Art offers two great gifts of emotion -- the emotion of recognition and the emotion of escape. Both take us out of the boundaries of self. - Duncan Phillips (1886 - 1966)
[Photo: Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, ca. 1922]
Wednesday, with mild summer weather, my friend Susan and I took a day trip to Atlanta's premier art museum. The High brought us, in the main exhibit hall, European art from the collection of Duncan Phillips, heir to fortune earned in steel, and art collector. These were mostly works I've never seen, by European artists I've admired for decades. Phillips's evocative juxtapositions and his appreciative commentary offered a road "out of the boundaries of self" for my friend Susan and me.
[Photo: At the exhibition's entrance, an enlargement of Degas's Dancers at the Barre, its most familiar image, clearly invited viewers to make a selfie, I thought. Susan wasn't so sure.]
The first pieces we see in the exhibit show the way Phillips worked. Two still life paintings side by side, from different centuries, generate conversation about what they share and how they differ. Nearby, we see different artists' roads, landscapes, and seascapes.
One vision of dancers in a studio took me out of myself; another did not. "The Spanish Ballet" by Edouard Manet (1862) faithfully records dancers' poses and colorful costumes with variety and detail, no more interesting than nice porcelain figures under glass. Next to it, Dance Rehearsal (1876) by Edgar Degas, draws us into a studio where ballerinas stretch, learn steps, chatter, or brood. The dancers glow with soft light reflected from floor - to - ceiling windows; details are lost in shadow, faces are averted, backs are turned to us: it feels like we walked in.
The Road to Vetheuil (1879) by Claude Monet and a view of a village street under snow by Alfred Sisley (1879) both have that same quality of drawing us into the frame. I sense what the air itself must be like; I can enter imaginatively into the villages beyond the curve of the road.
Phillips' comment that Van Gogh reveals his love and his faith in a painting of workmen making repairs to a village street made me wonder what Phillips was seeing. Susan and I speculated that simply dignifying common laborers at work expressed a love of humanity; she also pointed out how trees in the foreground, whose thick trunks break the street scene into panels, seem in their upper branches to swirl like tongues of flame, merging with the rooftops and the sky itself: a Pentecost - informed vision of Spirit bringing unity to the world?
The next couple of rooms were a challenge to me, as they were to Phillips, whose words on the wall declare
I am attracted to qualities of contemporary art precisely because they thrill me with refreshing differences from any qualities I have cherished before. - Duncan Phillips
In these rooms, Klee's hieroglyphics were fun, as were still lives by Braque in which he generated energy by friction, different angles on objects rubbing up against each other like pieces of a collage.
Most of all in these rooms, Susan and I enjoyed some works by Pierre Bonnard. Evidently, he has a fascination with windows and frames. There was a striking scene of greenery outside a window, viewed from inside a red room. In another scene, where there was no wall or window, Bonnard created one from overhanging branches.
We also viewed two other exhibits. Photography by Clarence John Laughlin dwelt on subjects and treatments that we associate with Gothic Southern fiction -- abandoned antebellum buildings, ghostly shadows, twisted forest. I was a bit uneasy, there, carrying with me what I'd heard a commentator say on NPR's program 1 - A, that "plantation" has always been a euphemism for "armed labor camp," and that we should no more have happy tours and wedding receptions at a plantation than we would have one at Auschwitz.
At the other exhibit, "Of Origins and Belonging, Drawn from Atlanta," we were intrigued by large-scale images of black men and women in active poses, over which were superimposed white curves and lines like unfamiliar symbols. I was struck most of all by a series of large pen - and - ink portraits of Latin American immigrants to Atlanta, drawn on some translucent material, through which we see layers of words -- their life stories, newspaper articles, other images.
[Photo: One of the series by Yehimi Cambron, born San Antonio Villalongin, Mexico, 1992, a DACA recipient working in Atlanta.]
After our visit to the High, Susan and I took the MARTA train to Decatur for lunch outside Cafe Alsace, where I found an impressionistic - style painting of the restaurant itself, dated 2004.
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