The Art Notebook Saga

Since I am sporadically employed (SIGH) I had some time last week to museum-hop, which, of course, I do enjoy very much. I left the Met and was pumped because there was a man outside wearing a pink suit and playing "Oh, Canada" on the sax (the best national anthem IN THE WORLD, if you ask my relatives). Anyway, I was a few blocks away before I realized that my little art notebook wasn't in my purse, and that I must have left it somewhere.

Now, this wouldn't have been the end of the world, and there is nothing that profound in it (as you'll soon see), but I had been using this notebook for about a year, so I was pretty attached. I hustled back to the museum to look for it. Not helping matters was the fact that I'd already returned my little metal thing that you wear when you gain admission to the Met, so I had to wait in line again to get back in. I was also wearing a Holter Monitor at the time, so I looked absurd. "Like a bomber in an old cartoon," one of my friends said when I saw her later that day. "Like you have TNT strapped around your waist and you carelessly left the wires hanging out. Stay away from Times Square."

Happily--I did not get arrested, AND I found the notebook on a back bench in the Greek and Roman galleries, which was the last place I'd remembered sitting down. Since it was back in my possession, I decided to take a gander through it to see if there was anything interesting I could share with you. It is turning out to be not so much "interesting," as "notably ridiculous." Here goes.

1. Far and away the work that I took the most notes on was Caravaggio's The Denial of Saint Peter (c. 1610). I counted 6 separate mentions. Here is a sample of what I mean when I say "notes":
--PETER'S HANDS & UNDER EYE SHADOWS
--background little red flicks shadows on sleeve highlights highlights HIGHLIGHTS
--they glow from across room, through doorways, vibrant, LIFE
--today it is noses and hands ("noses" underlined 3 times)
--soldier shadowed angular distinct mustache?
--FOREHEADS
--glows from across room [again--apparently this was a theme]
Maybe I should work on coherent sentences. Or sentences, period.

2. Speaking of coherent, try this on for size:
"post--C of T--sober RCC, Ven. "Birth of the Virgin" on wall, [illegible] based Durer. quote from Cesare Vecellio--proper dress for widows = NUNS. Lotto, Portrait of Married Couple, squirrel on table (does not look like squirrel.)"
This does make some sense to me, but who the HECK is Cesare Vecellio, and perhaps I should have written down what he said? This was all one long non-sentence too--stream of consciousness art history ramblings? Yeah, that is how I do.

3. Joachim Patnir, Penitence of Saint Jerome (c. 1518.) "huge head, presumably for his massive brain. Ha! alien shaped. [I proceed to draw alien shaped Jerome head]. lovely blue robe--color stunning. cerulean meets teal? Camels cute. Jer looks too healthy, other than being old. Supposed to be penitent who beats self with rocks."

4. Here is another gem: "Triumph of the Phallus, 1540. Self-explanatory." Yes, it probably is. (But Anna, who created it, and why? Erm.)

5. And what did I have to say about George de la Tour's Penitent Magdalen? "chiaroscuro, big time. IS this the painting in Ariel's secret stash when she sings Part of your World?" The answer to that is actually no--THAT painting, I found out just now, is George de la Tour's Magdalen of the Night Light (1640-45), which is in the Louvre. I suppose I should be proud that I got the correct artist of a painting that is shown for .3 seconds in The Little Mermaid. Or maybe I should just be concerned.

6. Flipping a few pages, I wind up at the Brooklyn Museum, where I saw Jane Dickson's Cops and Headlights V (1991), and said, "compositional zig-zag, blues & blacks w/ pops of yellow headlights. FAB." It is fab, although the image they have posted doesn't really do the colors justice, but you'll have to make do.

7. Most of my notes from The Frick seem to be pretty substantial and even include drawings, but here is a good one:
"I WANT HIS BOOKS"
This follows a page on Giovanni Bellini's St Francis in the Wilderness (1480), but I can't imagine I was talking about St Francis's books. Perhaps I meant Henry Clay Frick? There are bookshelves around the house, and I was probably jealous. Who can say, really.

8. I'm not normally big on Edouard Manet, but his Bullfight (1864), also from the Frick, got a few mentions. The composition is totally cool--it was a painting which was (I believe) cut in half, and the Frick has the top half.

9. I had a lot to say about the Francis Bacon show that the Met had last summer, including:
--Head III--I like the ear, but mouth unnerving
--FB obsessed with "Battleship Potemkin"--what is that?
--Men in Blue, '50's, DREAD, Cold War, apocalyptic, drapes, shrouded, foreboding, isolation
--blood (?) looks like bubblegum

10. Skipping ahead about 20 pages: "Anthony van Dyck--Self Portrait. what I imagine Oscar Wilde looked like." [no idea which museum this is in]

11. From PS 1, a series about Helen Keller, called Punk Helen Keller (2003) by Johnathan Horowitz: "from HK: make a junk heap of your masters religion, his civilization, his kings and his customs. 1915. right on."

12. MoMA, Claude Monet's Water Lilies room, (1914-1916). "Overheard: Jack, have a look, because it's very famous... more [squiggley line] for water; more [vertical lines] for sky. celdaon, turquoise, curvy. Various times of day, different types of weather."

13. MoMA, Salvador Dali, Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933): "bread & corn. Picasso's dog allegedly ate the original loaf. True? I hope so."

14. Skip a few more pages, and I seem to end with a few to-do lists, a knitting pattern I copied from a library book, and a recipe for chicken wing dip. A bit more on Watteau, Limbourg gospels, and...finished.

Looking it over, I seem to be disturbingly Eurocentric, although I definitely go to museums more often than I take notes, so this isn't a very fair sample. I can't imagine these notes will ever help me, ever, but it did make me remember some works I had forgotten about, and more importantly, made me remember how these works made me feel. The amount of exclamation points that accompany Caravaggio sightings, the hearts I drew next to Edward Hopper's name--those tell more of a story.