In some aspects it reminded me very much of Central Park. But every so often I'd remember that this all used to be the private compound of the Borgias, and think, Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.
I was delighted to discover that the park contained numerous statues of post-Borgia literary figures--notably Victor Hugo and Nikolai Gogol. The inscription on the base of the Gogol statue was in both Italian and Russian, which seemed entirely appropriate.
The National Gallery of Modern Art is fantastic. I think I needed a bit of a palate-cleanser after the amount of medieval and Renaissance art I've seen lately. The twentieth-century rooms felt bracing and clean. (I had much the same sensation at the Venice Guggenheim in October.) At the same time I was thinking of our discussion in philosophy class of the economic forces that shape the arts today; Scott pointed out that, for example, the C.I.A. helped popularize abstract expressionism, because they wanted to divert attention from art with more explicitly political content. I was conscious of wondering which artists were trying to shake me from my bourgeois complacency, and which might have been funded by people who would really prefer that I stay complacent, and so on. But there's a point at which all those questions become inimical to the whole point of art, which is to experience it with every sense and let the mind catch up later. When I hit that point was when I really started having fun.
I didn't know, going in, that the gallery had Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (the notorious urinal). But it did, along with a whole host of other read-made Duchamp compositions (if "compositions" is the right word for them). What's funny is that when I saw it I felt a little shiver of recognition, the same one I feel when I round the corner and see a Michelangelo (or whatever) that I know. I knew instantly this was the piece to mention when people asked me about the trip. This mass-produced thing, the defiantly anti-Aura piece of art, most definitely has its own Aura now. I hope Duchamp would be amused by that.
There were several Italian artists I'd never heard of--it's wonderful, of course, to stand in front of an acknowledged masterwork, but in some ways it's even better when a gallery introduces you to a painting or a painter you don't know at all. (This happened at the Uffizi with the fantastic Feast with Lute Player. That link doesn't really do it justice; when you stand before the painting in person you have the sense that you're at the pub with all these people, who are your best friends.) I loved Carlo Levi's portrait of the poet Umberto Saba, which seemed to glow; it was mostly the choice of palette and the way the light hit the oil paint, but it suggested wonderful things about the vitality of the subject. The rhythm of Giacomo Balla's Espansione dinamica + velocità made me wonder why he isn't better known among the cubists. Among the works of the later twentieth century I especially liked Alberto Burri's giant experiments with different materials and surfaces--great knots of canvas and paint, blocks of wood, cracked slabs of pigment, and so on.
The piece that hit with the most immediacy, though, was Ivan Mestrovich's marble statue Vecchia. It's an old woman, nude. It's the antithesis of the heroic nude. She is dessicated, slumping; the line of her lips shows her nearness to death. But the heartbreaking thing about it is her utter defeat. There's no humor left in her, no strength left in the back or the hips or the arms. She has given up. If, after an absence of years, you met a friend and found her looking like this, you would weep. I very nearly wept for the marble stranger.
Then on to the Galleria Borghese, one of those places that helps you understand why Italy has as many laws at it does. Rules are very important at the Galleria Borghese. You can't get in without a reservation; the reservations are only at odd-numbered hours; you can't get in before your reserved time slot; you can't stay past it; you have to check your bags (but not your coat); if you somehow make it past a guard with your backpack and an upstairs docent sees you, you will be sent downstairs to check the backpack before you continue looking at art; and God help you if you forgot to turn off your cell phone.
But for all that it has Bernini's David. I've lost count of the number of Davids I've seen on this trip. Michelangelo's, nerving himself (I agree with several critics that he has not yet thrown the fatal stone); Donatello's, boyish and balletic, his innocence seemingly undamaged by the sight of the giant's severed head; and any number of others, in paint, fresco, bronze, marble, and glass. The stance of Bernini's David is a big deal, I know--the torsion and action of the muscles, the slenderness of the taut sling--but for my money the exciting part is the face, the lips compressed with effort, the eyes being willed not to blink. I've seen this face. I've made this face. He is so alive.
1 comment:
killer.
joy.
shotgun.
thanks.
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