Take the kids to the museum

RPH #12

take your kids to see the pictures

“Oh, don’t take the baby (2 year old, 5 year old etc. etc.) to the big painting show. They will just cry and bother everyone else.” This, my dear cousins, is a lie. On Tuesday I walked by a dancing 2 1/2 year old standing in a line with her parents. She was letting off some of that endless steam and keeping the people around her entertained. When I saw her again, about an hour later, she had a tiny meltlet (that’s not a real meltdown, just a couple of little squeaks) because she was tired but her daddy held her and she fell asleep on his shoulder. She didn’t bother anyone, she didn’t stand in the way of any painting and she didn’t complain at the size of the crowd. She did manifest one of the important truths of my childhood: take your kid to the museum.

The De Young and the Legion of Honor were cheap days out in the late 1950’s. My father was a cub art teacher at Roosevelt Jr. High, and my mother was at home with two little girls starting elementary school. They had no money; thank God both of them loved to camp, or there wouldn’t have been any vacations. But they had two pretty fine museums and we went. First we went in strollers and then we toddled along with our parents, and we remembered. The first artist I remember liking is Henri Fantin-Latour, because he painted beautiful flowers. This is my point, take your children, grandchildren, cousins and young friends to the museum, they will remember.

This wild imperative is because of the current show at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and that little girl. The Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée D’Orsay is one of the best shows I’ve ever seen and cousins, I’ve seen a lot. Tuesday at noon, our little party walked into the first room, with perfect examples of what the French Academy wanted in the middle of the 19th century. There was the luscious and perfectly composed “Birth of Venus.”— a large canvas (7’ x 3 1/2’?) on a classical (Greek or Roman) subject, perfectly rendered and very cool. (No matter how beautiful the nudes, male or female, they are removed from the observer.) These are the paintings that the Academy accepted. They honored, they celebrated but they did not move, not even the perfectly proportioned “Madonna of Solace” which shows a distraught mother draped over the lap of the Virgin and the baby, dead, at the feet of the Mother of God. The infant’s grayish, porcelain body is perfect in death and the mother’s aspect is genteel grief. This picture is what I don’t like about the French Academy of the middle 19th century.

The genius of this show is the time it takes to tell its story. We don’t leap from the cold perfection of the Academics to Cezane. The tale unfolds from Corot and Breton to James McNeill Whistler. You think you know “Arrangement #1 in Grey and Black: portrait of the artist’s mother” but it is a revelation. On the cusp between the formalism of the Academy and looking forward to what will come, Whistler’s “Mother” is totally involving and worth the whole price of admission.

take the kids to the museum

The “New”, as critic Robert Hughes calls it, comes in stages and each painter comes in his or her own way. Manet and Caillebotte are the true Januses, who look forward and back. “The Floor Scrapers” of Gustave Caillebotte and the “The Fife Player” by Édouard Manet are perfect examples of what happens when formalists look at real life.

But back to the question of small children looking at paintings. All of the images that we’ve reviewed are comprehensible to even the youngest viewers, if they aren’t asleep. They can appreciate the straight backed lady in the rocking chair and the boy in the baggy uniform playing a little flute. I’m not so foolish as to suggest that the Horrors of War by Goya is suitable for anyone under the age of 10. (It will give 10-year-olds nightmares, just like the rest of us.) But the minds of young children are fed by wonderful paintings. They will tell themselves stories for the pictures and so remember.

There were also middle and high school folks in this treasure trove. They were listening, almost to a person, to the gallery walk. Try as they might, they couldn’t keep up the bored, adolescent facade. They looked and could not stop looking—I do wish I could talk to them. Just as there is nothing like live theatre to open and fire the imagination, there is nothing like real paintings to do the same.

Now we enter into the first real flower of Impressionism and all bets are off. Alfred Sisley has three paintings, in three different styles, painted within 2 years of each other and that, my dears, is why a show of this size is so exciting. To watch a painter experiment and change is such a thrill. In the middle rooms we come to the man who brought me to Impressionism long before I knew the word, August Renoir. Yes, he could paint junk, but when he was good, he was so good. The little girl got tired in the room with a very large portrait of a very grand lady by our own August. I think it frightened our small art lover because it was so big. Very large (6’6” X 3’?) it represents a handsome, full figured lady whose hair is up in lustrous braids and she stands in a ruffled satin afternoon gown. Any fairy lover will love this picture.

But look, over on the right hand wall, there is a small perfection by the same guy. Sketched with a very fast hand is the image of a little gully in springtime in Algeria. It might not interest the child but will feed the soul of the parent. For here is light and shadow and grass and heat and all in little space. Breathe deep, and look, it will give you strength for the journey.

Manet and Caillebotte have another thing in common: they both supported other painters. Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) had a lot of private money from textiles, and he spent a little of it on his friend’s paintings. When he died, far too young, he left his collection of over 500 pieces to the nation of France. They didn’t want them all. Don’t get me started! Édouard Manet is the patron saint of this entire show. In fact there is an apotheosis painting by Fantin-Latour of Manet and his circle. There is the saintly Manet (he really was a good guy, who supported his friends) with Zola and Renoir (very young) and a whole bunch of other luminaries. I could go on and on about Pissaro and Monet and Morisot and I can’t truly describe what I saw.

This particular show is short lived, as all the great ones are. Because the D’Orsay is doing a full refit, we luxuriate in their treasures. But, cousins, our own collections are like Ali Baba’s cave, filled with unknown jewels. The De Young, the Legion of Honor, the SF MOMA, the Asian Art and our own Oakland Museum of Art, all polished up and pretty. Take those babies and children and sullen teenagers to museums and show them the pictures. You will have a good afternoon and they will remember.