'm never seen wine that reminded me of the sea. I hope never to see it.
But the question is whether the sea's color has ever reminded you of wine.
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