Last night, I stood in the presence of art. Art. Capitol A Art. My nose was inches from a Picasso ceramic. I put my hand on the frame of a Matisse. The room hummed and thrummed with energy, with life, with beauty and statement and meaning and history and emotion. This is why people create, isn't it? So that all that life inside them gets transferred to some other vessel, and when they die, some part of them is left behind. And when a group of art is gathered in a room, the room sings as if the artists were there, having a party.
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| Madame Pampadour, Henri Matisse. |
We were just a group of people at a holiday party. There was wine and beer and food and laughter. But the party was in the former gentleman's homestead of Mr. And Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley, and still houses the collection of work Mrs. Lynde Bradley amassed that has not been donated or loaned to museums.
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| Vase, Pablo Picasso |
It is an amazing, incredible, uplifting, giddy feeling: to be in the presence of art, of Art, without glass or sensors or security personnel watching silently and with hawks' eyes. It is a rare thing, to be able to reach out and touch and feel the buzzing from the canvas, the cool porcelain regal and domineering and utterly self-contained. I could have spent hours, days, months in that room. I could have gently placed my fingers on each and every piece and slid it carefully from its place in the rack made of two-by-fours. I could look at each of those paintings, each of the Toulouse-Latrec lithographs, forever.
Every moment is eternity in the presence of art. In the presence of Art.
But, as I was discussing with a fellow adventurer prior to being overawed by Mrs. Bradley's collection, living with art is a very different experience than visiting it in a museum or a gallery. There is a subtle pressure, when you go out of your way for something, to experience it fully or to appreciate it all, and immediately. It's the Mona Lisa syndrome: visiting the Louvre inevitably means a trip to see the Mona Lisa, even though the painting is small, and the crush of people around it so thick and intense that you don't get to look at it for more than a moment before the tide of humanity carries you away. And this generally leaves one with a sense of ennui about the whole experience: "All this, and just for that? Sigh."
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| Treasures at the Lynden Sculpture Garden. |
But living with art is different. Matisse in your living room can be sat and stared at for hours, just you and it and the quiet of your home. It can be absorbed, in slow sips rather than great gulps. It can be taken in fully.
And, Matisse in your living room can be ignored. It can be pushed to the back of consciousness while you read, or entertain, or play the piano, or eat a midnight snack, or chat, or write, or whatever it is you like to do in your living room. And then, at some point, you look up from what you were doing, and Matisse is still there, and you are struck anew, and you want to devour all that beauty again.
I want to live with art.
Maybe you will meet a guy named Art.
ReplyDeleteAs long as he's like Arthur Bach, I'm cool with that idea.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Matisse in your living room denies that particular Matisse to everyone else.
ReplyDeleteLeonardo in the Louvre denies Leonardo to a huge group of people that can't get to Paris.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that having a piece of art for yourself is inherently selfish, which seems to be the implication you're making? Maybe I'm misreading it; Lord knows I often do.
But, as a very general principle, I don't have a problem with personal collections. No art is ever accessible to or shared with every being on the planet. All art has a limited audience.
Owning anything for yourself is inherently selfish by definition, isn't it? Not that we don't do it anyway. It seems to me that great art, influential art, belongs to the world. Part of the point of a private collection is not mere ownership, it's the act of making the pieces exclusive; their denial to the masses is an intrinsic part of the package.
ReplyDeleteThe comparison isn't quite right -- Leonardo in the Louvre is theoretically accessible to anyone with enough desire to see him. The possibility exists, where in a private collection that possibility often does not exist. Besides, there's something to be said for art that is accessible to a large chunk of the population, as opposed to art which is accessible to one person only.
What is "Important Art?" Matisse is an important part of art history and development, but does that mean that every single thing he ever produced ought to be on public display as an Important Piece of Art? What about Durer? What about Warhol?
ReplyDeleteI can see that my comparison is not perfect, but I still don't have a problem with private collections. Maybe it's just because I want one, or because I am inherently more selfish than you, but I think that owning a small piece of something important like Matisse's place in art history is not equatable to denying the world at large the entirety of that history or that importance.
Important art -- art that has made a significant, obvious cultural impact. And perhaps the impact of a particular piece matters, rather than simply the artist -- the Venus de Milo in a private collection is to my mind almost criminal. A preliminary sketch? Perhaps more acceptable, but I still don't like the idea of necessarily exclusive collections because they seem to me to engage in a sort of elitism -- "I have this and you don't."
ReplyDeleteI believe in public museums: a proliferation of private collections simply results in a cultural 1%.
I believe in public museums, too. But I don't think that *a* Matisse in a private collection is comparable to the Venus de Milo in a private collection, or the Mona Lisa in a private collection.
ReplyDeleteFurther, there's a question of length of perspective. Mrs. Bradley, a quintessential one percenter (and someone whose politcs I abhor) was a prolific private collector during her lifetime. The bulk of her (privately amassed) collection is now, after her death, on public view at MAM and at the Lynden, with selected other works in other museums across the country.
Should we not, as individuals, buy art from artists for ourselves ever? How would the artists live, and eat, and work, if the only buyers of art were museums? By assembling a private collection, she was essentially subsidizing the artist, giving the creators of those pieces the financial backing to keep going. And now the world at large has decided which of those artists are worth of being displayed in a museum, and the rest languish at Lynden where they are rotated through the house throughout the year.
The Bradley's are elitist one percenters. I don't disagree at all. But one, she did provide a sort of service for artists while the world made up it's mind about them, and as long as we have money, artists will need and be short of it.
But I'm also uncomfortable with the idea that no one should ever buy a piece of art ever. I have several pieces of original art that I've bought over the years; if one of those artists turns out to be a Matisse, am I selfish and wrong for having it?
Here's a better concept of "important art." Some artistic creations become iconic; they cease to be owned by just one person or group, but become owned by the culture at large.
ReplyDeleteOk, but that takes TIME. And private collectors essentially buy time from artists while the world sort out what is iconic and what is not. And that's an important function, because without some kind of subsidy, the production of art would drop off dramatically and the world would stop progressing.
ReplyDeleteYou might be selfish and wrong for keeping it to yourself, if it were truly great art with the legitimate potential to inspire the world.
ReplyDeleteI don't have an issue with people buying art -- my issue is with major, important works kept in private collections.
And you've identified the real problem -- a world in which only the wealthy can be patrons of great art is exactly what I'm reacting against.
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ReplyDeleteAnd I guess I think that even I, right now, in my romantic poverty, am and can be a patron of art. I can't buy a Matisse or a Picasso. But Matisse and Picasso are both now dead, and their work has been judged by the world already, so I don't really have an interest in owning anything by them. I'd rather fall in love with something, buy it even on my shoestring budget, and then later that artist becomes Matisse.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, gallery owners play a role in the subsidy of art, but I would say not as fluidly as private collectors. Gallery owners keep one eye on trends in creation, and one eye on trends in purchase, and they are looking to turn a profit on that which they promote.
The private collector has no motive other than aesthetics, statement, emotional reaction. The buy because THEY like, because THEY appreciate, because THEY feel, not because they think that lots of other someone else's will like and appreciate and feel. I find the private collector to be a more honest transaction of genuine merit.
See, and I find the private collector, or at least most of those I've encountered, to be more concerned with *owning* than aesthetics.
ReplyDeleteAnd that is one of the things about Mrs. Bradley that I respect, and give due homage to, regardless of any of my other feelings on her. She was a collector of aesthetics. She had the money to get anything, but she bought what SHE liked with few exceptions, and she regretted each of those exceptions publicly.
ReplyDeleteAll the other "collectors" I know are too poor to own anything that would be worth bragging about, so they, too, are collectors of aesthetics and not status.