I love art. When and where did that start? At school? At home? In books? For me it began when I was a child in the 1950s and '60s, before and during my adolescence. The primal scene was divided between two museums in Boston, where I spent a long time. I visited two again last week to check the memory with reality and got a surprise: sometimes coincide.
I come from a family art lover. Winter Solstice Saturdays, muddy and short in New England, were days of museum. Our pillars are the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, close to each other at Fenway, an arm of the river and parklands Olmsted. There were initial hopes that the area would attract wealthy residents, they become fashionable, but he did and museums were a little left there.
Looking at art in a sustained manner, it would be a curious thing - odd, not bad - for a young person to do. This implies a certain amount of just staying still, perhaps art exotic names an appetite for specific language and terms, and an ability for imaginative projection legible to participate in stories, not just receive.
That was O.K. It meant they were quiet. In the 1950s the preblockbuster pedestrian traffic was light and the number of small guards. I knew them knew me. And I knew my way around. It might be a day or so in mine does not, and I feel good.
That said, I think that first got hooked on museums as do many children, through emotions and Egyptian art.
The doll-size wooden models of daily scenes stored in the tombs, making it seem as if, for the Egyptians, eternity was an endless game of playing house. (You will find nearly a hundred of these miniature sculptures, all belonging to the museum and above all to see for the first time in a special show called "Secrets of the Tomb 10A: Egypt 2000 BC)
Why? On the one hand, the Museum of Fine Arts, a ton of it, the largest collection outside of Cairo. In 1905 the museum had partnered with Harvard in archaeological excavations at Giza, after reaching a "divide the spoils against Egypt: half of what was excavated would stay there, the rest would go to Boston.
And then there were the mummies, ready, as I remembered, in a space cryptlike. They are probably the real reason Egyptomania preteen. They are not art, not objects: they are the bodies, and for many children to give a fascinating first encounter with the physical fact of death. They did it for me and it took years before he could go beyond it to see how Egyptian art, especially the irrepressible hunger for life.
Treasures wine, are now seen as magnetic, and some of the same way as they did when I was 10. Of all the art of ancient Egypt is particularly modern, even futuristic, or so I thought. With their figures ordered and confident smiles, the ruler of the Old Menkaure and his wife, in a portrait carved a reputation, it seemed to my parents' friends who come to enjoy cocktails, straight from a spaceship.
The galleries of Egypt were an immersion environment, but they were not alone. There was also the chapel as a venue for the exhibition of 12th century frescoes in the apse of the church catalana.
For me, individual paintings were worlds within worlds that really mattered, what I wanted so badly so early. Mid Rogier van der Weyden-15th century "St. Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child" was a favorite. I looked endless, not the subject, but because every detail is specific and complete: the main figures in a crowded room clean with a touch of adjoining rooms and a garden beyond, the city towers, a canal or river that flows to the skyline.
The main image, a giant of Jesus with a sad face and long fingers, oddly, seems to change shape and dimension before my eyes, swelling of the dome, floating free of it, flattening and tipping forward as if to lock in the room. How, I wondered as a child, artists receive no such effects of plaster and paint? I do not know, but the effects work, painting - protected with a solution of lime and parmesan cheese when fresh arrived from Spain in 1919 - is still fresh.
This picture showed me what the outlook was. And she taught me what art, specifically painting, was or could be: a realization of order, a universe that could, if only to look, move and live where he could establish a life, to live an ideal.
I was attracted to the psychological drama. But at the same time he retired in the opposite direction, which is why so often ended in the Japanese Buddhist Hall, a kind of minitemple lined with sculptures. I would say that my time spent there as a formative experience of Asia (later studied Asian art in graduate school), except that the idea of Asia has always been the case both in the air in Boston, a port city with a history 18th century in China's trade links and 19 century in Japan.
The art also held mysteries restless, the seeds of a moral and emotional education. I remember again and again "by Velázquez Don Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf." The prince golden blond boy in the dress sewn to the commands of the image, but the most interesting for me was the second son, who was not a child - or was it? - With bristling, white apron and slack, cautious sideways glance. What was this match on? I did not know, but there was sadness.
Although I did not know, was sharing the galleries of Japan with the spirits venerable Boston Asiaphiles all.
There was Edward Sylvester Morse, a zoologist who in 1862 went to Japan to study brachiopods and ceramics accumulated. And the art historian Ernest Fenollosa that while teaching economics at Tokyo, snapped the Japanese art, in a frenzy of modernization, were wasted. And William Sturgis Bigelow, a Boston Brahmin on a spiritual quest, which helped buy many of the monumental Buddhas around me.
The Museum of Fine Arts has been through plenty of both and is in the midst of a big change now, which may be why it seemed a bit discombobulated last week (although some of that may have been me trying to age find again). In November the museum opened a wing dedicated to contemporary art and the Art of the Americas. In the 1950s, and even in the 60s, the farms were contemporaries, so I was aware, fairly low. No more. The Art of the Americas as a multicultural category, there were in the late Victorian Gilded Age-a-museum of my youth.
You'll find the names of these men on the labels in the galleries of Asia, along with the collectors and students of Charles Goddard Weld, Denman Waldo Ross and Okakura Kakuzo. I know about them now and its local resonance continuing. Boston has a tenacious cultural memory. To a degree that would surprise and perplexity to New Yorkers, Victorian life in the city and its arts institutions, even after decades of changes and updates.
I do not forget that the museum? Most of what I remember is still there, even the quiet, had the Buddhas and mummies myself. But now there's more.
Talk about walk-in environments. This was an exercise in installation art before the term was invented, postmodern before postmodernism, a total of meticulously custom art work. It was designed to remain so. From Gardner - who died in 1924 - provides that if a single object as well as suppression or relocated, the lot was auctioned.
I was a teenager. I already knew the museum had walked its rooms. For me it was a wonder cabinet, exactly exciting for its mix of images and styles without limits, an abundance so relentless that there is a single piece never came fully into focus, everything was more or less on par with everything else .
In any case, if the end of Victoria-to-the Golden Age is what you want, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a five minute walk, a time capsule of an era and inviolate personality, and conceived as such. The details of construction in the late 20th century are often told. Isabella Gardner was a New York City, born in Boston, with decent luck, shrewd advisers (chief among them Bernard Berenson), the eclectic tastes, personal effrontery and belief in the more is more.
Thus equipped, they patched the museum, which was also home, of countless architectural fragments to create an inside-out Venetian palace. Then, packed to the ceilings with Renaissance paintings, Roman sculptures, Rococo furniture, modern design, which is medieval and gossip in Asia, each placed in demanding a piece of mosaic.
It's easy to forget, given the museum that survives, how exciting its creation must have been, with new pieces are constantly sending out waves, fresh harmonies and increasingly intricate cross references throughout the set. You still get an impression of fluidity and the growth of the large central courtyard, with its glass roof and seasonal plants. The first sight of him and the smell of damp earth takes me back instantly to a time decades ago when I went cold at Fenway in the eyes of nasturtium spilling from balconies of the courtyard.
The purpose of art is less important than the experience of art.
That experience begins the moment you see the courtyard and intensifies as you walk down the stairs to the first Italian village. It is hard to miss the painting of Piero della Francesca of Hercules, looking buff and eyes as a male model. Somewhere - but not in the gallery, as there is no label - may have learned that this is only cool by the artist in the United States and coming from a wall of his house. Why has painted? Nobody knows. Why Gardner got a gallery of Simone Martini caste, dressed in layers of the saints? Nobody really knows, although the game of the flesh against the spirit, Classical-against-gothic feel subtle and intelligent.
The lighting is a problem here, a frustrating mix of darkness and glare. But that was what I wanted to Gardner, these galleries were not connected to electricity in their lifetime.
Not all his pictures, I came to learn, are fabulous. Some are better cast in the shade. When there was a winner, however, she knew what to do. Installed near a window, even if this puts the painting out of sight, as in the case of death "by Fra Angelico and the Assumption of the Virgin", a concert of little blue and gold, hung on a corner beside a fireplace.
Certain things were not in those graphics staff, because everyone knew they were great, and Rape "by Titian in Europe." I was not initially clear what was in it (big lady, cherubim, frightened bull), I found out later. The gardener, as if to finesse any confusion, which now uses the title "Europe". He preferred a painting nearby, the more modest "Christ Carrying the Cross", but slipped its attribution to Giorgione follower of Bellini.
Once he is there, it's yours, your secret. The whole place is thus a path of discovery, and regulars have their own mental maps. When he was 15 years or less, mine included a pair of Han dynasty bronze bears (Gardner, who knew all the Buddhists of Boston, has a small collection of Asia), a drawing of Michelangelo's painting of Bartolomé Bermejo Santa Engracia and Matisse.
In the normal museums, a demotion probably a painting on the ice. In the context of Gardner his condition has not changed much because, like other pieces in the collection, he has a personal story. The box arrived in Gardner, just before her husband died and she became a shrine to his memory, always keeping a cup of fresh flowers - violets in the season - in front of it.
They are still there.
But unless someone goes to court and annul the will, the museum saw first half century ago is the same as would be if he were about half a century. I will not be, but a boy, wandering into a winter afternoon, and light, smell the earth and looking - really looking - with love in her eyes.
I have come to take the painting as a positive lesson in the politics of charisma. I have also learned that time can be hard to spell. On my visit last week, sections of the museum full of unidentified objects seemed more dimly lit attic of the palace. (Berenson's wife, Mary, once in front of a junk shop.) The Dutch called room seemed especially sad, decorated with empty boxes awaiting the return of the paintings - "The Concert" by Vermeer, Rembrandt Storm Sea of Galilee "- stolen 20 years ago.
When I was young, I thought that Gardner was the most glamorous place that was. Now I see it is as cowardly as it is stylish. And, on the wishes of its founder, is among the pages of history as a dried flower. This may not be so bad. In New York - capital of cosmetic improvement - it would be. Boston is different, though even here there is pressure to keep moving, than a peripheral way Gardner is doing: a new wing designed by Renzo Piano, is underway.
But as you turn the vacuum frames and head towards the stairs you see another Rembrandt, a self-portrait of principles, a pastel image of a face, an old-fashioned kind, with the aid puffy hat and some background lighting, has become a VIP It's a wonderful picture, and doubly wonderful to be where he is kooky in this house full of saints and rickety chairs, and John Singer Sargent.
