Summer Summer Moon
Visiting old friends. Saturday I walked through quiet galleries at the MIA, luxuriating in quiet spaces filled with Chinese sculpture and painting, then over to the Japanese collection. There were, again, no visitors while I spent a moment with the fine ukiyo-e prints hanging now.
Then I found myself heading up to the third floor to the newly restored Blind Man’s Buff. I love the gallery, which also holds a Kandinsky, a Cezannesque Braque, some Matisse, an Ensor and this painting. Beckmann is a wonder to me each time I see a piece of his. Blind Man’s Buff is a major work, one of his triptychs and one of the best of those. Its central panel arouses in me a sense of the mythological, the grand forces at work just beyond the veil of our daily life, a life represented by the two panels in this painting.
Even in daily life though there are mysteries and one of them, a common yet profound one, is love. A blindfolded man stares across a crowded room toward a woman, kneeling. Are they lovers? What mythic forces have been set in motion by them? Or what did they start? What separates them? While daily life is a hurly-burly of figures and symbols mashed together, the gods jam. Even time seems different there. Look closely at the clock.
After this I went to the contemporary galleries and found gallery 374 an eye opener. It now has works previously shown at other spots in the museum like Shonibare’s “Sleep of Reason”, Kehinde Wiley’s “Santos Dumont-The Father of Aviation” and Nick Cave’s “Sound Suit.” Seeing these works together, especially with Zang Huan’s “Text” and the etchings by Glenn Ligo helped me get a feel for the Baroque nature of some contemporary art, a feel I might not have gotten without seeing these works in companionship.
Old friends. And new ones, too.
