so elegant so intelligent

going to moma

i had not thought death had undone so many

Whenever I visit Austin, he says, let’s go to MoMA—and then we never go to MoMA. Until my most recent trip, when love conquered all (the Q train). Something I found myself thinking is that while I used to visit New York to see him and feel like an exile—I’ll be back…—now I just feel like a tourist.¹ And while the line on New York is that it’s a great place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there, it’s really the other way around. If I go back to MoMA I would like to spend time on one floor or a few rooms. In theory, this is an easy thing to do as a resident.² But when you’re visiting you look at the ticket and you think… I am getting the most museum I possibly can out of this.

Some institutions out there generate a lot of self-mythology… but MoMA doesn’t seem to be one of them. There are a couple books about MoMA out there, including one with the promisingly gossip-y title Good Old Modern. It is out of print, though I did manage to find a copy, but aside from the first couple pages, I have not actually read it yet. You can consider these “post-experience, pre-knowledge” thoughts, possibly to be followed by post-knowledge thoughts or at least post–slightly more knowledge.

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The trollish and, one might say, illiterate question I had—after having been in MoMA for maybe an hour and a half, but in any case before going into the part of the museum that actually houses contemporary art—was: is it a problem that all this modern stuff is so old? I do know “modern” doesn’t mean contemporary and rather denotes a specific period; you know; I know you know; now you know I know.…³ I started asking myself this question while looking at a René Magritte painting (The Lovers) that is much-beloved by many people (myself included). I thought this is beautiful and weird and perhaps—in being both beautiful and weird—represents an end point nobody’s really gone past. Is that a problem? I’m not sure. I go back and forth on this.

Similarly, while regarding the abstract art, I wonder: can I shake the association this type of art has, at least for me, with waiting rooms, airports, book covers? Is it possible to recover the violence of a Jackson Pollock painting? It wasn’t achieved by me in this visit, at any rate, but that of course doesn’t mean it is impossible.

Sometimes I think: we have a kind of avant-garde that’s been the same for about a hundred years or so.⁴ In literature the big name “innovators” remain writers like Woolf, Joyce, Kafka, Borges.… Though Borges died in 1986 (not a hundred years ago). So sometimes I think that I don’t know enough to think that. And the other thing is I don’t really believe in “progress” in art, indeed I reject thinking about art that way, so why should I care one way or the other, why should I even ask these questions, etc. There are only moments, and MoMA is dedicated to this moment, and it is over. Is that a problem? Surely not.…

Girl at the Piano (Jacques Villon, 1912) | The Piano Lesson (Henri Matisse, 1916)

I had one mission here: I wanted to see the Florine Stettheimer painting they had on display (Portrait of My Mother, 1925). Rather like with my gal Yva, I am a sort of fake Stettheimer fan. She popped up on some social media feed of mine (Bluesky, I think?) and I was fixated but the books I found were too expensive to buy at the time.⁵ So when I found out one painting of hers was on display at MoMA I resolved to see it, since we were planning to go anyway.

In retrospect, I should have looked around to see where else in the city had Stettheimer paintings, but this did not occur to me. An itenerary for my next visit is being laid.

Portrait of My Mother (Florine Stettheimer, 1925)

Portrait of My Mother was exquisite in person and I could have happily sat in front of it for an hour, probably. I don’t think the digital reproduction captures it at all. There’s a warmth and serenity to the picture and somehow the mother looks insect-like—like a beetle?—but only in the most flattering possible way, just as her startling darkness, in such a light picture, makes her feel like an anchor and not a black hole. She’s stepping forward but it looks as if she’s floating, and her hands are posed with her book in a way that looks like a medieval saint gesturing at the Bible, but in fact what “creates” this shape is that she is holding her delicate spectacles.⁶

When I look at a piece of art like this I think, this is everything I ever want to do. In my own form, in my own way. This kind of lightness that requires everything.…

I was not sure if this picture was in the public domain or not, and so in looking it up on WikiArt I discovered something interesting—a series of portraits that make their subjects dark shapes in the midst of bright color, just like Portrait of My Mother:

Henry McBride, Art Critic (Florine Stettheimer, 1922) | Portrait Of My Aunt, Caroline Walter Neustadter (Florine Stettheimer, 1928) | Portrait of My Teacher, Fräulein Sophie Von Prieser (Florine Stettheimer, 1929)

How I wish I could see all of these together!

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Some scattered thoughts.

• Further Stettheimer reading, courtesy of friend of the newsletter

  Henry Begler
  : “Cooking with Florine Stettheimer,” Valerie Stivers.

• Gustav Klimt in person: Hope, II (1907–08) produced, to an almost overwhelming degree, a feeling of illness and nausea. Looking at it, I thought: I always thought I liked Klimt, but now.… It was hung up alongside a sketch of Egon Schiele’s (Woman with Slipper, 1917) and I felt the same way about both of them—sickly, wrong, like those dreams where you can’t see properly. The Park (c. 1910), on the other hand, I loved.

• The big structural pieces in MoMA feel like in some ways they are in the worst possible spot for such a piece because there’s no clear way of sitting and spending time with the space. I wish I could lie down and experience Richard Serra’s Equal (2015) in a garden, for instance. In general, MoMA is a strong reminder that museums can feel like a way to experience art that isn’t exactly good… just better than all the alternatives.

• New-to-me artists whose work really stood out to me, indeed sometimes felt like it was shouting at me across the room: Agnes Pelton (The Fountains, 1926), Lenore Tawney (Little River, 1968), Charles Burchfield (Rogues’ Gallery, 1916), E. McKnight Kauffer (various illustrations), Remedios Varo (The Juggler, 1956), Judit Reigl (Guano-Round, 1958-64), Barbara Morgan (various photographs), Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (Skylark, 2010).

• Also quite liked: Meret Oppenheim’s Little Ghost Eating Bread (1934), which Austin pointed out to me.

• In general (and characteristically) I gravitated toward what was either a bit whimsical (Oppenheim, Magritte) or felt mystically odd (Pelton, Tawney), and less toward what felt very heavy (Pollock) or too canonical to see properly (I sort of mean this literally—the crowd in front of The Persistence of Memory was intense and I gave up on getting through it).

• One artist who represented the whimsical, mystical, and downright creepy in abundance was naturally Louise Bourgeois (Les Trois Fées, 1948). I came out of MoMA thinking that a book cover may be a terrible thing to do to a piece of art that you like, and yet I would, naturally, love to have that particular picture on the cover of a book I wrote.…

• At the gift store I purchased this snake hair clip that I have almost purchased an absurd number of times. It is cute. I am pleased. Year of the Snake!

1. Previous reflections here.

2. Of course, if you live there you probably never actually do those things either. Even though it’s completely inapt to this situation, I thought of this speech from When Harry Met Sally:

Joe and I use to talk about it and we’d say, we are so lucky we have this wonderful relationship, we can have sex on the kitchen floor and not worry about the kids walking in, we can fly off to Rome on a moment’s notice. And then one day I was taking Alice’s little girl for the afternoon because I promised I’d take her to the circus, and, we were in the cab playing eye-spy. Eye-spy mailbox, eye-spy lamppost. And she looked out the window and she saw this man and this woman with these two little kids and the man had one of the little kids on his shoulders and she said, “I spy a family.” And I started to cry. You know I just started crying. And I went home and I said, “The thing is Joe we never fly off to Rome on a moment’s notice.”

The thing is Joe you never do just go to the museum to stay in one room.

3. But it’s not totally illiterate; in the opening pages of Good Old Modern, Lynes recounts how Mrs. Rockefeller, one of the founders of MoMA, was moved to do so partly out of a concern that museums were not doing enough to encourage contemporary art:

“For many years,” she wrote a few years after the Museum was a fact, “my husband and I collected things of the past.” She had bought Japanese and Early American prints and, as she said, “went on to Buddhistic art and European china and all sorts of beautiful things that have been created in civilizations older than and different from ours.” But she was evidently worried about whether these were the sorts of things that her children would “be interested in and want to live with.” There were many groups of people and a number of dealers, she came to feel, who were helping to support and encourage modern painters and sculptors in America, but museums were doing almost nothing.

NB, on Mrs. Rockefeller, Lynes also writes that “Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Miss Lizzie P. Bliss, and Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan were the founding mothers of the Museum, and a formidable trio they were, women of spirit, vigor, adventurousness, and, not unimportantly, of commanding wealth.” Recently I was reading a book about the composition of “The Waste Land” which I then forgot to keep reading but one thing pointed out in that book is how often women were the money and even the editors behind various modernist institutions.

4. Somebody who writes very crankily about this is (of all people?) genre paperback maven Lester del Rey in his 1979 history of science fiction (The World of Science Fiction: 1926–1976) (relevant line bolded) (I have only read bits of this):

Some of this reaction probably came from the lingering lack of prestige enjoyed by science fiction among most critics of literature. Just as fans at one time had compensated for the ordinary disregard for their chosen literature by insisting that all readers of science fiction were intellectually superior, so now the writers began assuring each other in forums and by correspondence that science fiction was really the significant area of modern literature and that those writing it were the unappreciated artists of the day.

Then having assured themselves of the superiority of the field and their place in it, they proceeded to borrow heavily from the mainstream (or some parts of it) and to write as if the closer science fiction came to that mainstream the better it must be. The pulp and adventure backgrounds of science fiction were largely rejected. So-called experimental writing—derived, of course, from the avant-garde experiments of forty years before—was regarded as somehow superior, and social consciousness of a sort was more important than extrapolation.

You may want to know, because you, like me, are nosy: who is he sniping at here, exactly? J.G. Ballard, Harlan Ellison, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, and Thomas Disch, as far as I can tell. He actually goes out of his way to make it clear that this is not covert his way of whining about the new prominence of women in the field, citing the existence of “Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Vonda N. McIntyre, Joanna Russ, Pamela Sargent and Kate Wilhelm” as a positive development in the same chapter.

5. My prior ignorance is, as they say, on me, as apparently Stettheimer is not only well-known but well-loved. (Well, she deserves it.) Anyway I’ve bought the books, they’re future BDM’s problems.

6. Similarly medieval-feeling: the way the doorway behind her frames her head, but if you gaze through it, what you see are not angels but playing children. (Hers? Her grandchildren?)