Monday, December 26, 2016

Art and Bourgeois Values


Pan and Psyche by Aristide Maillol. (a gift of Dr. James Land Jones)

How fortunate it is to be brought up by parents who appreciate art and music. My mother was a fine art painter and my father was an admirer of art and music. Mom adored Rembrandt and Van Gogh. Dad liked to listen to Stravinsky. There were always art books in our house to peruse, and as a child, I had the good fortune to hear the Savannah Symphony play the classics for my school class, taken by bus downtown, regularly. As a teen, I visited the Telfair Art Museum on occasion, enjoying the Ashcan painters and the marvelous works by Kahlil Gibran.  Later, in my early twenties, I actually lived in the house once owned by his beloved Mary Elizabeth Haskell.



24 West Gaston St. (my photo)

When I left for college, it was to study math and science. When I returned to Savannah to live, it was with a Ph.D. in philosophy of art. I spent some 20 years teaching at art colleges, including SCAD and the Atlanta College of Art. Best of all, I created the position of Art Librarian at the High Museum of Art to accompany my teaching at ACA. The wonderful and brilliant Gudmund Vigtel loved my proposal. During my seven years at the High, I was able to design and occupy a new Library space and to create a library/publication exchange program with many major museums in the U.S. and Europe.

Therein, we find my bourgeois delights. Almost daily in my new office, looking down on the High Museum across the street, I would open some magnificent catalog from MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Tate, The Boston Museum... The publications from the High were rather marvelous too, often in collaboration with other institutions. Both the Library and I received copies of these latter publications of which I still own many-- a signed copy of the Avedon catalog, for instance. I often met and talked with top living artists at patron receptions.

As a member of ARLIS, I attended conferences in cities around the country where we had receptions in the best museums and art spaces, with visits to galleries and the like. The meals at receptions were feasts. At the Heard Museum in Phoenix we were greeted with margaritas in hand-blown glasses at the entrance, with Tex-Mex delights on silver trays within. One of my fondest memories is having the National Gallery in D.C. all to ourselves during the splendid Matisse in Nice show. I wandered happily from room to room of those divine paintings of open windows to the Mediterranean.



(From a recent New Yorker)



Here are some of the spaces ARLIS enjoyed in the years I attended: MOMA, The Metropolitan Museum, The National Gallery, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Heard Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Art, The Getty Museum, The Kimbell Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Nelson-Atkins... We met in New York twice during my years at the High. Every conference included side trips to such places as Taliesin West, art galleries and the like. There were also regional conferences in New Orleans, Charlotte, Raleigh, Birmingham, and of course, Atlanta.


Darryl at Taliesin West.


In other words, I loved the bourgeois privilege of having private art viewings, of grand parties, and best of all, an office I designed myself in an art library I designed, filled with gorgeous books of art and even some rare, very valuable catalogs with hand-tipped plates of the work of Kandinsky or other artists. The rare books were locked in a fine, antique book shelf in my office. In fact, the entire office was decorated with overflow furniture from the museum's exquisite Decorative Arts collection. From my days at ACA and the High until today, art has enriched my life. Travel has added the art of so many museums, galleries, and architecture.  From Teotihuacan, Monte Alban, and the art of Frida Kahlo to Nara and Tokyo to the Parthenon and the Pantheon; from FLW's Falling Water and the Sydney Opera House, to the Frick and the Uffizzi, I have had the blessing and the bliss of great art.

Should I be ashamed or proud of my exclusive and privileged access to art and parties created in artistic settings? Often, I've told the story that when I was working on my dissertation, I asked to see the famous portrait of Gertrude Stein  by Picasso at the Metropolitan. The Picasso galleries were closed at the time. A friendly curator asked a guard to escort me to the painting in question, and I had Miss Stein all to myself, with all the Picasso galleries, in fact. I felt that I had arrived in the World of Art, then. And the world of art has opened its doors to me so many times. Nonetheless, I do feel that we who love art, whatever our station in life or accomplishments, ought to be able to delight in such art as fully as possible. The Dalai Lama has said that the meaning of life is to be happy. I cannot imagine happiness without all of the arts: literature, music, and all of the visual arts.



http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/488221


Jameson



Sunday, December 25, 2016

Darryl on Hitchens and Mencken



Comments from 2011:


News Fee

How fragile we are... A great Loss.



Mr. Hitchens wrote in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell and trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy…
NYTIMES.COM|BY WILLIAM GRIMES
Polly Richards Babcock and Stan Wood

Darryl Gossett One of the great journalistic curmudgeons -- the HL Mencken of our day.

December 16, 2011 at 11:40pm ·

Teresa Roney Oh, no - so much more than that. He cared enough about logic, reason and civilization - and used his only weapons - verbal swords, humor, and intelligence, to slash away at illogical and perversely irrational reasoning and actions. He didn't do this in a void. Rather, he realized that it affects the human condition, and that we suffer when issues and problems are dealt with illogically and irrationally. He understood that it matters, and that someone had to do it. It must have been painful and, perhaps, lonely at times for him, because there are so many ghastly idiots all over the place. He was a true member of the intelligentsia, and a brave, courageous soldier in that small army. He deserves the highest Medal of Honor, but I doubt that he would care about anything so ridiculous as a medal. I am in mourning.

Darryl Gossett There is nothing that you have said about Hitchens, Teresa, that is not equally true -- at least -- about Mencken. (Notwithstanding that Mencken also found time to write the seminal work on American English, to exert a profound influence on American literature in his role as literary critic and editor of "The Smart Set" and "The American Mercury," to set the model for New Journalism in his onsite coverage of the Scopes Trial [which he coined 'The Monkey Trial'], to write the first scholarly analysis of Nietsche in the English language, and to tackle over a 50-year career such topics as prohibition/temperance, women's suffrage, the idea of democracy, and ... of course, religion and its role in American life. His views on religion, and the manner in which he expressed those views were cited as inspirational by none other than Mr. Hitchens himself when he publiched "God Is Not Good."


Darryl Gossett Mencken's views on religion (particiularly the American expression of evangelical Christianity) were every bit as caustic as Hitchens', and were expressed 60 or 70 years earlier. To wit, here is his classic recap of the whole matter:To sum up:
1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.


Darryl Gossett Anyway, my point is that I intended the comparison as high praise of Hitchens, particularly in regard to the pugnacious, adversarial, fearless quality of his writing. While I take issue with some of Hitches' politics (and certainly with some of Mencken's), and with the tone of callous elitism that unfortunately crept into the writing of both men, they are both thinkers that I quite enjoy taking issue with ... and I can think of no others whose words more gleefully challenge their readers to do just that.


Teresa Roney Oh I know. I'm just in mourning. I love you, Dar!