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A Monet of One’s Own

monet-notbh

Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1919 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art

(Originally published in the NY Times)

I SLIPPED away from work on a recent Monday to take my two nieces to the Garry Winogrand photography exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I doubt there’s a better way to play hooky in New York right now.

When you go — not if, but when (and soon, by the way; the show closes Sept. 21) — I suggest you bring a thesaurus. Because it wasn’t long before we found words failing us. An image of an acrobat caught midleap on a Manhattan street, for instance, struck the three of us as the epitome of “amazing.” So did another photo. Then another. Upon seeing the first few dozen of the more than 175 prints on view we pledged that we would not use that word to describe every single photo. Beautiful, incredible, joyful, strange, very sad — we made it as far as the second room before we were back to the A’s.

“It is just so… amazing,” said Katy, who’s 18 and an aspiring photographer, as if she’d been rendered helpless by yet another example of the Bronx-born artist’s particular genius for street photography. I nodded in sympathy. In a world plagued by intractable problems — police shootings, Ebola spreading, spiraling civil wars, planes falling from the sky — lacking sufficient synonyms for a work of art seemed a good one to have.

When we reached the last room, I asked Katy which picture was her favorite. She led me back to the one that had stumped her in the synonym department. Her sister, Emily, who’s 14 and had been off wandering through the Met’s collection of European paintings, then showed me her favorite piece in the museum: a Monet water lily painting (the first she’d ever seen) from 1919.

This is when I let each girl in on a secret: It can be yours. No different from falling in love with a song, one may fall in love with a work of art and claim it as one’s own. Ownership does not come free. One must spend time with it; visit at different times of the day or evening; and bring to it one’s full attention. The investment will be repaid as one discovers something new with each viewing — say, a detail in the background, a person nearly cropped from the picture frame, or a tiny patch of canvas left unpainted, deliberately so, one may assume, as if to remind you not to take all the painted parts for granted.

This is true not just for New Yorkers but for anyone anywhere with art to be visited — art being a relative term, in my definition. Your Monet may, in fact, be an unpolished gemstone or mineral element. Natural history museums are filled with beauties fairly begging to be adopted. Stay alert. Next time a tattered Egyptian mummy speaks to you across the ages, don’t walk away. Stay a while. Spend some time with it. Give it a proper name: Yours.

But don’t be hasty. You must be sure you are besotted. When it happens, you will know. A couple of years back, I spent much of Memorial Day at the Museum of Modern Art with my friend Oliver, a self-described philistine when it comes to art. He struggled to see the value in the work of the performance artist Marina Abramovic as she sat gazing into the eyes of museum visitors. And the enormous, bright red Barnett Newman painting, “Vir Heroicus Sublimis,” got him all worked up, railing against the pretensions of abstract expressionism.

This was my cue to lead Oliver to another gallery on another floor and steer him toward an early, rose-tinted Picasso. He smiled a smile that even Edvard Munch might have wanted to paint. And he stayed and stayed and stayed, a self-appointed sentinel to Picasso’s “Boy Leading a Horse.”

It’s yours, I said. Congratulations.

I have been slowly adding to my own collection since moving to New York. I acquired a Francis Bacon nude that I fell hard for at the artist’s retrospective at the Met five years ago. The piece was on loan from a European museum, and the fact that I might never see it again made it all the more irresistible. My naked Bacon and I are forever embroiled in a long-distance romance.

Usually, I gravitate toward works that are overlooked, tucked back in a far corner, or that are a museum’s “John Doe” — Artist Unknown. I am just as likely to make a medieval suit of armor mine as I am an obscure Diane Arbus. I also push myself to go into galleries that I would not normally think about entering. Often, this is a source of my best finds. I am strongly anti-museum map and militantly in favor of getting lost. While there’s nothing wrong with navigating straight to the old masters, I believe it’s far nicer to lose your way in a labyrinth of galleries and suddenly find yourself, as I did one Saturday evening, face to face with an Odilon Redon bouquet looking so fresh I could have sworn the paint was still wet.

Perhaps the best part about possessing art in this way is that what’s mine can be yours, and vice versa. In fact, I would not be surprised if half of New York City has also put dibs on the Monet that Emily chose. This made it no less hers.

I brought her in closer to her new acquisition: “Emily, meet your Monet. Monet, Emily.”

Words did not fail her: “Hello, beautiful,” she whispered.

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14 comments on “A Monet of One’s Own”

  1. Lisa Ibrahim says:
    March 31, 2015 at 8:25 pm

    It’s mine too… I miss it terribly. I guess I need a trip to New York!
    When I am there I will look in on my Starry Night as well.

    Reply
  2. Sukaina Kazmi says:
    August 30, 2015 at 6:15 pm

    Starry Night is mine.

    Reply
  3. Christiane says:
    August 31, 2015 at 8:10 am

    another beautiful piece… thanks!

    i have enjoyed doing a version of this for years – feeling a piece claiming _me_ (my heart, my soul – somewhere at my core), rather than I claiming it as mine!

    Reply
  4. Sabrina says:
    August 31, 2015 at 11:14 am

    What a poignant essay…thank you for putting words to my feelings. I have a whole, but small, room in the National Gallery in Washington, DC where I go see “my boys:” Jackson (Pollock), Mark (Rothko), Hans (Hoffman).

    I found your site while reading about Oliver Sacks, whose books have astounded me; the whole world will feel his loss, but your personal loss is unimaginable. My deepest sympathy.

    Reply
  5. Ros says:
    September 12, 2015 at 5:21 am

    I love this piece of writing Bill. I had a five year relationship with Caravaggio’s ‘The Taking of the Christ’ in Dublin’s National Gallery. It saw me through good times and bad, light and shade. I close my eyes and I can be right back on the bench in front of it on a mid-winter afternoon.

    Reply
  6. Mike says:
    September 28, 2015 at 10:57 pm

    For me it has been Chardin’s “Soap Bubbles”. I love the Impressionists, and laugh at Dada, and its hard to beat a Franz Marc horse, or a Weston bell pepper. But something about the boy and his bubble, captured forever in paint, lifts my heart.

    Thanks for the story. Very tender and heartfelt. Your prose undulates like the Water Lillies.

    Reply
  7. Claudine says:
    January 3, 2016 at 2:45 am

    I loved your essay. It reminded me of the pleasures of Art, and how that pleasure can be taught and shared. My husband, my children and I do a version of this when we visit a museum or an exhibition, asking ourselves which is the work we would like to take home. But I prefer your version: No need to take it home in order to love it more. (Apparently, Ernst Gombrich, the wonderful Art historian, did not buy Art).

    My favourite piece is Goya’s sinking Dog, at the Prado. I might go and visit him today.

    Thank-you.

    Reply
  8. Libby says:
    July 4, 2016 at 10:55 pm

    I am so pleased to discover your writing after reading On The Move and feeling quite overwhelmed. One of the rooms of art that threw me into paroxysms of weeping because it was so wonderful was in the Musée d’Orsay highlighting the Impressionists. Thank you for your essay.

    Reply
  9. Susan says:
    August 26, 2016 at 4:42 pm

    I got to your website today after reading your latest piece on the online NYTimes (Out Late With Oliver Sacks). Your writing is wonderful, I so enjoyed the NYT piece as well as this one. They are so accessible and it makes me feel that you are speaking with me directly. I also appreciated your view of each person’s relationship with a specific piece of art. I have that feeling with a number of Mark Rothko paintings that I have spent hours sitting in front of and emotionally climbing into. Thank you!

    Reply
  10. Hal O'Brien says:
    August 26, 2016 at 9:51 pm

    My collection includes:

    * Winogrand’s picture of JFK accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, in 1960. We only see the back of Kennedy’s head directly; his face is only visible on a TV set. Seems almost a cliche to say it’s a comment on how we see our public figures mostly through TV, but that’s because we live now. In 1960, that idea was fresh. And the tones of the print are so very very sharp…

    * Rubens’ Portrait of Marchesa Brigida Spinola-Doria. It doesn’t come out so much in reproduction, but in person it seems you and she are sharing some private joke.

    * Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s self-portraits.

    There are others. My catalogue is not so much secret, as private, if you get the distinction.

    Reply
  11. Hal O'Brien says:
    August 26, 2016 at 9:56 pm

    Although this train of thought now reminds me of “Le choix de Vincent : Le Musée imaginaire de Van Gogh,” which was a show that gathered together many of the pieces Vincent and Theo wrote about to each other in the voluminous correspondence.

    Reply
  12. Peg says:
    August 28, 2016 at 10:17 am

    Lovely! You put in words my lifelong love for L’Hiver by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer.

    Reply
  13. Steve Susoyev says:
    January 31, 2017 at 9:58 pm

    Lovely and liberating. I’ll admit to having photographed (only when allowed!) and downloaded images of my favorite works, and gone as far as to print them on canvas, in attempts to capture their beloved essence. Most recently I did this with Van Gogh’s almond blossoms–the one with the vibrant turquoise background, which he painted for his nephew and namesake, and never signed. I wept when I first saw the original, and stood in its presence for over an hour. The canvas-printed copy is just that, a copy, and your essay helps me realize that the painting is right where it needs to be–in Amsterdam, and in my heart. Thank you.

    Reply
  14. Grant says:
    February 8, 2017 at 8:16 pm

    Yes.

    Reply

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