It's my ambition to spend the waning years of my life looking at art and reading books on art history and criticism. Too late, it seems. My legs hurt now when I amble around art museums and my eyes don't focus well on the pictures -- it seems that I spend most of my time with my eyeglasses in my hand, stooped over to read labels. Gradually, it seems that my experience of museum art is more about the labels on the wall than the pictures which seem increasingly blurry to me. I've always favored graphic work, prints and engravings, and, indeed, this may be the only kind of image that I see clearly -- I can push my face up close to the image and, without my glasses, inspect the hachure and bite of the burin as exhibited by the print or engraving. It would be nice to visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art every month, but I can't seem to make the time and, so, I am at the museum usually at intervals of three months. I've been going to MIA since I was six and have been there many times and the place is very familiar to me although, on each occasion, I find something new and intriguing. On October 2, after a brief business meeting in St. Paul, I drove over to the Institute, planning to see just one or two galleries before driving back to Austin. But, as is always the case, I spent more time than I expected and, even, saw some things worthy of reporting to my readers. Hence, this note.
The Mexican landscape artist, Jose Maria Velasco, lived from1840 to 1912, dying two years after the first great revolution of a century of revolutions, the Mexican Revolution, began in 1910. Velasco is well-known, even revered in his home country, but, almost, completely unknown in the United States. About 20 works are on exhibit at the MIA; these range from small watercolors and studies (rocks, jungle vegetation, and clouds) to heroically sized canvases that are akin in subject matter and photo-realist detail to paintings by the American artists Bierstadt, Moran, and Fredric Erwin Church. (To my eyes, Velasco is most similar to Church with a little admixture of the visionary strain visible in Thomas Cole.) The selection of Velasco paintings include a number of perspectives on Mexican snow-capped mountains looming over the Vale of Mexico, a grim-looking apocalyptic waterspout (the picture is very small -- if it were larger, the thing would be overwhelming) and the eruption of a volcano. There's a startling picture of a feathery silver comet hanging over of one of Mexico's eerie endorheic lakes -- the huge comet is reflected in the dismal water trapped in a desert basin. (The label treats the painting as a harbinger of Mexican revolution -- the image portrays a celestial apparition about twenty years before the canvas was made at the time of the uprising. Velasco painted desert scenes with cactus and textile mills occupying the middle distance. A Cardon tree in Oaxaca looks like a platter held up on a trunk and bristling with sixty saquaro cactuses -- a little fellow is visible at the foot of the surrealistic tree to provide scale. A small painting of what Velasco calls a "rustic bridge" looks a bit like Menzel, it's a jerry-rigged collection of splintery planks hanging in trees drooping over a pond of murky water; however, the bridge, almost indiscernible in the tattered trees seems to have a pale skeleton tangled up in it -- on closer inspection, the skeleton is just a group of white anthropomorphic roots, although one must query why those roots have suddenly sprouted from the side of the tree about 10 feet above its base. Velasco's masterpiece is a majestic canvas called "The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isobel", a large-scale work that the artist painted for an exhibition in Vienna and that exists in, at least, three versions, two of which are in the show. Meticulously painted, the image, when reproduced for a book or Art Institute flyer, seems to be a photograph -- at full size, the canvas covers the wall (it's dimensions are 161 x 228 cm) and reveals its brush strokes. But, viewed from middle distance, the picture has a photo-realist quality. In the second iteration of the picture (1875), a woman carrying a baby walks along the stony hillside, two dogs and a small boy dancing in front of her; the woman imparts a sense of scale to the huge barren landscape spread out below the hill. In the middle distance, a pale grid with minute buildings marks the cathedral and outbuildings sacred to the Virgin of Guadalupe at the Tepec hill; farther away, a white stain on the valley floor, like an encrustation of salt, represents Mexico City -- the shallow lakes near the city extend to the right across a brown treeless steppe stretching to twin volcanoes on the horizon. The 1877 version of the scene is brighter; the texture of rocky hills and slopes is more visible. There are no figures. A skeletal nopal cactus stands roughly where the woman and dogs were earlier located; to the right, a hawk bearing some creature in its beak skates across a gorge cast into deep shadow. The bird of prey and the nopal cactus refer to the Aztec origin story; after emerging from caves from far to the north, the Aztec marched across the deserts for generations until they reached the promised land, a valley with a great salty lake filling its basin and an eagle perched on a nopal devouring a serpent.
Gatsby at 100 occupies two small rooms. The exhibit consists of paintings and objects from the Institute collection accompanied by quotations from Fitzgerald's novel. There's a first edition of the book with its spooky cover showing two disembodied eyes hovering over the title and a blue, hazy landscape. I don't think the juxtaposition of art and citations from the book is particularly successful -- the images seem mostly unrelated to the passages from the novel. But there are some fine things in the exhibit. A large 1928 lithograph of a very freely drawn nude by Matisse ("Nude, Left Hand over Shoulder") is particularly fine. A huge photograph showing mostly horizon with two farms at opposite ends of panorama is striking -- 2017 Tei Nguyen. A lithograph entitled "Minneapolis" (Louis Lozowick, 1925) show the city as square slab towers and great pillars of grain elevators, their columns round as the ranks of a pipe organ.
Every time I walk the corridors and exhibition spaces of the MIA, I discover new things, little treasures that I haven't seen before. An eerie late painting by Winslow Homer looks like Robert Motherwell; it's called "Cape Trinity, Soqueney River." A ribbon of moonlight illumines a huge black bluff overlooking water in which an odd, untethered strip of pale reflection shows. The label pursues the post hoc fallacy suggesting that the big, abstract black forms prefigure Homer's death in 1910 -- but the canvas was painted in 1904; it's not a premonition of anything but Abstract Expressionism forty-five years later. In a big room full of architectural models -- usually a place I ignore -- there's a metal ornament marked "Consultation Rooms" designed by Sullivan for the Farmers National Bank in Owatonna. The "t" letters in the legend are an architect's tee-square -- the thing is green, verdant with ornamentation, a beautiful object. Upstairs where the American folk paintings are hung, there's a huge canvas that seems to be a copy of Alfred Bierstadt's iconic painting, "The Last of the Buffalo". This painting is a parody by someone named Keith Monkman made in 2009 and is called the "Death of Adonis". A blonde cowboy, a bit like a young George Armstrong Custer, is falling backward from his steed. Another bison hunter lies dead on the ground. Aphrodite, portrayed as a sort of Vegas showgirl, with red spike heels and a naked ass squats next to the corpse. Another blonde cowboy ("cowboi"?) is being gored by a big, furious buffalo. (The image is cartoonish but striking and, particularly interesting, in light of another show in the Institute, a small room full of very strange renaissance prints called "The Weirdening of the Renaissance" -- the title suggests the jocular, cavalier tone on the explanatory labels. In one of the engravings, a nymph is scrubbing away at Aphrodite's private parts while Adonis, halfway transformed into a stag, struts forward, advancing like a post man carrying a letter or some kind of perverse butler or valet. (In the background of the engraving, poor Adonis, now fully metamorphosed into a stag is being torn apart by his own dogs.)
I was thrilled to find my favorite painting in the whole world on show, the miniature Indian image of "Lovers Watching an Approaching Thunderstorm". This small image was made between 1780 and 1790 by an anonymous craftsman of so-called Kangra School (workers in Himachal Pradish wherever that may be.) This picture is something that I would be happy to gaze upon forever, or, until my retina detaches under the pressure of the image, or until my eyesight is destroyed by wet (or dry) macular degeneration. It is the most wonderful thing and has not been on display for several years and so I am ecstatic to see it again.
