Necessary Angel

Up to this point I have written primarily about art and architecture, and a friend pointed out to me that I have far more interests that are relevant to my goal of observing the world around us and offering my thoughts on what I see and feel.

With that comment in mind, I plan to write about other senses and the result of observations occasioned by smell, taste, sound, and touch as well as by sight.

For example, this morning I went as I do each day to Dowses Beach, a five minute ride from my house. Actually, I alternate between visiting Dowses, in Osterville, or driving another five minutes eastward to Craigville Beach. I've taken a number of photographs over the past few months at Dowses, and its changing aspects throughout the day and across the seasons has been fascinating to observe and record.

This is what I wrote as I sat on the beach this morning:

I may be crazy, or ignorant of the ways of the seas, and of the tides that come and go, the winds that blow over them, but this morning, as I sit and mourn the passing of autumn, a sweet southeast wind blows the white-topped waves diagonally across the shore, and on its breeze I smell warm things. Spices from the tropics, large brightly colored flowers opening among fleshy green leaves, sunlight warmth coupled with sweet saltiness. There is the scent of growing, ripening, coming to blossom and fruit, falling softly to the ground to melt into the soil and become the source of the next cycle, quickening the new seed. The breeze dries the water it has brought to my eyes, and I arise and run to the water's edge to gather the air like a shawl I can wrap around me for comfort in the coming days of winter.

It has been nearly a year since I added a post to this weblog. So much for inspiration and consistency. I won't bother to cite reasons or give excuses here, but once again an article in today's New York Times has me writing and wondering on this site.

It seems that a controversial sculpture of a pregnant female nude, entitled "Alison Lapper Pregnant" has been installed in Trafalgar Square in London, alongside the phallic Nelson column and in company with some British military heroes.

Alison is nude, pregnant, and without arms and completely grown legs as a result of what used to be called a birth defect - maybe that still is the accepted term in our world. Strange, for when I first saw a photograph of the large sculpture I simply leaped to the assumption that it was a 21st century homage to classical Greek sculpture, specifically the world-renowned Venus, also armless. It took me a minute or two to realise that the subject, a beautiful woman, is not just seated, as I had quickly assumed, but that her legs are foreshortened by nature, and not tucked under her.

With all the furor over the placement of this work of art in the midst of these classical versions of military men in a country that has always loved and honored the art and culture of classical Greece, I wonder why no one has spoken of this reference, conscious or unconscious, on the part of the sculptor. His message, if I can presume, includes the statement that in our world it is possible and appropriate to consider a less-than-perfect woman by conventional standards of beauty as a perfect icon of that beauty for our time.

In an editorial this morning, the New York Times continues the discussion of the $45 million (or more) that the Met has paid for the Duccio Madonna and offers another argument or two for the purchase - preservation for the future, and accessibility to a wider audience than the painting previously had.

Both are valid reasons, and it is indicative of the focus of our society that in the commentary, the writer(s) argue that the lasting value of the purchase is greater than that of similar sums to secure the presence of athletes for area sports teams, whose extent of 'social inspiration' (since you probably can't think of the Duccio as providing entertainment to the masses) is far less.

Bringing this idea closer to home, were the MFA to have spent $45 million on the Duccio, would Bostonians be complaining? How much Red Sox inspirational strength insurance would $45 million buy? Let's forget for the moment that the money doesn't come from one big common purse.

The fact is that the MFA is planning to spend a similar sum to build a bigger and better 21st century space to house the artistic treasures it already owns. There have been similar flaps here in the past, if memory serves, around the purchase of a Rembrandt painting. It's the duty of a society to preserve the great ideas and expressions of humanity, and the New York Times makes that point clearly. Enough with the $45 million. There's enough in the account to cover the check.

The November 15 issue of The New Yorker contains two articles about the new Museum of Modern Art building in Manhattan, scheduled to open next weekend. One, by Paul Goldberger, speaks of the "riddling Zen reticence" of this renovation and expansion by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. The other, by John Updike, is the result of a recent walk through the not-yet-finished structure, and a stroll through the history of the museum and the landscape of 'modern art' during the twentieth century.

I second the observation by both writers that today's museums give us our connection to the world beyond that of surface appearances, and that these are, as Mr. Updike says, "temples of the Ideal, of the Other, of the something else that, if only for a peaceful moment, redeems our daily spending and getting." We don't necessarily have to go to a church to connect with the presence of the divine. Sacred space, and the experience of the numinous, is readily available in the secular world - we need only to be aware and mindful of its reality - in every meaning of that word.

A day or so ago, the New York Times published an article in the Arts section on the acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art of a major painting in the history of Western art. The work is by an Italian artist of the 14th century, Duccio di Buoninsegna, and its subject is the Madonna and the infant Jesus.

As far as the title of the article, "The Met Makes Its Biggest Purchase Ever," seems to indicate, the primary importance of this painting is the large sum of money that the Met is paying for it, and the journalist's implication is that at 8 x 11 inches, it isn't as though the museum is getting a whole lot of pigment for its money. I'm not chastising the writer, Carol Vogel, but it seems to me that monetary value shouldn't be the primary point of interest in the work. Even as I write these thoughts, I'm not ingenuous - I realise that headlines like this stop readers in their tracks and interest them in reading more, but this painting in itself has the same capability, and not because of its selling price.

Duccio is an artist of the very early Renaissance, and his body of extant work is very small. In many cases, paintings by Duccio that are in museums outside Italy are for the most part pieces of a large and awe-inspiring altarpiece, the Maesta, that is in Siena. Ms. Vogel actually mentions these facts, and notes that a fragment from the altarpiece is in the Frick Collection. This work is not a fragment; it is a complete composition in itself. But the rarity of this Duccio painting, and its monetary worth, seem secondary once you see the actual work of art itself.

Without getting too much into Art History 101, as Ms. Vogel quotes Philippe de Montebello (the director of the Met) in the article when he talks of the artist's importance, Duccio was definitely in the avant-garde of his time. He in Siena and Giotto in Florence were pushing the envelope when it came to the depiction of sacred subjects in this period. You only have to look at the Byzantine images that directly precede these artists' saints and holy figures in the evolution of painting flesh-and-blood beings in Western art. Prior to the work of these artists, holy figures in icons and frescoes or altarpieces are beautifully stylized and distant idealizations of the sacred, and it is difficult to consider the possibility that these figures bear any connection to humanity other than their perfected human forms.

The expression of the young mother of Jesus as painted by Duccio, and seen here in detail, is one of the first acknowledgements in Western art of the human connection with and to divinity. Even more so is the depiction of the totally normal gesture of the infant Jesus, who is touching the veil of his mother as a baby might do. This is not the stiffly posed Byzantine-influenced King of Heaven whom we see sitting seriously upright, sometimes severely so, on his mother's lap. At another level, there appears in Duccio's mother and child a subtlety of recognition between the two figures that suggests a number of possibilities of interpretation of the relationship between Mary and her divinely anointed son.

This is not another Madonna and child painting. It may be worth $45 million because that is what the Met may have paid for it, but its true value lies in the layers of awareness of the subjects, which the artist first presented to the world six hundred years ago, and, in that wonderful timeless aspect of great works of art, presents to us today. We can accept this gift, if we are willing to look beyond the price tag and pay a few precious moments of our time to look and see what is really there.