Adventures in Cultural Expansion, Part II

The Met, Van Gogh, and my Grandfather

Since we moved here we’ve not gone into the City much. Navigating transportation can be an issue for me, since I screwed up my back while moving and spent over a year basically in a “minimal moving” sort of state. I’m much improved now (in that I can go up and down the stairs, walk down the street without a brace, go to the store) but after 3 or 4 hours of light activity, or an hour of more strenuous walking, my whole body starts to… not. The more activities you add to the outing, the more likely it is that I’ll get to our destination and need to turn around and leave. Since Emma doesn’t drive in the City, we’ve had to be sparing with our adventures, which is fine; it isn’t like there’s nothing to do right here in Rockland.

But there was this exhibit, Van Gogh’s Cypresses, that we really wanted to see at the Met. And it is going away August 27th, so we were running out of opportunities.

Last Monday, I took a big leap and drove Emma, her sister Alicia, and Alicia’s boyfriend Gabe to the City to see the Cypresses at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was honestly not a difficult drive; I totally built it up in my head to be awful, but in reality, I’ve had worse traffic on game day in Arlington, or most any day in Austin. With the help of our navigation system and some planning, we avoided almost all traffic, and it was a really easy drive—which helped tremendously when faced with the big day we had ahead.

I’ve been interested in art since I was a kid and my grandfather, an artist, used to take me to the Dallas Museum of Art on little field trips. We’d go see the “Old Masters” first, always. He’d ask me what I saw, in all the Impressionist landscapes and refined portraits. Then we’d do my favorite part, and go upstairs to see the furniture and pottery. I’ve always loved it when things we actually use are art, or at least are artful. That’s why my room is Like This.

Then we’d do what was arguably his favorite part: we’d go to the basement where they were keeping the modern art at the time, and he’d show me different pieces, and he’d ask me, “What do you think about this?”

As a ten-year-old I didn’t know that Mark Rothko’s “Untitled (Red)” was anything except a colorwash that looked like I could do it myself (which is, I think, something Rothko also argued; that childish painting was in the same conversation as modern art). I expressed this idea, and others, while touring that basement with Peep. He never judged my opinions, nor did he validate them. He simply kept asking.

“What do you think about this?”

“What do you think about this one?”

“What do you think when you see that?”

It was, in essence, a kind of training. In taking me to the DMA early and often, Peep trained my brain to look at art, to think about it, to express my thoughts and feelings—he prepared me to be critical, and confident, which absolutely affected the way I interacted with all other media. If I could be critical of “all those dots” in a Monet painting, could I not also be critical of the movie we were watching, or the book I was reading? Nothing was off limits, and for a girl in a high-control religious environment that urged me to keep my opinions to myself, this was a kind of freedom I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to have. I had it. It changed me.

It’s still changing me.

The Met is, in a word, breathtaking. The environs themselves feel like they reverberate with all the energy of the paintings on the walls and the people viewing them. As I walked through exhibition halls swirling with visitors who talked in so many different languages, who held hands and held up phones, who gathered in clumps and drifted through hallways, it was impossible not to feel the scale of the building. It’s huge. It’s so huge that we saw like, 3.5 exhibits and it took four hours, a ton of walking, and all my energy.

It was magnificent.

I know that I’m hanging out with the right person because when I go to a museum and start crying, I can feel Emma smiling at me, and I know she has tears in her eyes too. Looking hungrily at something beautiful is in my nature, it’s core programming that drives me back for one more look, then one more, then one—

Standing in the crush of people in front of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” being jostled as folks tried to take selfies or pictures of their kids, cleaning off my glasses where they got fogged up from my mask—none of it mattered when I saw the loving way the cypress was rendered in that painting. The texture, the context, the conductive way it seemed to draw energy from the crowd and push it back. I went back, over and over, to see it just once more. Basic, even plebian tastes to be infatuated with such a popular painting, perhaps.

But when I looked at it, I felt my own love for the stars, for the trees, for the open spaces, for recovery, for making things, for art and class and humanity, for the extremely small window of time we’re on this planet and the lasting marks we leave.

So yeah. I cried.

I cried in the halls of the European paintings. I cried in the Cypresses exhibit. I cried in the exhibit of Berenice Abbott’s New York. I cried in the Musical Instruments collection. I cried looking at the Tiffany Glass while sitting in a water puddle.

I didn’t cry in the Arms & Armor section because a really cute little boy was walking through and saying, “I like that sword, and that sword, and that sword—” about every sword in the place, and frankly, I too liked all those swords.

I cried over lunch when I told Emma about how, at art school, so many of my classmates believed their mental illness made them creative. For years I didn’t seek help for my own mental illness because I thought it would destroy my ability to write. I didn’t know healing would make me a better writer, because people didn’t talk about that.

I thought I’d die for love of words, quite literally.

Even still, I never stopped loving the night sky, or the trees, or the safe places. And as we drifted through the end of our visit, my eyes turned from the art in protective cases or behind rope-strung stanchions, and toward the people around me. A young woman in a fashionable dress knelt down to take a photo of the armored horse models on display in the middle of the Arms & Armor exhibit, and then scowled at an unseeing couple who stationed themselves right in front of her to chat. A pair of old men joined us on the elevator, one of them wearing a mask and talking quietly about his medication; the other mentioning it was about time for lunch. Emma walked close to me, protective and supportive, as I moved between groups of viewers toward the exit. She reached for my hand when I got overwhelmed, looking at the courtyard filled with beautiful natural light.

We saw very little of the museum, but enough to ensure we’re already planning another visit. And yet, like my memories of going to Central Park with my Mama, or the DMA with Peep, I think this memory is one I’ll return to over and over: Emma pulling me gently off the bench in the Cypress exhibit, saying “There’s more to see over here,” and leading me, hand-in-hand, toward beauty.

XOXO,

Anne