No. 39: Matter across time
The paintings are familiar and warm, like a hand-thrown mug of tea my hands caress and care for, the comfort of its aromatic steam misting my nostrils and eyelashes. Matisse, van Gogh, de Chirico, Cézanne, Seurat... the so-called masters of early Modern Art. The greatest hits of a nostalgic White male ideal of Culture (the Canon). A diffuse blend of natural and artificial light blankets the rooms. Gold leaf picture frames with tacked brass nameplates enclose hundreds of invented worlds.
I know these paintings from the art history books of my early art education. I know these paintings because I spent many hours with them, sketching and studying, copying. Some of the brush strokes are so specifically imprinted in my memory that the spark of recognition when I inspect them is disarming. The guards are getting nervous – they tell me to keep my distance.
I first visited the Barnes Foundation as a high school art student in the early 90s when the collection was still housed in the suburban Main Line mansion of their collector, Albert Barnes. A few years later I worked every Saturday for a season as an unpaid volunteer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when a curated selection of Barnes artworks was displayed as a traveling exhibition. I don’t recall what my duties were, but I wandered the galleries for hours, languidly gawking at the paintings. In 2012 the collection was relocated (with great controversy) to a new museum building in Center City Philadelphia, which is where I returned recently to visit the artworks with my oldest daughter.
Even though my naive dreams of artistic myth-making are long gone, I still feel the material pull of these paintings. The interlocking brush strokes of Cezanne’s still life’s and landscapes form a stable geometry in two-dimensions. van Gogh’s luxurious color and lines are liquid and alive and volatile more than a century later. The elegant lightness of Matisse is expressed in figures and hues somehow both substantial and ethereal. Thankfully, my cultural world is so much more expansive than it was when I was 19 or 20. Thankfully, I still have these paintings to remind me of youth and light, the smell of varnish and paint, and the beautiful connection of eyes, hands, and matter across time.
