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.

A Day in the Digital Lab

So in my other life, when I'm not taking germy money from germy people, I work for a stipend in the Brooklyn Museum's Digital Collections and Services Lab. (note: I have a cold, which I am surly about and blame retail for. However, I like it that my voice is an octave lower than normal, because now when I sing Billie Holiday standards in the shower, it sounds more authentic. In case you were curious.)

I am at the Lab currently, scanning, so I thought I would give you an account. I am being funded as part of a grant given by the IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) to the BM. This grant is used for scanning and uploading on the website some areas of the collection (over 1,000,000 all told) which are underrepresented. Prior to this, most of the images on the website were "greatest hits" of the collection, which left out a lot of works. So, the curators went in and picked out the objects they liked and found interesting, and gave us a list, and we've been scanning them. My realm is the black and white photonegatives. (Photonegatives are film, like you would have in a normal, non-digital camera, except they are a larger size. And since they are negatives, what appears black on them would be white in the actual work, and what is white would be black.)

Anyway, here is what I do:
1. Consult the master list of the IMLS objects, and start pulling slides out of the boxes. They are arranged by their accession number, which is the year in which they entered the museum. For example, 12.53.2 would be something acquired in 1912. It was the 53rd group of objects acquired that year, and the 2nd object in that group. There are 89 boxes of black and white photonegatives.
2. Once I have a pile, I power on the scanner, which is a flat thing (technical terminology, ha) which opens and has two large glass plates. I clean the plates with a chamois cloth (which traps more dust than a regular cloth, allegedly.)
3. I put on one white glove, like Michael Jackson c. 1985. With the white-gloved hand (finger-prints = VERY BAD), you grip a negative in the corner by your thumb and forefinger. Drag the cloth across both sides of it to remove dust. Hold it up to the light--the dust will show up as white specks, and then you can keep cleaning accordingly.
4. Once the negative looks pretty clean, I hold it under the light to figure out which side has emulsion on it. You can tell which side is emulsion-ed because it will not transmit light. The non-emulsion side will reflect light back at you. In these scanners the emulsion side goes UP, but it's different for other machines (were I to put the emulsion side DOWN, the image would be scanned reversed, and I would have to redo it.
5. The scanner I use fits 8 images comfortably, so once 8 are loaded then it scans and I have a few minutes to get tea or blog (yo!) or email or wander around.
6. Once the batch is done scanning, you save them in very specific folders (there is a whole naming process for each image, involving "bw" and "IMLS" and "view 1" and "a-c" and a bunch of stuff that normal people don't need to know about.) Then you open them in photoshop and crop, straighten, color correct (which for the black-and-whites involves grayscale, curves and layers and little eye-dropper looking tools.) Finally you blow them up to actual pixel size and delete any imperfections/dust/scratches. My problem is I tend to over-edit and delete things which are flaws of the work, and not just flaws of the negative (like if a page from a manuscript is torn, I have a tendency to edit out the rip, when it is really a part of the work. If that makes any sense.)
7. After all that, you look up the image in a bunch of databases, make sure the accession number is right, update the info in Microsoft Access and email a bunch of people to let them know that it is ready to be uploaded to the website.
8. Repeat. Indefinitely.

Now, if you think this sounds boring and monotonous, you are darn right it is. However, sometimes you get either totally awesome or totally ridiculous images, which breaks up the boring. Like today, on the awesome scale, I got a Rothko watercolor. I've had a few Hoppers (mmm) and some Mary Cassatt's which were cool. The JJ Audobon nature prints are fun, because they are very stylized, and you can play with the contrasts--plus the foxes are CUTE! Some of the Asian collection's hanging scrolls are great, and there is one really fun one which is a series of insects, who all have little humanoid faces...some are grumpy, some are smiling, which cracked me up. On the ridiculous scale are the period rooms, which were photographed in the '70's (the BM has a whole floor of period rooms, mostly from the 19th century). The food that is displayed on the tables is usually pretty funny--today we got one that was turkey, pot roast (we think), shrimp, peas, mushrooms, and what looks like goblets full of jell-o.

In the next few weeks I get to start scanning papyrus slides from the Egyptian collection, so that could be neat. (What is neat is that the actual photographs are over a century old and on glass plates instead of film. So at least that'll be different.) And then next time you go on a museum's website, think about how many people it actually takes to get those images to you!

Perks of Being an Art History Major

Art History? What are you going to do with THAT?!
--my dental hygienist (and about 50 other people in my hometown)

I always think you people are nice to have at parties. You bring a classy air to gatherings. I think art historians are good conversationalists.
--my OB-GYN

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
--Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

If I were planning on making pots of money (which I'm not), I would be in the wrong line of work. I gravitate towards jobs in institutions which tend to have small or variable budgets (libraries, museums, liberal arts), which is not conducive to saving up, or buying things. However, a friend in high school (who went to college for violin performance) used to say that we wouldn't be rich, but we would sure be interesting, and I like to pretend that is true. And although my paycheck is tiny, the perks are sometimes big. Here are some things to tell people when they quiz you about what you are doing with your life:

1. Free Stuff. With my museum ID badge I can get into any NYC museum fo' free, which is actually pretty nice. Especially for MOMA, where the ticket takers tend to be snippy, and it costs $20. Granted, I should be willing to give money to these institutions, but it makes me feel less guilty if I just stop in for an hour or so. And I can sneak in guests. I also get half-price tickets at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and discounts in all museum stores.

2. Solitude. For an art nerd, it is REALLY nice to be alone when looking at art. I'm one of those annoying people who is taking notes or getting really close to things and getting yelled at by museum guards, so really, you probably don't want to be there with me anyway. On Mondays and Tuesdays I really like walking to my office because I have the European wing to myself, and I can examine things like a loon and not have any witnesses.

3. Openings. Art show openings are not normally my scene, because I'm a terrible networker. The exception to this was at school, because then I always had my friends to talk to and it was fun and low-pressure, but now it's slightly different. I don't know much about contemporary anything, and if I have to talk to strangers (and offer opinions, ack) I tend to smile a lot out of nervousness and play with my hair. This is one of the many reasons why I do not want to be a curator! But I put on some mascara and went to one last night, which was actually pretty fun. A few co-workers and I went to happy hour first and then returned to the show, which is called "Who Shot Rock 'n Roll" and is a collection of rock photographs. The reception had dj's and drinks and food and a performance by Blondie, which was worth it.* Debbie Harry is 60ish now, but she is still a total rocker babe. And they performed for free, which is super nice. (A bit of self-promotion for them, too...her partner, Chris Stein, is also in the band and is one of the photographers featured.) And it was cool to see the paintings in context with all the swirling lights and swirling people around them.

If you like art and art history, then all of these things are auxiliary, but they are nice. And let's be honest, I have an easier time explaining myself to people than philosophy majors do (what DO you say if you're a philosophy major and people are quizzing you about your future plans? "I'm going to think." Maybe this is why I, too, find most philosophy majors I've met kinda insufferable.) And honestly, how many economics majors end up doing exactly what they planned? None. And I think that is how it should be. For me, not much beats seeing something or learning something interesting that I didn't know about before, and that is worth it.

*"for Blondie, some Blondie." Mom, I thought I would reference your fav movie.

A Night at the Opera

And now, on with the opera. Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlor.
--Groucho Marx, A Night at the Opera, 1935


(thanks to wikipedia for the Lincoln Center image)
On Thursday night I went to the Metropolitan Opera and saw Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. Every other opera I've seen has been at Chautauqua, and some have been really good (The Marriage of Figaro) and some have been quite not good (Little Women...I may have said, "if Beth doesn't die soon, I'm going to get onstage and kill her myself.") But Der Rosenkavalier was unlike anything that I've seen before.

An Opera Maven that I know recently told me about 200 rush tickets that are set aside for sale on the day of the performance. They are orchestra level tickets (which run $275-$175) which are priced for $20 instead (a donor pays the rest of the ticket.) I decided to try this, because a normal $20 ticket is up in the light green section on this map, with an "obstructed view." The $20 ticket I got, after waiting in line for 3 hours in the basement/parking garage of Lincoln Center was in the grey section on the first level, over on the left hand side, about half-way back. SO WORTH IT. If you don't mind waiting in line (which has some good people watching opportunities, incidentally), I would highly recommend doing this.

The plot of Der Rosenkavalier is minimal at best. Act 1 opens with the Princess von Werdenberg, called the Marshchallin, in bed with her 17 year old lover, Count Octavian Rofrano. The Marschallin's boorish, lecher of a cousin Baron Ochs shows up (Ochs = Ox, good one Strauss!) and Octavian quickly dresses up like a maid named Mariandel, to escape detection. The Baron asks his cousin to supply a knight to deliver a silver rose to his betrothed, Sophie Faninal, who is much younger than he is. She suggests Octavian to be the Knight of the Rose, which is what Rosenkavalier means. And then Ochs flirts with all the maids, etc, and Marshchallin starts to feel old, and she expresses to Octavian her conviction that he will end up leaving her for someone younger. The thing is, she's not bitter about being older, she's just realistic about her fate. It'd be a cool role to sing, I think. The Times describes her as a Cougar, which is a phrase I try not to use, so pretend I didn't.

In Act 2, Sophie and Octavian meet in her father's home when he presents the rose, and they fall in love. He ends up wounding Ochs in a duel, and there is a lot of running up and down stairs and singing loudly and drama. The Marshchallin isn't in Act 2 at all. In Act 3, Ochs meets "Mariandel" (Octavian in drag) at an inn, which "she" traps him into seducing her, which gives Sophie's father a bad impression, and then Sophie is released from her engagement and Ochs has to run away from the innkeeper, who he owes money to. It's nice because he gets his comeuppance. Finally, the Marshchallin shows up, wearing about 100 pounds of fabric in an insanely beautiful white dress and wig, and gives her blessing to Sophie and Octavian, and they sing a trio that is well worth the price of admission. Curtain. For a better plot summary and pictures from the Met's 2005 production, see Opera News here.

(thanks to NYTimes online for the pictures of Renee Fleming)
Some people waited in line since 10 am, because this was a powerhouse cast: Renee Fleming as the Marschallin and Susan Graham as Octavian (in comedic fashion, the young male lead is sung by a woman, in a "trouser role"). The main chatter in line and in the lobby was whether Fleming was losing her touch, and if her best days are behind her (not unlike the Marshchallin, actually). Beats me. I have zero knowledge about different singers, and she seemed very, very good to me. It wasn't even so much the singing as her expressions or gestures--I was close enough that I could see pain or amusement on her face, or in her shoulder shrugs.

As good as the singing was, I was even more impressed with the sets. Act 1 takes place in the Marschallin's bedroom, which is all gilt and pink curtains and a ceiling fresco, with little spindly tables all over. Act 2 is in Faninal's estate, which actually elicited clapping from the audience--it was rows and rows of windows and elaborate staircases and chandeliers. Act 3 was set in an inn, so it was much different: smaller, dark, with a lot of candles. And the Metropolitan Opera building itself is crazy, with long red-carpeted staircases, muted lighting, and spiraling chandeliers. Very cool.

What was also cool was that the girl who was next to me in line for tickets (I say "girl" but we were about the same age; compared to everyone else there we were whippersnappers, though) also got the seat next to me in the theater, so we became Opera buddies. We hung out during the intermissions and talked about super nerdy musical stuff and never asked each others names. So I will probably never see her again, which actually seems like a very New York-y thing to do. I like it.

For two real reviews, see here and here. Both have good audio from this performance, particularly the second one.

And for a clip from the Marx Brothers A Night at the Opera, which is a totally hilarious movie, see here (they are trying to mess up the opera for a variety of reasons). The movie also has the late (and great) Kitty Carlisle Hart in it, so you know it's legitimate.

DUMBO

In the spirit of trying new things, I spent my day off last week in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) which is a burgeoning artsy neighborhood. DUMBO in the '70's and '80's was a little dodgy, with a lot of abandoned warehouses, but like a lot of places in Brooklyn it's been revamped. Now the warehouses are studio space, which is available cheaper than other places in Brooklyn. I peered into some (a lot of metal working/big sculptures) so that was cool.

There is a little waterside park in between the Brooklyn Bridge (right) and the Manhattan Bridge (left) which is really nice. It's across the way from the South Street Seaport in Manhattan which is tourist central, but since it's Brooklyn, you get good views of Manhattan AND no tourists. Win-win.

DUMBO has a lot of green space and benches, but the downside to being by the bridges is that it is LOUD. I was on the phone with one of my friends while walking nearby the Manhattan bridge when the subways were going overhead, and it was deafening (also, I find being directly under bridges unnerving in general). But the water view is lovely, and more importantly, I had some solid opportunities to people-watch.

And here is a last shot of the bridge peeking through some buildings. DUMBO is the site of an old shipyard as well, and the streets are cobbled. It is worth a visit. AND, for the history nerds amongst us, it was also the site of the Battle for Brooklyn, one of the first battles of the Revolutionary War. Washington and his 8,000 troops were stationed in Brooklyn, and the British invaded with 20,000 troops. Washington lost Brooklyn, but sustained zero casualties and snuck his men over to Manhattan in the middle of the night.