Monthly Archives: November 2009

Experiment: Slow Art

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Today I’m going to MoMA with a purpose: the challenge is to really look at a work. I mentioned a Slow Art event at MoMA a while ago. It asked participants to pick one or two works and just look at them from 15 minutes to an hour. I don’t think I can handle an hour–so I’m aiming for 30 minutes.

But now I have to choose what to look at for that long? I’m tempted to choose something in the Monet’s Water Lilies exhibition, because it will be big and pretty and I don’t know that I fully appreciate Monet.


I’ve also been checking out the permanent collection. Of course, I can’t go wrong with a Picasso. The collection has a magnificent collection of Odilon Redons–but they don’t seem to be on view. I love Klimt’s The Park, but I’m afraid I would get bored with it.


Of course, maybe I should choose something less well known. If they had Cy Twombly’s Four Seasons up, I know what I would choose (it’s another absolutely beautiful set of seasonal paintings.) I have quite the penchant for landscapes this morning. A portrait would also be a nice choice, because you could make up stories about the person. Ah well, decisions, decisions.

Anybody have any ideas?

A Bruegel For All Seasons

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder‘s The Harvesters, above, is an iconic fall painting for me. This large work, bursting with golden yellow tones, illuminates the room it hangs in at the Met, more reminiscent of a Van Gogh than of the 16th c. works around it. However, Fall is nearly over.
The painting below is more appropriate for days when it gets dark at 4:30 in the afternoon. Hunters in the Snow is a rare winter landscape of Bruegel, and one the similarly captures how a season feels. It’s flat grey sky and the starkness of the trees against the white snow exude chill. Like The Harvesters, it’s a picture that looks shockingly fresh and recent.

According to the Met’s excellent Heilbrun Timeline for Bruegel, the artist was trying to capture the different seasons in a commisioned series, sic:

For the Antwerp home of the wealthy merchant Niclaes Jongelinck, who owned no less than sixteen of the artist’s works, Bruegel executed a series of paintings representing the Seasons, of which five survive: Gloomy Day, Return of the Herd, Hunters in the Snow (all Vienna, Kunsthistoriches Museum), Haymaking (Prague, Národní Galerie), and The Harvesters. Though rooted in the legacy of calendar scenes, Bruegel’s emphasis is not on the labors that mark each season but on the atmosphere and transformation of the landscape itself.

Jungian Art?

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I’m fascinated by the recently published Red Book of CK Jung since I read this New York Times article, which is a unique, fabalistic account accompanied by drawings of Jung’s struggle with his unconsciousness. It happens to be the basis of Jungian thought, and shows Jung at his most unhinged, and perhaps transcendent. The drawing above is one that Jung did for the Red Book, which he used more as a journal, and is currently on view at the Rubin Museum of Art. The book has never been seen before. The museum describes the exhibition:

During the period in which he worked on this book Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation. It is possibly the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. More than two-thirds of the large, red, leather-bound manuscript’s pages are filled with Jung’s brightly hued and striking graphic forms paired with his thoughts written in a beautiful, illuminated style. Jung was fascinated by the mandala—an artistic representation of the inner and outer cosmos used in Tibetan Buddhism to help practitioners reach enlightenment—and used mandala structures in a number of his own works.

A great post on Artopia runs wild with mandalas and Jung and Aboriginal art…I highly recommend you check it out. It ends by arguing that none of these are, in fact, art, but tools of spiritual devotion. This kind of argument would rule out a fair chunk of the Western canon as well. Why can’t it be art and be a spiritual tool? However, it’s hard to fault someone who has turned me on to a really exciting exhibition I could have missed–I’ll have to report back after I check it out for myself.