@ sixes & sevens

On Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum

Takashi Murakami: I open wide my eyes but see no scenery. I fax my gaze upon my heart., 2007 Acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on board. 242.6 x 281.9 cm. Collection of Linda and Harry Macklowe (source)

Prompted by a curmudgeonly review by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker and some contrasting exuberant encouragement from colleagues at work, I vowed to see what all the fuss at the Brooklyn Museum was about today. On a hunch I texted my Brooklyn buds Amy & Benny to see if they were free to join me, and we met up in front. I don't think I've seen the museum 'happening' as much as it was on this warm and overcast spring Saturday.

More sit-up sentences

I've been struck lately by the colorful writing of New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl. A passage in a recent review of the Martin Ramírez show the the Folk Art Museum came very close to inclusion in these posts:

Ramírez is one of the Big Three of twentieth-century outsiders [with Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger] ... He has in common with them an extravagant giftedness. All would have been stars in any art school, had they attended one. That they eluded contact with institutions of fine art owes something to personal disarray and something to chance, in a ratio impossible to gauge. It's a small thing, which makes them hard cases, exceptions proving the existence of a rule--that art, to be recognized as such, requires grounding in both individual biography and common culture. (my emphasis)

Then he did a gripping review (Issue of 2007-02-12, Posted 2007-02-05) of the Tintoretto show at the Prado. This abbreviated paragraph stopped me in my tracks:

In “Tarquin and Lucretia,” the naked, lividly fleshy protagonists struggle at the edge of a bed, toppling a sculpture and breaking a necklace that rains pearls. The woman’s right hand seems to extend from the canvas, as if to be grasped by a rescuing viewer. ... “The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence” is a sketchy and fierce nightmare of death by roasting, with an anticipatory whiff of Goya. (my emphasis)

I'm starting to get a sense of what it is that makes me sit up, but I'm reserving comment until I'm sure.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that Schjeldahl is also an accomplished poet. A compilation of Schjeldahl's prose writings has been published in The Hydrogen Jukebox (University of California Press, 1991). I should put that in my reading queue. It reminds me that a copy of Michael Kimmelman's The Accidental Masterpiece has been gathering dust in the living room since I bought it last July.