She taught us how to look. Required to visit the Metroplitan Museum of Art often, I remember studying the El Greco's for hours, struggling to select one about which to write a critical essay. I finally settled on The Opening of the Fifth Seal ("The Vision of St. John"). I returned many times to the museum to look and make notes, look and make notes. I loved that painting -- its energy and movement, play of light and shadow, upward-moving composition of repeated elongated shapes and bold brush strokes. I don't remember how I did on the paper, but I remember the looking and the beauty and the joy of writing about what I saw, and that, of course, was the point.
Today's New York Times offers an article titled "At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus" about a phenomenon I've noticed in museums since I started going to them: the streams of "viewers" who read the labels and move on or who take photographs and move on, as if collecting bits of "experience" they can tick off a mental list. Years after my El Greco experience, also at MMA, I was happily spending time with Grant Wood when a young couple breezed in the room and asked the guard, "Where's the famous painting? That's the one we came to see." The guard and I unobtrusively glanced at each other before he answered.
In his article, Michael Kimmelman says that he and his son take sketchbooks to museums, not because they are fine artists, but because the act of sketching forces them to slow down and look. I did the same thing one summer when I spent almost a month in Oxford, England. In the Ashmolean for most of an afternoon, I recorded an overheard conversation as well as an impression of a few objects.
Yesterday, I blogged about a way of looking aided by the camera, but I snap in the natural world of flux, not in a museum. The object there before me does not change, though I do in the looking. I love both ways of seeing for the same reason: the pleasures of "slow looking" (Kimmelman's phrase).
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