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March 23, 2006
TT: On the town
I'm writing from Washington, D.C., having just gotten back to my hotel after a very long day, so I'll keep it fairly short:- I started things off by going straight from the train station to the National Gallery, where I saw Cézanne in Provence, a 117-piece exhibition up through May 7. Some of the paintings are fairly familiar, but at least as many of them are likely to be new to even the most knowledgeable lover of Cézanne's work. Like most blockbuster shows, this one is too much of a muchness, and it's also attracting hordes of noisy visitors--but it's overwhelming all the same, and not to be missed.
For me, the last gallery, which consists mainly of landscapes painted at the end of Cézanne's life, was the most memorable. The Phillips Collection's near-abstract Garden at Les Lauves hangs next to the exit, accompanied by this excerpt from a letter written by the artist in 1905, a year before his death:
Now, being old, nearly 70 years, the sensations of color, which give the light, are for me the reason for the abstractions, which do not allow me to cover my canvas entirely, nor to focus on the edges of objects where their points of contact are fine and delicate; from which it results that my image or picture is incomplete.
The two side galleries devoted to watercolors and color lithographs comprise a show-within-a-show (and aren't nearly as crowded as the main galleries, thank goodness). I saw several of these watercolors at a Princeton University exhibition I reviewed four years ago for The Wall Street Journal:
In France, Cézanne was piling up watercolors by the dozen as early as the 1870s, some obviously sketchy, others so dazzling in their iridescent color and complex composition--an elaborate skein of pencil underdrawing "covered" by overlapping patches of transparent pigment--that it is hard to think of them as mere studies. Yet such may well have been the artist's intent, at least at times, for Renoir claimed to have found discarded Cézanne watercolors littering the fields around Aix-en-Provence....
Not surprisingly, it was a great poet who summed them up best: Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that Cézanne's watercolors consist of "very light pencil outlines, and, here and there, as if just for emphasis and confirmation, there's an accidental scattering of color, a row of spots, wonderfully arranged and with a security of touch: as if mirroring a melody."
(A word to the wise: when you've had enough of the crowds, slip across the corridor to Gallery 70, where you can feast your eyes on John Twachtman's Winter Harmony in near-complete solitude.)
- I went straight from the National Gallery to the White House, where I lunched with two colleagues. I blogged last year about my previous visit to the White House Mess, so this time around I'll say only that the chicken and empanadas were first-rate.
- From there I walked to the Old Post Office, headquarters of the National Endowment for the Arts, and spent the remainder of the afternoon in a closed session of the National Council on the Arts. After wrapping up our first day's discussions, we shared a working dinner with Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, who spoke with passionate idealism about cultural memory in Iran and America. It was our first meeting, and I was forcibly struck by her charm and charisma.
I told Nafisi after dinner that her remarks had put me in mind of the concluding passage of C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism:
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
Now I'm worn out and ready for bed--Thursday's session starts promptly at nine a.m. and I'm already a couple of hours' behind on sleep. See you tomorrow.
Posted March 23, 2006 12:00 PM
