ART IMPRESSIONS

Europe » France » Nord-Pas de Calais » Lille
October 7th 2007

Published: October 8th 2007

This is going to be a really random, jumbled entry. Today I went to the Palais des Beaux Arts (Art Museum) in Lille. I took a notepad and paper with me and jotted down whatever thoughts crossed my mind as I went past. I can already tell you that I plan on going back there often. Eventually there will be pictures, but today I just wanted to write.

Please bear in mind that I do not claim to know anything about art at all. However, I also believe that you needn’t know anything about art to write about it. In fact, sometimes it’s better not to know anything; that way, the reactions are purely personal. I can imagine it being reassuring to the artists as well, proving that their art could reach all sorts of people.

Two paintings by Martin Joseph Geeraerts. Small children playing outside. Done in shades of grey on canvas (no black). What struck me about these was not their subject matter, but the technique. The paintings were done with definite lines and with lots of shading so they actually looked like they were sculpted out of grey stone instead of being painted on canvas. It was really neat - art mimicking art mimicking life.

A sculpture in bronze by Ossip Zadkine called Forêt Humaine (Human Forest). This one was quite abstract and chaotic. There were arms and legs everywhere, grasping onto and wrapped around other tree trunk-like structures. However, the arms and legs were not neatly and delicately chiseled out, but rough suggestions of arms and legs. This made it so that there were certain parts of the sculpture that, even when you looked at them carefully and for more than a few fleeting seconds, you couldn’t tell if it was an arm, a leg, or just a tree trunk. I liked this one because it was so crazy. The arms and legs were everywhere, and it was hard to tell which ones - if any - belonged together because they were all thrown in with the tree trunks. The intertwined pieces - arms locked, legs around tree trunks, etc. - made perfect sense to me. We’re all searching to make sense of our lives. Everyone needs to feel that their life has a purpose, so we are all constantly reaching out, grasping for anything that makes us feel this way. We make connections, hold onto things, detach from others… we’re all thrown into the same world together.

François Pompon - Le Transi - a sculpture in stone of a decomposing skeleton. The skeleton is standing up. He is looking up toward the sky, his left hand (holding an apple) also outstretched toward the sky. On his right arm is a shield. This one was problematic for me. It was disturbing, because it really looked like a decomposing body, but it was standing as though it were alive. The face (just a skull, actually) still seemed to have an expression that wavered between anguish (a combination of the shape of the eye sockets and the position of the head looking up) and some form of relief (skeletons are all smiling, after all). The apple in the skeleton’s left hand added to the anguish, as though he were asking how he had gotten to such a sorry state. Then, however, I saw the shield. The only part of the sculpture that has any smooth surface, it stands out in stark contrast to the body. Then what? This person died in battle? Are we saying something about war, or about how humans, when in groups, are prone to it? Or..? I was just frustrated, because I wanted it to just be about him instead of about mankind, and the shield was suggesting that it was not so.

François-Dominique-Aimé Milhomme. Hermaphrodite. Marble sculpture of a woman lying on a bed. What astonished me about this one was how incredibly SOFT the bed looked. It looked as though it was molded around the woman’s soft, curvy body, and as though if you were to touch it, it would just as easily give under the pressure of your fingertips. And it’s marble! I’m just in awe of how an artist can take such a cold, solid material and give it the illusion of being everything it is not.

Next: four busts. Two of bronze, two in stone. Two by Charles-Louis Corbet and two by Philippe Laurent Roland. These were probably my favorite. They are busts of older men with curly wigs (George Washington-style), and they were all looking to one side or the other and smiling. Four different smiles, too, but all seeming to be smirking and hiding something mischievous. Whoever had placed them had put them in such positions that they were all exchanging glances and smirks. I literally laughed out loud when I realized that - it was great! They have their own private joke going on over in one corner of the otherwise serious, quiet, impersonal hall.

Again with placement: Two marble statues of women done by Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. One woman is pouring water, and the other is just standing. They are placed right across from a HUGE window. On such a sunny day, the sun was pouring into the room, and most of the rays fell directly on these two women. Genius, because both women’s heads were tilted slightly down, and they both had their eyes shut, as though the sun were too bright for them to stand facing directly.

Antigona. A (huge) painting by Jean-Pierre Alexandre. A woman is holding her infant up in the air, eyes pleading, a desperate expression on her face. Two children quietly pray in the foreground. Behind and above the woman, the first thing you see, an angel bathed in light, glowing. However, this painting gives ZERO sense of relief or comfort. The angel is also looking upward, arms out to her sides, as though she is asking why these people have to be in such a state. Or maybe she’s asking if God (or whatever Higher Being to whom she is responsible) is sure that things have to be carried out this way. This is a really disconcerting painting, because usually paintings with angels give at least some sense of calm or relief, but not here.

Luc-Olivier Merson. Le loup d’Agubbio. Painting. In the doorway of a small village butcher shop, a man feeds a scrap of meat to a wolf with a halo around its head. A woman and her children are standing nearby, not really looking at the wolf, but you somehow know that they are aware of its presence. What I love about this painting is that the butcher’s face and the woman’s face are painted with extraordinary detail, but somehow the overall painting is still very soft. Perhaps it is because of all the shades of grey in the buildings and pinks in the meats hanging in the shop window. At any rate, I just really liked how this painting had so much detail in parts and still looked soft and somewhat blurred.

Monet. Verbeuil le Marin. Painting of a city on the water in the morning. What I love about this one are the colors. Soft, dusty blues, delicate pinks, sea foam greens, greys… You can sense the morning - you can just FEEL the morning sun’s rays, and you can tell that it’s the type of day where, when you feel those first beams of light through the thick, humid morning air, you can tell that it will be a very warm day by the time noon rolls around.

So those are my impressions about a few of the works I saw today.

Impressions about art in general:

I’m still astonished when I see those huge paintings that take up a whole museum wall. When the artist sat down to start a painting like that, where did he start? Did he just start splashing the outside perimeter of the canvas with the colors he knew would be involved? Did he start with the person to whom our eye, as museum-goer/temporary art critic, goes first? Did he start with the background people and details?

The walls in the museum are mostly the white-grey color of the stone that make them up. Upstairs, though, there are two rooms whose walls are a deep, rich red color. This completely changes the atmosphere. Instantly, the room is warmer and smaller. Also, different colors pop - blues, for example, become almost three-dimensional. I wonder who decided to do that, and how they chose which works would go in those rooms.

Everyone is impressed by works that are very precisely detailed and look positively real. I am not excluding myself from this, either. However, I think there is something to be said for more concrete lines, flat colors, and paintings that are slightly more two-dimensional. After all, even if you’re trying to depict something real, whatever that something is only existed in the precise moment in which it occurred. Any recreation is therefore already quite false. Not only will you inevitably forget certain details, or not have noticed them in the first place, but the image you have created in your head is quite subjective. You focus on what caught YOUR eye the most. It’s kind of nice, then, to see a picture that is slightly less detailed and “realistic” - it gets the point across just the same, and it’s a reminder that we are looking at art, at an idea of a specific place and moment in time (and a specific mood and moment and place in the artist’s life as well).

Okay, that’s all for now.

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