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Tuesday, January 11, 2000
By Tony Norman
I'm not in the habit of skipping church to go to art museums, especially when playing hooky means driving to Cleveland. But I wanted to see the Dutch and Flemish still-life exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Sunday was the last day the show would be open to the public and I didn't want to miss it.
My priest, a former Oberlin professor of architecture, agreed to give me a special dispensation and the morning off if I promised to visit the museum's Medieval room. That's how Episcopal priests are these days: always looking to be hipper than thou in a retro way.
"Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands, 1550-1720" got a rave review from PG art critic emeritus Donald Miller at the end of November. A friend read the review and made her way to Cleveland in early December to see what 170 years of painting excellence looked like. Last week, one of my colleagues in the editorial department saw the exhibit and agreed with Donald and my friend: This show was not to be missed on pain of death.
Peer pressure may have gotten folks through the door, but those with souls were stopped by the sheer beauty of the exhibit. The galleries were full, but standing before paintings of succulent grapes, porcelain Chinese tea cups, curling lemon peels and glistening pewter still felt like acts of solitary communion.
Getting lost in the details of three dimensional illusions on two dimensional surfaces is even more amazing for us moderns upon realizing that several of the more gorgeously rendered paintings have been with us nearly half a millennium.
So I stared at Johannes Torrentius' "Allegory of Temperance" painted in 1614 and thought about the transience of earthly things because the artist demanded that I face life with realism and self-discipline.
I considered the decadence of Pieter Aertsen's "Meat Pantry of an Inn, with the Virgin Giving Alms" and shivered at the cult of consumption it satirized in the red hot capitalist year 1551. I'm not one of those Marxist aesthetes who thinks every skinned boar's head is a secret indictment of capital, but I suspect Aertsen and his colleagues would've had a field day with the conspicuous consumption of our own day.
The beauty of the show hinged upon the skill and audacity of the painters. Some placed human skulls and flickering candles in the center of compositions ostensibly celebrating the burgeoning middle class. But there was no escaping the lessons they meant to convey: everybody's days are numbered, even the rich. But fear not, there is a rough equality in death. Wow!
Today's trendy "Goths" could learn a thing or two from painters like Pieter Boel and Floris van Dijck. It seems a cruel irony that so many contemporary art lovers dismiss representational paintings simply because they're accessible.
I felt humbled by the show and retreated to the Medieval room for perspective. Eventually I wandered into other exhibits. Jacob Lawrence's 15 print series on Touissant L'Ouverture, the hero of the Haitian revolution and a collection of illuminated manuscripts down the hall turned me around all over again. Meaning and beauty was evident in many styles. It wasn't the sole possession of a few Dutch masters, as tempting as it was to believe it that afternoon.
Strolling to my car minutes before the museum closed, I couldn't help smiling. Even the overcast sky wasn't going to change my mood. Though hungry, I felt oddly refreshed. It was easy to wonder if I'd somehow made it to church that day after all.
Tony Norman's email: tnorman@post-gazette.com