Monday, February 17, 2014

Monuments Men


The Monuments Men

February 17, 2014

Dear Hank,
For me, art is transformative. By that I mean it takes me to a place, a better place; a place within myself where I realize all that I, or man, might be, can be, and perhaps will be. It makes that connection on a visceral level with what Jung calls The Vast Collective Unconscious. It shows me all that could be. It creates an intellectual and emotional bond on a physical level. It creates a understanding that, as Joseph Campbell said of somethings - comes before words of what we are and what we can be.
I had a college professor, Dr. Hogan, who said,  and I quote loosely, “Freud said dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, if so, then art is at least a Federal Highway.” How right he was. While dreams are the province of our own personal realm, art is our shared collective realm, as seen by an individual within our culture as a whole - our larger world. Thus art is shared experience. I have heard it said that good art reflects the society within which it was created, and I think, that is true. Experiencing that art allows me to experience in some way what that world was like at the time of the work’s creation. 
A buddy of mine says although seeing a copy is nice, but she likes to “see the paint.” There is something about being in front of the real thing, the genuine article that is different than being in front of a slick glossy poster of it.  
I experienced that when I was in the Tower of the East Wing of The National Gallery. It was the a series of paintings the chapel in Houston that is named for him. After fifteen or twenty minutes I began to see the shades of color, the deeper sense he had connoted in each of these huge panels of seemingly like rectangles within rectangles. There is a subtle deep vibrancy to his paintings. It was like becoming aware of a deep bass resonance.
I have also stood before the paintings in The Barnes Collection, no doubt the greatest collection of Impressionist paintings in the world, and seen the face of Van Gogh’s Postman looking back at me in those lurid greens and yellows; or Monet’s Water Boat, Modigliani’s Reclining Nude, Matisse’s Joy of Life. Each one emotes a feeling, a passion, a sense of connection with something greater than myself and yet is all within me.
Last night we saw the movie, The Monuments Men. It starred George Clooney and one of the best group or actors of our time. Bill Murray as a GI seeming to pick up where he left off in Stripes. The Frenchman who starred in the modern silent film of last year (or was it the year before?) entitled The Artist; John Goodman, who seems to be in every movie that is any good in the last few years; a little bug-eyed fellow who you say to yourself, or the person you are with, Who is he?, Where have we seen him before?; and an actress whom you probably won’t know until the credits roll. (I won’t spoil your surprise.) And Matt Damon being a suave art curator. 
It’s the closing days of WWII and the task of these people is to find, preserve, and recover the art stolen by the Nazis; mostly by Goering and under direct orders of Hitler. I was familiar with the story but I had not realized the magnitude, nor the enormity, of the crime. Thousands and thousands of paintings, statues, church bells, and sculptural pieces were taken from museums, and private collections. 
(An early scene in the movie shows people sandbagging the wall holding Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper while the building that housed it was being bombed. I found this touch interesting because my mother told me she saw the painting as it was being sandbagged and that was the late 1930s. The building was bombed in 1943.)
Every painting and sculpture (except one Raphael that was destroyed by the Nazis) was familiar to me as one who had studied art in college. But the star of the movie was The Ghent Altarpiece. Painted in 1432 by the van Eyck brothers Hubert and Jan, it is - to this day - stunning in it’s brilliance.
I went to Bruges to see it. It’s a triptych, which means it is three panels. The two outer panels are hinged and half the size of the center part because they close ovr the center; thus the outer panels are painted on both sides.
Here is an image of the triptych when closed and thus showing the back of the two outer panels. 
This is the way I first saw it in the church in Bruges, Belgium.
Once an hour they open the panels and the have four regular 150 watt flood lights mounted on two each on two 2 by 4’s illuminating the interior panels. Here’s the interior:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghent_Altarpieces

What was striking to me was how bright the paint was. The image don’t do it justice. The reds pop in their brilliance, the golds shimmer. The painting is done in egg tempra, which as I understand it, means they used egg white as the glue to stick the paint to the surface. (Paint in a tube didn’t come into being until the late 19th century, all painting before then had to be done indoors where one could mix their own paint and keep it moist enough to be able to get it on the surface before it dried. The Impressionists were one of the first, if not the first, artists to be able to paint outside because they had paint in lead sealed tubes, which allowed them to squeeze out what they needed at the time they needed it, and not have to have mortars and pestles, and bowls with solvents and glues to mix colors when needed.)
For people who like to say art should be realistic looking, take a look at what these brothers did. Here’s Jan’s Marriage of Arnolfini :
A painting whose image has been shown to not only illustrate realistic portrayals of people and their times but also to show the use of light and shading, and also to show how accurate the painting was (notice the reverse image in the convex mirror), and the use of symbols and catholic mystic images (explained in many texts elsewhere.)
David Hockney in 2001 published a book called Secret Knowledge Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters where he explained how artists like the van Eycks had used optics: mirrors, lenses, and camera obscuras -  to help create their images. (Why hadn’t this been common knowledge before? Well, there was the problem in their time that the church considered such reflective techniques the work of the devil and you could get burned at the stake, and there was the whole secrets of the guild sort of thinking: if someone couldn’t figure out how you had done something then they couldn’t copy it.)
If you want to talk about valuable. Well, take a look at The Annunciation: 


It’s a small painting, just over a foot wide and a yard high. It sits in a remote gallery in the West Wing of The National Gallery in Washington, D.C. You have to really go out of your way to find it. At the time it was purchased I remember my art professor, Dr. Phoebe Stanton, saying that it cost more per square inch than any other painting in history; maybe, a hundred thousand dollars per?
But the images that flash up in the movie The Monuments Men: Rembrandt, da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Rodin, van Eyck, Rubens are all classics; part of our heritage, our Western culture. 
Some have said the movie lacks the drama and tension necessary to make a movie great or that the real story is drama enough. They have their opinions. But to see - recreated - Rodin’s Burghers of Calais sitting on pallets at the famous fairy tale looking castle of “Mad” King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein Castle in the Bavarian Alps, to see images of painting after painting - every one a classic, is well, for me, not just interesting but inspiring in the way that standing before a great work of art compels me to remember how great we as humans can be. The movie is inspiring - to me, because it reminds me of how inspiring art can be, and why it is so important to life.

I gotta go. A fellow with a white shirt and narrow tie is at the door with an important message for me. Oh Jesus.

Bryce

posted by Rick Kinnaird at 7:45 AM

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