Gotham Diary:
Up on the Roof
13 June 2013
As you can see, it was a perfect day for visiting the Museum’s Roof Garden. I hadn’t yet been, nor had the announcement of this year’s installation, by Imran Qureshi, caught my eye. I was very surprised to see that it amounted to — nothing. For the first time since the roof opened, the space stretches empty from building to parapet. Only having taken this in does one look down at the paving stones, which are splashed with dull red paint and inscribed with fragmentary lotus blossoms. It is a witness to violence, specifically to the violence in Pakistan, and, although two dimensional, it is not understated. For the simple reason that it is easy to overlook, it is disturbing to notice. It is also exotic, more exotic than it would have been within the Museum. Nothing could be less like the ghostly blooms of lotus than the lushly textured carpet of treetops, the most hope-inspiring form of life more than six months old.
I had errands that took me toward the Museum. After lunch at the Shake Shack, I stocked up on cash at the bank. At Flowers by Philip, I bought plants for the balcony; and, at Crawford Doyle, Janet Malcolm’s collection of pieces, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers. I had made a point of waiting to buy the Malcolm at the bookshop; it’s the kind of book that I want to pay for there. I managed to get in and out without buying anything else, which was so much the better when I came across two quasi must-haves on the sale table at the Museum. The first was a biography of Nicolas Fouquet, by Charles Drazin, that I probably should not have paid full price for, but the other, Frederick Brown’s For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus, I was sorry to have missed until now. The last third of the Nineteenth Century was long my idea of a Dark Age, and I never obliged myself to learn its fundamentals. That ignorance has developed into an embarrassing pothole, and now I’m simply pleased to be able to repair it.
Visiting the Roof Garden was an errand, as well: seeing art for the first time always is; it’s only when you’ve thought about something that you begin to see it. I had no intention of exploring the interior of the Museum, and, once I’d taken in the Roof Garden, I took the elevator downstairs and headed out. On my way, though, my eye was caught by an unfolded altarpiece that seemed new to me (although it can’t have been, as it was featured in the big Netherlandish-art show in 1998), The Life and Miracles of Saint Godelieve. It has been in the Museum’s collections since 1912, but I really don’t recall attending to it before. St Godelieve, the patron saint of Flanders, was a good girl who wanted to share everything with the poor and to become a nun, two ambitions that were thwarted by her forced marriage to one Bertolf of Gistel. Bertolf soon regretted his exercise of force majeure, however, and concocted wicked stories about his wife that prepared the ground for her apparent suicide. In fact (according to legend, that is), he had her strangled. In the altarpiece, painted by an eponymous Master of of St Godelieve Legend, Godelieve is painted with long red tresses that are put up only once, into her wedding headdress: iconic proof of her refusal to be the great lady that she was born to be. My favorite thing about the piece (at not-quite-first glance) was the expression on the face of Bertolf’s mother, as she confides her “misgivings” about Godelieve to her son. She reminds me of another no-good-nik from a neighboring county, Ortrud of Frisia, the villainess of Wagner’s Lohengrin, an opera set only about a century before the life of Godelieve. The St Godelieve altarpiece subordinates sophisticated composition to effective narration, and is one of those works of art that used to inspire aficianados of cinquecento art to dismiss Netherlandish painting as “primitive.” But I hope that the curators leave it where it is for a while, so that I’ll pass by it most times I visit the Museum.
***
When I got home, I sat out on the balcony and dove into Janet Malcolm. I read the very brief pieces at the end first; then I turned to the title essay, which is, literally, a collection of attempts to write something reasonably substantial about David Salle, the hot Eighties artist who, by the time Malcolm got around to him in the early Nineties, was already something of a has-been. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what his stuff looked like, but that seemed beside the point, because although Malcolm described a few paintings, what seemed to concern Salle more in their conversations was the uncertainty of his fame. Junk-bond millionaires had made him rich by paying top dollar for his work, but it seemed unclear whether this work was actually art or, instead, just another hula hoop. Without the enthusiastic praise of Peter Schjeldahl, quoted by Malcolm, I’d have opted for the latter, as I do now, having done a bit of googling. But then I believe that Andy Warhol put an end, not to art, but to the idea that art is potentially transcendent in a way that can be vouched by philosophical consensus. In light of Schjeldahl’s interest, I’m thrown back into the wetlands in which the tides of what I think of as art intermingle with the more brackish waters of commercial illustration.
In the evening, I watched The Leopard, or most of it; when Kathleen came home from a late night, there were still twenty minutes to run. I hadn’t seen the sparkling Criterion Collection edition of Visconti’s movie, which has the strange effect of highlighting Visconti’s regard for music as a kind of subsidiary decoration rather than as a compositional element. When it isn’t in competition with the narrative, Nino Rota’s soore is pretty tacky, and Visconti thinks nothing of cutting it off along with a scene change — a sloppy effect that Hollywood outgrew very early. The interiors are all garishly over-lit; it might be argued that interiors in the 1860s were over-lit, given the excitement provided by gaslights, but they can’t have been always over-lit. And the compositions are antic rather than stately; there is no effort to see the aristocratic family as it saw itself — aside from Visconti’s trademark determination to get the costumes right. Only the Prince is a figure of real dignity, and one wonders how much of this is the filmmaker’s doing, and how much might owe to Lampedusa’s telepathic foreknowledge that Burt Lancaster would be playing the part. Why a burly American actor should be the ideal Prince of Salina is a deep mystery, but he is. Another mystery: why does The Leopard look so much more primitive than Senso, set at about the same time and made almost ten years earlier?