I traveled to the Minneapolis Institute of Art but found that there were no ticketed shows. Works from the collection, of course, comprise the vast majority of things on display and, so, I just walked around at random for an hour, exploring parts of the museum not familiar to me. Unlike the Walker Art Center, where much of the art is intentionally ugly and confrontational in a superficial way, the objects assembled for viewing at the MIA are mostly beautiful with interesting and complex histories and, so, the place is ideal for browsing. You will almost always find something to delight you.
In a gallery that I haven't entered for years, small figurative paintings from Persian are displayed, most illuminated books particularly images culled from The Book of Kings (Shahnemah). Much Islamic art is abstract or calligraphic, limited by religious prohibitions on graven images. But the Persians seem to ignored those restrictions and created many lively, brightly painted images, small format illustrations to books. A tiny work of genius, "Two Drunkards", was made in the Sefavid era (about 1600). The image, displaying extraordinary draftsmanship, shows two elegantly clad men in a garden represented by faintly limned flowers, more like shapely brownish stains than actual vegetation. The men look alert, although one of them seems to have fallen, but the title of the work is "Two Drunkards." The older upright man reaches down to lift his fallen comrade. Both have knotted turbans over their handsome faces and the upright figure sports a black smudge of sfumato beard. The men carry little daggers on their hips and their fingers and hands are exquisitely diagrammed by the ink used to outline them -- this is ultra-stylish calligraphy transformed into an image and the black and grey and brown-blotched picture (leaves in the garden) is a masterpiece. The drawing is decisive, expressing the figures in what appears to be a continuous perfect line showing no trace of hesitation or pentimenti. I don't recall seeing this picture before but its the sort of thing that transfigures your entire day once you have spent some time with it. (The image probably has something to do with the Sufi sect of Islam, a mystical order of dervishes who celebrated their love of God with ecstatic whirling dance -- equated here, I think, with drunken revelry.)
A show of photographs by Gordon Parks comprises a photo-essay made in 1942 about a Federal janitorial worker in Washington D. C., Ella Watson. The images are black-and-white and very lucidly composed. Watson was a charwoman who worked evenings cleaning federal offices. During the day, she cared for three small children and a teenage girl who shyly peeps around corners or is glimpsed in mirror in several of the photographs -- the adolescent was probably too self-conscious to allow Parks to take her picture. Parks' celebrates Watson's dignity, her apparent selflessness, and piety -- she was a deaconess is a "Spiritualist" church, the Verbrycke Spiritual Church in her neighborhood. In some images, we see her with head bowed in church wearing a simple black frock and a silver cross pinned to her shoulder. She cooks for the children, reads them Bible stories, and bathes them in Park's luminous images. In several pictures, she works in federal offices wielding a mop and broom. In the most famous and charismatic of these pictures, she stands gazing out at us in front of a big American flag, holding her mop and broom as if they were weapons of war. Parks invokes the WPA-style murals painted in the preceding decade featuring farmers and laborers as heroes and Ella Watson, who looks dour and unsmiling, is celebrated in his pictures as a proletarian champion, a heroine of courage, faith, and steadfastness. (The show is called "American Gothic" since Parks imagined his frontal portrait of Watson as a commentary on the famous "American Gothic" painting by Grant Wood.) Watson is not conventionally attractive but the photographs make her look highly intelligent and, despite her slender, willowy frame, powerful -- it's impossible to figure out how old she might be in these pictures. Parks later worked as chief photographers for Life magazine and he pioneered the form of the visual essay -- the genre to which these pictures belongs. (Parks lived for part of his life in St. Paul and, in his later years, made movies, most notably, The Learning Tree and the influential crime film Shaft -- one of the first, and most notorious, Blaxploitation films.) A haunting image in the show pictures Ella Watson at church wearing cross lapel pin and a necklace (no doubt a religious charm) next to a sort of terrarium in which a foot-long naked saint rests on his side surrounded by plush curtains. Lettering on the wall tells us that this is "Joseph's New Tomb"; on the wall above the aquarium-shrine, a framed photograph shows the pastor of the church preaching to his flock. It's a very strange, impressive, and mysterious image. I liked this show and recommend it when you have some other business at the MIA and, also, urge you to seek out the little picture of the two Sufi drunkards. (The drunkards are in Room 207 I believe, the last room on the right side of the big hallway leading to the ticketed exhibitions in the Target Galleries; the Parks show will be on display until mid-June 2024.)
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