Gaughin on display
We went to the Gaughin exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum on Monday. Our Christmas splurge was a year's membership, discounted for the holidays. There is a free Thursday once a month for the general museum, which we can take advantage of, but I figured out that with the special exhibit fees--which are never waived--if we went at least twice during the year we would come out ahead. And we could pick any day, any time. We used to do the same with the Pacific Science Center; if we took the family, we would buy a membership and make sure we came again before it expired, and then resist all blandishments to renew it. Until we decided it was time to do it again.
So there is one Monday a month for members only, the museum is otherwise closed on Mondays. Tickets for members are free, discounted parking was provided for, crowds are lighter, and off we went. Despite Hubby's claims to all and sundry that "my wife is picking me up and dragging me off to this," (someday I am going to decide that he's really not worth the aggravation) we both wanted to go, and we enjoyed seeing it.
They had created a very comprehensive exhibit, including not just works from all the periods of his art, but works and artifacts from the islands where he encountered new visual ideas, so that you could see how his surroundings and travels influenced and changed his painting. Putting the famous and less famous works in context was fascinating, and much more illuminating. I left feeling that I had a better education in this part of art history than when I walked in. I had a framework for Gaughin in terms of what was happening in Europe, too. He definitely was a pivot point, and his use of color in a new context was stunning.
As a human being, however, he left something to be desired. Ever searching for the most "unspoiled" life, he took his family first to the isolation of Brittany in France, and then abandoned them for the South Seas. Even there, he was not satisfied. He wanted to be the only emissary of European civilization wherever he was, but he was coming in too late for that. He tried to retreat ever farther, and roamed to other islands, but since human nature is actually always in evidence, there was no such thing as a perfect place. He tried to agitate politically, never settling in.
It seemed to me as we finished and left for home, that this was a man who never learned to count his blessings. He had gifts, and he left a legacy, but only as it was divorced from who he was in the conduct of his life. He never understood, or he decided to forget, what it means to have one true love and nourish a family through the years. If he wandered and rebelled over the course of many, many years, maybe he was unhappy because he was looking to the wrong things to fill the empty places, to heal the discontent. The emptiness was spiritual; it always is.
Being a grownup means that you have to do the gruntwork as well as the glory work. Some of life is going to be ordinary. It means knowing that nothing really replaces having people to love who love you too, and that it takes work, just like anything else. Talent and human caring are not either/or qualities.
Someday he, like all of us, will stand before God and be judged as a human being. I'm not sure that he will come out very well. Our gifts are given to be part of our lives, not separate from them. How are we using ours? It's something to think about.
So there is one Monday a month for members only, the museum is otherwise closed on Mondays. Tickets for members are free, discounted parking was provided for, crowds are lighter, and off we went. Despite Hubby's claims to all and sundry that "my wife is picking me up and dragging me off to this," (someday I am going to decide that he's really not worth the aggravation) we both wanted to go, and we enjoyed seeing it.
They had created a very comprehensive exhibit, including not just works from all the periods of his art, but works and artifacts from the islands where he encountered new visual ideas, so that you could see how his surroundings and travels influenced and changed his painting. Putting the famous and less famous works in context was fascinating, and much more illuminating. I left feeling that I had a better education in this part of art history than when I walked in. I had a framework for Gaughin in terms of what was happening in Europe, too. He definitely was a pivot point, and his use of color in a new context was stunning.
As a human being, however, he left something to be desired. Ever searching for the most "unspoiled" life, he took his family first to the isolation of Brittany in France, and then abandoned them for the South Seas. Even there, he was not satisfied. He wanted to be the only emissary of European civilization wherever he was, but he was coming in too late for that. He tried to retreat ever farther, and roamed to other islands, but since human nature is actually always in evidence, there was no such thing as a perfect place. He tried to agitate politically, never settling in.
It seemed to me as we finished and left for home, that this was a man who never learned to count his blessings. He had gifts, and he left a legacy, but only as it was divorced from who he was in the conduct of his life. He never understood, or he decided to forget, what it means to have one true love and nourish a family through the years. If he wandered and rebelled over the course of many, many years, maybe he was unhappy because he was looking to the wrong things to fill the empty places, to heal the discontent. The emptiness was spiritual; it always is.
Being a grownup means that you have to do the gruntwork as well as the glory work. Some of life is going to be ordinary. It means knowing that nothing really replaces having people to love who love you too, and that it takes work, just like anything else. Talent and human caring are not either/or qualities.
Someday he, like all of us, will stand before God and be judged as a human being. I'm not sure that he will come out very well. Our gifts are given to be part of our lives, not separate from them. How are we using ours? It's something to think about.
What's that line? Anywhere I go, I take me with me. I agree that he was an unhappy man.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, I did kind of drag him to the Picasso last year. They WERE cutting the special exhibit fee in half on the free day, and I thought it worth doing for our education, because we weren't likely to see such a comprehensive show again. It was valuable and I liked more of it than Hubby did. The trick is never wait until the last free day of the run, it's mobbed enough on the earlier ones. We went all the way to Portland to see a huge Monet show one year, but we had other reasons for being down there, it was part of a three day trip that started at the ocean.
ReplyDeleteI am my father's child, I jump at the museums and try to expose my children to history as culture. I love to see how many ways there are to look at the world.
Come visit: the Stanford Cantor Art Center is open, after many many years of being closed after the Loma Prieta quake. Enough funding came through that it finally got rebuilt. There's a Rodin garden, and even ancient Egyptian things that the original Stanfords had found interesting.
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