After five parts of Larry’s story, here’s a light synchro, sort of!
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Rob and I visited the Norton Museum today, a really wonderful place where you can wander around for a few hours and enjoy a visual feast. As we got out of the car, Rob said, “There’s only one Monet piece on exhibit.”
“I think it’s Matisse we came to see.”
“I think it’s Monet.”
As it turned out, Rob was right that we’d come to see Claude Monet’s Nympheas – Water Lilies – on loan from a museum in Switzerland until July 12. But neither of us knew that the Norton also had some of Matisse’s paintings exhibited. A kind of synchro?
Monet was a founder of the French impressionist movement and one of its most prolific painters. He did a number of these water lily paintings and in 2014, one of them – the painting at the top of the post – sold through Sotheby’s for $54 million. Yet, Monet, like Van Gogh, like so many of the famous artists, suffered from depression and poverty for most of his life.
At the museum, his Water Lily painting was in a room by itself and took up most of the wall. When I first saw it, I wished the museum had lit the room differently. The painting seemed ominously dark and the nuances in blues really weren’t evident to me until I took a photo.
Matisse’s paintings were in another room, with interesting company – Joan Miro, Picasso, and Georgia O’Keefe. Matisse, trained as a lawyer, may have been an exception to the depression and poverty element so many artists experienced. He supposedly came to art late – at the ripe old age of 21! I kind of get lost in his paintings, like this one, of a woman whom he painted a number of times. Her face supposedly intrigued him:
She hung next to a painting of Matisse’s wife. I didn’t snap a picture of her. I found the wife’s face disturbing; her eyes were lopsided, veiled, strange. Was the woman in the above painting Matisse’s lover? Mistress?
Then there was Georgia O’Keefe, whose art is always a delight – straightforward, an expression of whatever she loved in the moment she was painting. Her work is the perfect expression for anyone in the creative arts- love what you’re doing as you’re doing it:
The real surprise today was a photography exhibit of the Florida Everglades that the Norton has commissioned. This exhibit struck me as the most mysterious, the one that expressed only a fraction of the secrets that I suspect the Everglades holds. I set one of my novels – Kin Dread – in the Everglades – and this photo not only captures the essence, but bears an eerie resemblance to the cover:
Eliot Porter (1901-1990); Cypress Slough and Mist, Cypress Lodge, Punta Gorda, Florida, January 31, 1974; 1974; Dye imbibition print; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist; P1990.51.2171.1
I love Monet, and OKeefe – their delight in nature and light became an offering to everyone else. I’m sorry to hear that Waterlilies were badly displayed and lit – another irony.
54 million is an irony indeed, and a sad commentary on the rediculousess of the art world. Still, I would rather see that kind of money spent on Beauty, to be shared with others, even if its creator died relatively impoverished (not, however, in soul)……..than to see it spent on war. In fact, as far as the military is concerned, 54 million is barely a drop in the bucket.
I always found many of Matisses portraits rather ugly and unappealing, although I never felt safe to say so. But Monet…………the light of life and nature shines through his paintings, a gift………….
Yeah, to the military, 54 million is pocket change!
Have always liked those water lilly paintings, $54 million though – think what else could be done with that money.
It could probably pay off the debt of a small country!