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And Then …
And then, the day after I wrote the previous post but before I posted it, I got a strong compulsion to just go down to the museum and see it again, right now, having not visited it in something over ten years, and take pictures for the post. (This was yesterday.) Well, it was everything I remembered and more. (In fact, though the sculpture no longer rotates, apparently, the vertigo was still present on that walkway — but, after all, the barriers are clear glass.)
I don’t believe the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art is photographable, not at least to the degree of conveying what it is like to sit in it. It is all triangles. If you walk to a corner you walk into an acute angle. The floor tiles are triangles. Even the sun patterns on the floor are triangles. The walkways fling you out into space over two, then one, level (or maybe three). I think the building has four levels but possibly five. It is a tesseract. You are often surprised by new vistas — new angles, see? — as you wander around. It looks different everywhere you go, and since the ceiling is all skylights it looks quite different at different times of the day (Impressionists would get fits). Photographs of it seem too square, too right-angley.
Anyway, I’m in no way compelled to see the actual art exhibits in the East Wing. The building is enough.
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What Joy
There was a show on PBS a few weeks ago, a documentary of sorts about a French photographer and experimental filmmaker, made by herself, or so I gathered, and she had this interesting life with tangential contact with those more famous, as these things usually go. I missed the beginning, and it was all in French with English subtitles, and so my impressions of it were probably more impressionistic than intended.
At one point she mentioned meeting the artist Alexander Calder, known for his mobiles, like this one in the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, which is, perhaps, my favorite building in the world — but I better emphasize perhaps, so as not to give you too much.
She said he was a delightful, kind person, and as she talked about him they showed a picture she took of him on a beach, jumping to catch a ball, smiling. And the subtitle came up as she spoke in French: “What joy.”
I have a tenuous relationship with this sculpture because when I walk along the walkway just beneath it I feel a tremendous vertigo, and since the sculpture is slowly rotating and gets quite close to the walkway floor I feel as if it will sweep me off and over — or that I’ll have a compulsion to grab onto it and swing free. So this sculpture to me is a little fearful thing, but it’s grand and cool, his last major work, and it is impossible for the East Wing to be the East Wing without this Alexander Calder in it; it is the museum’s signature piece of art and it belongs there like nothing else could, compelling you to draw your eyes upward as y0u sit there in this building that is itself a piece of art (thank you, Mr. Pei). And, you know, if Calder really was this joyous person maybe he did want to tempt people to grab on, swing free and not let go. (I’ll have to visit again soon.)
How interesting to know he wasn’t morose and moribund and all those things artists are supposed to be. How fitting that his work should be in the East Wing, because of how the building makes me feel when I visit it. Should I really be surprised to see him jumping to catch a ball on the beach?
Oh, no — no –
What joy.
What joy.
Photos © ACF
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Habituated to the Vast
“I remember, that at eight years old I walked with him one evening from a farmer’s house, a mile from Ottery — & he told me the names of the stars — and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world — and that the other twinkling stars were Suns that had worlds rolling round them — & when I came home, he showed me how they rolled round. I heard him with profound delight & admiration; but without the least mixture of Wonder or incredulity. For from my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii etc etc — my mind had been habituated to the Vast.”
………………………..– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, recalling when his father showed him the night sky in 1781
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