Visiting the Frick Again

The last time I visited the Frick was to view the tiny and exquisite Memling exhibition. This time I saw his "Portrait of a Man" again, and still loved it as much. (I have the postcard of the Man stuck to the inside of my locker in school.) It gripped me far more than the Holbein, Gainsborough and Whistler portraits in the same collection. The other portrait that exercised comparable power over me was an Ingres, some noble woman or another, looking pert yet pensive. The mirror behind her displayed the care with which her hair was tied up with ribbon.

The highlights of this visit were the Turners: "Antwerp" and "Cologne." The colors are irridescent, whether they are the white surf of waves, or the golden-green sheen of sunlight hitting a river. No wonder the Impressionists pissed their pants when they saw his paintings. But even his calmest paintings convey the force of restrained power, whereas the Impressionists still motion in dabs of paint.

The Vermeers were not as captivating as before. They struck me as, dare I say it, formulaic. Windows on the left letting in light that bathes dark interiors with an unearthly shine. The one that held my attention this time was "Mistress and Maid." We see only a sliver of the mistress' face since it is turned towards the maid behind her. The maid's face, however, is seen fully, as she hands a letter to her mistress. I liked the irony in the amount of face given to mistress and maid.



The Cezanne, "Apples and Pitcher," was powerful; Fragonnard's love series was essentially frivolous. After reading about Matisse's reaction against the Venetians when visiting Italy, I could not help but see the materialism in the Titians and Veroneses, the lack of spiritual intensity for which Matisse condemned them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more