Signposts Back

I was in the Musée d'Orsay in 2016 and I was hopelessly sad. I had just split from a boyfriend when neither of us had wanted to because he was moving away. I was on a three-week immersion program in France, being perfectly rotten: too cool for group activities and fairly depressed. I found myself in front of “Vue de toits (Effet de neige)” (essentially view of roofs tops, snow effect) by Gustave Caillebotte, which is, by the standards of the Musée d'Orsay, an extraordinarily unassuming picture. It depicts, as you might expect, some Parisian roofs covered in snow. But for whatever reason, looking at it was the first time I felt happy in months. It could have been the sense of calm and peace, of coziness, of a gentle world out there -- of a world out there at all. I went back to the Musée d'Orsay nine years later and stood in front of it again and remembered. 

Art is simpler than we fear. You do not need to study art history to appreciate it. You do not even need to read the little paragraphs on the wall beside the pieces. You can, and this may enrich your experience. But all you must do is really look at the art. Let it move you. 

My dad recently gave me a book called “All the Beauty in the World,” by a man named Patrick Bringley who spent ten years as a security guard at the Met. It is a lovely, life affirming book that perfectly captures my feelings on art. Here, Patrick writes about his experience looking at a Daddi painting which depicts the Crucifixion: 

“As a watchman, I can use this picture in something like the way it was intended to be used, and for that I am grateful. An artist in the fourteenth century wouldn't have dreamed that one day there would be art connoisseurs and textbooks dedicated to something called art history. In Bernardo Daddi's mind the painting must have been a kind of machine to aid in necessary and painful reflection. I'm not interested in finding anything new or subtle about the Jesus pictures. Daddi has painted suffering; His picture is about suffering; it has nothing on his mind except suffering; and we look at it to feel the great silencing weight of suffering, or we don't see the picture at all.

Much of the greatest art, I find, seeks to remind us of the obvious. This is real, is all it says. Take the time to stop and imagine more fully the things you already know. Today, my apprehension of the awesome reality of suffering might be as crisp and clear as Daddi's great painting, but we forget these things; they become less vivid. We have to return, as we do, to paintings and face them again.

Art serves as a necessary confrontation with essential truths we know but cannot continuously hold in consciousness - that we will die, that suffering is real, that we exist in a vast cosmos of time and space, or perhaps even just that Paris contains rooftops which occasionally are covered in snow which house other people with their own lives and their own concerns, that there is a world beyond heartbreak. These "obvious" realities become less vivid in daily life, and art (along with sacred spaces, music, ritual) functions as a "signpost back" to what fundamentally matters.

Patrick took his job at the Met after his brother died from cancer. He didn’t want to move on back into the bright, fast paced world. He wanted to spend time with beauty. To reflect. To be outside the world for a while. 

I have the suspicion that death of a loved one would cause me to change how I spend my time. But if it would, I should likely change that now. Death is, unfortunately, coming. If my pursuits would feel trivial in light of that, they are trivial now. 

There is something there in museums, listening to a symphony, in motion while dancing at ballet class, listening to a choral mass, stepping inside a cathedral or a synagogue -- there is something there that is not there inside the meetings, conferences, and the endless stream of Slack and Email. Perhaps it definitionally cannot be there in the day-to-day if it can only live in short bursts, or if it can only exist in contrast to the rest.

It is likely protective that we cannot confront the Big Truths so directly for more than brief moments. I asked two physicists why so few people thought about the biggest questions -- why we are here, what else is out there, what happens next -- and they said that society wouldn’t function if too many people thought about those questions, so it was trained out of most people or perhaps never trained in in the first place. I wonder how it is that I can forget what truly matters so often. It often feels like being cursed in a fairytale -- that when you look away from your companions, you will forget they are there, that when you wander off the path, you will forget your way back. 

But art will show you back. And it can show you things that can only be shown like that. Patrick writes:

“I experienced the great beauty of the picture even as I had no idea what to do with that beauty. I couldn't discharge the feeling by talking about it, there was nothing much to say. What was beautiful in the painting was not like words, it was like paint -- silent, direct and concrete, resisting translation even into thought. As such, my response to the picture was trapped inside me, a bird fluttering in my chest.”

The implicit meaning of art is often something we feel deeply but cannot transmit, or can only do so through a similar medium. 

We are for the most part verbal creatures and it can be easy to confuse words with the world. But there are of course very real things which cannot be well described in words. Art can sometimes capture these. There are certain emotions or truths that can be captured in a symphony or a painting that are flattened and impoverished in a description. 

I have a similar experience when I watch a symphony, ballet, or opera with someone. In the intermissions or afterwards, I want to discuss it but I find I don't have adequate words. All I can ask is “Did you experience that the way I did? Did you feel that? Were you moved?” I used to think this was because I wasn't sufficiently educated — that a proper connoisseur would have more to say. I will find more words as I learn more, but my current response may simply be right. The point of the piece isn't to be picked apart. As Patrick says, art “can look like a slab of sheer bedrock, a piece of reality too stark, direct, and poignant for words.”