Museums’ Memories

Special thanks to Mary Christian and Katie Eberth for consulting on art and architecture.

Let’s go to the museum. Walk with me, into the grand entryways with giant skylight windows shedding sunny expectancy on the growing morning queues. Stand with me in the cold outside the Musée d’Orsay (or MO, as it’s affectionately termed) on free entry day. We can talk about the paintings we’re most excited to see. I can ask you where you’re from, you can ask me if I’ve been here before. When we enter, we can take each other’s photos in front of Starry Night Over the Rhône.

I looked across that same view over the river at night one November. It was a pilgrimage, if you will, to stand in the spot where Vincent painted. The view in reality did not compare; the painting is more alive than life. It is something we all know about Van Gogh, it is more than a little obvious. But experiencing the contrast in reverse in the very same spot impressed it upon me differently. I had the same thought about his art that we always do. But rather than the emotional pull of the vibrant painting, I instead felt the lacking chill of the real dark night.

Shall we step together now, further into the sculpted and painted worlds that speak of our reality in the fervent tones of our very nature?

Or perhaps we’ll be tourists having some fun. Take my photo in front of the large window clock. I’ll take yours. The iconic shape of its black backwards face contrasts starkly with the light through the windows. It’s a pretty backdrop for a photo, both now and five years ago, eight years ago, the times I’ve been here before.

And so time ticks on, the present moments measured by its larger-than-life hands; just as we wander the past.

The buildings that become museums tell a story in themselves. Look up at the crystal chandeliers of a palace; pull back a red velvet curtain at the door of a church; crowd beneath the vaulted space of an ornate train station; tiptoe across the creaking floors of an old house. Or, though they have always been museums, we may still marvel at the edifices designed ground-up to display arts and cultures.

Facts fill small signs scattered across these varied walls and floors, words that only one person in five stops to read. Help me remember to take photos of the most interesting ones, so that we can remember the stories behind the objects. See over there, a porcelain vase from the ancients that a suffragette smashed to pieces. It had to be pieced back together painstakingly, as with the freedoms the protesting woman hoped to win; her violence against the beautiful displaced treasure and the hands that restored it became at once a piece of it. On another sign, read about the small rock engraved with a letter home to someone’s mother. Or discover a piece of terracotta shopping receipt lasting centuries longer than the return-by date.

Try not to stumble as we make our way across the knobby cobbles of Oxford into the Ashmolean, making a direct turn into a hallway of Greco-Roman-Victorian hobnobbery. The gallery sheds light on the dastardly attempts of restorers to refinish old statues with disproportionate heads and poorly matched materials.

In keeping with its University home, the Ashmo shares many teachings with us. A scientific finding of pigment on old statues has been turned into a somewhat grotesque-looking Caesar. Perhaps the colors are accurate. But there is artistry missing in this paint-by-numbers coloring, similar to the artistry that is missing in the Victorian restorations. (Thankfully our current sensibility prevents us from modifying the actual statues themselves.) Maybe you’ll say I’m romanticizing. Or maybe you’ll say there’s a lesson to be learned in this, as well.

Further along we find an immaculate replica of a giant bronze man, indistinguishable by our untrained eyes from the original we might view with astonishment in Greece. Our astonishment at the original comes courtesy of my Art History Minor sister, who impressed upon me the rarity of such bronze built specimens.

Step further backwards in time with me and we can walk together with my sister through the object of her first study. In the shadow of Yellowstone’s slumbering super-volcano, the Museum of the Rockies’ Oplontis exhibit envisions a place destroyed by the fire and ash of Mount Vesuvius. We can learn from my sister as she relates the history of art and culture preserved by disaster.

Or join us for the hours she and I spent waltzing the Met in the center of NYC. If you’d rather not miss out on a high-piled pastrami sandwich, however, I suggest you instead follow our other sister and our mom to the deli. It’s your choice as well, between their excursion for Indian and Mediterranean street food, and ours to the MOMA to revel in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. It’s a short trip, you see, we must move on quickly.

But if you join me in my memories of museums you will find many opportunities to stare into the soulful paint of that one ill-fated artist.

Yes, if the works of Van Gogh move you, we can take the train to Amsterdam for a day with the express intent of visiting the museum completely dedicated to him. We can stand for an eternity to lose ourselves in his letters, his self-portraits, the almond-blossoms painted for his nephew, or of the bedroom painting that is there; or we can go to the bedroom back at the MO in Paris; or the bedroom in the air-conditioned oasis of the Art Institute of muggy hot summer Chicago. Insanity, peace, peace, insanity...we could argue over the state of the artist’s mind indefinitely. But always for him, and always for us, it is the paint: the thick, lively, moving paint.

While you are in Amsterdam with me, we won’t take a moment for the old Dutch masters. But fear not. Many can be viewed in one of several late-night January excursions to the Louvre. And you can also skip across to Japan with me for a Vermeer exhibition in Osaka months after the fleeting train ride to Amsterdam. You see, it’s just like Whistler’s Mother; she was gone during my last visit to the MO, but we were able to see her at an exhibit in Seattle. Or was it San Francisco? They were both during my childhood, and so if you would like to come along with me in my memory it might be a little fuzzy as to the west coast city in which we may find her.

One may see works of the most popular artists scattered all over the world. And one may also never see others, ones that belong in the collections of private individuals. Join me, if you like, for a special exhibition in Paris where many usually-sequestered pieces by artists such as Van Gogh, Degas, Monet, or Camille Claudel can be viewed at a very special and particular length of time.

Some of the privately-owned works could not be photographed. They exist in a moment and time that memory has clouded over. I wish I could describe them for you; but alas, I did not jot down any notes to aid my foggy remembrance. They existed in that present, vibrant moment. As a memory, they do not exist in this one.

Seeing more than one of something multiplies the memory of it. Prints and bronze casts, authentic identical twins, triplets, octuplets, are each as original as another. The Thinker at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco is no less Rodin’s Le Penseur than the one at the museum named for the sculptor in Paris. The Burghers of Calais at that musée are just as much originals as those set before the backdrop of Westminster.

Yes, London; it is a city of museums. We can explore either the history of British art, or immersive modern installations, at one Tate or another. We can take in old and new together during Late at the Tate, blending nightlife and Tate Britain’s collections. It’s a fun night out. But I’d recommend coming along with me to see the Pre-Raphaelite paintings another time. Their rich strokes of real fantasy are not easily enjoyed under multicolored strobe lights.

Walk away from the Thames and into the city to the British Museum; there, witness the breathtaking backdrop of a Doric-columned gallery, showcasing the taken Parthenon marbles of someone else’s gods. Turn a corner of the world, as high stone gives way to expansive glass. We enter the Acropolis Museum in Athens, looking out its transparent curtain walls to the surreal vista of the temple itself atop a rocky outcrop. And we might become a little sad. For in this beautiful showcase of their real home, mere replicas of the fragmented Parthenon bodies sit. Perhaps it is here that they rightfully belong, and perhaps someday they shall return. But maybe we can also pause, with gratitude. For while housed in a city reached more easily by travelers from a greater number of countries, these gods enjoyed accessibility for millions of people. What is the price of allowing mortals access to Olympus? It is a price that Athens may someday no longer have to pay.

We can philosophize on this, like the ancient Greeks of old, or like the French grandfather who cherishes the history and meaning for French culture that other countries’ art earned during its tenure there. La Jaconde, and her Mona Lisa smile, knew practical anonymity before infamous French museum adventures turned her first into a kidnapped princess and then an iconic celebrity. One wonders if her fame itself has turned her demure smile into one that is coy and knowing. If we fly to Milan on silver wings we can view another Da Vinci, The Last Supper. As we marvel at the light that emanates from the master’s paint, we hear of the miracle of its survival, on a lone wall surrounded by the rest of the crumbling structure, destruction wrought by the bombs of Allies trying to destroy a regime of evil.

Wandering the long courtyard hallway of the Victoria & Albert museum, a plaque once passed by on a prior visit tells us the war story of the showcase of Rodins. As bombs brought death to London, the museum gave shelter to a traveling exhibit of the sculptor’s works. When the war ended, Auguste offered the whole display as a gift in gratitude to the U.K.’s service in the Allies’ cause.

Articles flash across my screen, recommended by the bots that have scanned this draft before anyone else can read it. Like a scene from a movie, a protester throws cake at the Mona Lisa, smearing it across her glass. Rose petals fall to the floor as the man is escorted away. A vandal in Texas wreaks destruction on priceless pieces, including ancient Greek terracottas. One wonders about the pottery smashed in their own age thousands of years ago, in accidents, fights, burglaries. Another damaged piece was described as a contemporary Native American ceramic, threatened to be lost a mere 35 years after its creation. Perhaps these shall return to display, like the vase in the British Museum, after reconstruction by skilled hands. Regardless of misadventure, it is only thanks to such skilled restorers that any art passes down to prosperity.

Images flash across a small cinema screen in Calgary, Alberta. Rain, wind, enormous waves crash. A grainy picture and breaking up audio show the captain of a cargo freighter as he faces a terrible decision. Urged by his friend on the phone to abandon ship, he instead decides to stay. He insists on protecting the hold of inanimate passengers: pieces of art, priceless. Irreplaceable. Costing human life.

During the wars that devastate, brave souls risked their own lives to hide and protect art. Other treasures became smuggled or stolen. Klimt’s gold, more valuable than its weight in it, was fought for in the courts by the woman to whose family it belonged. Just as the Jewish family fled Germany to the U.S., so too does the painting and many of its cousins find a home now in New York City. My Art History Minor sister brought us to see it; her husband hangs a copy of it on their wall.

Records of provenance and intense scientific methods provide proof of authenticity that even an expert eye could miss. The basis of a creation’s value to its creator (its intrinsic emotion and rebellion) shifts, until the worth of the creation is based on the creator’s name and notoriety. Art becomes artifact. In place of emotions evoked or skills showcased, its story and place in our past becomes the answer to the question: Is it real?

But as we meander through these memories of museums, indulging in philosophy, another question arises. It floats above our heads as we take in Grecian art in England, art privately owned, art with errant additions, art that war has given a new sense of place . . .

To whom, we wonder, does art belong?

And we hope that the answer is us.