‘First Saturday’ at the Brooklyn Museum

(Is it my imagination? Didn't the museum used to be called the Brooklyn Museum of Art?)

Finally made it to a ‘First Saturday’ of the month at the Brooklyn Museum, when admission is free and hours are extended until 11 PM. Went vaguely intending to hear a special curator talk; but ended up so delighted and stimulated by current exhibitions, that I hadn't the capacity for anything more or special.

Started in the museum vestibule, with an exhibition of versions of figures from the Burghers of Calais monument, by Auguste Rodin, always a favorite of mine. Remembered how much I love Rodin's at once fine and strong figures. Isn't that what ‘heroic’ looks like, fine and strong? Thought that any right man for me must have hands like a Rodin man!

Then ascended straight to the fifth floor. Wandered through the American Identities exhibition, which included several pieces worth looking at, and happened upon the museum's Visible Storage/Study Center, which I loved! All kinds of pieces of American, mostly, applied art, chocked and spotlit inside tall, glass and steel cases, in an otherwise dimly lit room. Many lovely Art Nouveau and Mid-Century pieces. I may actually prefer this storage presentation, to regular gallery space.

But I'd come to the fifth floor, really for the paintings by Asher Brown Durand, apparently a major figure of the Hudson River School. The paintings were, as hoped, masterful renditions of the awesome beauty of ordinary nature. A side note, the exhibition reminded me of the expression ‘en plein air’, which is simply pleasant to behold.

American trees are better than English trees.

Also recollected that, as a child, I didn't like Hudson River School paintings. Perhaps especially, the trees in the paintings. They seemed messy, gangly. Not the crisp idealization of trees I preferred, trunks thick and straight, limbs in all the right places and nowhere else. It wasn't until some years later that I first saw my hometown American countryside for what it really was: full of this kind of taller, unkempt, magnificent trees.

These trees are American, belonging to a large country with a short history of land ownership, where, even yet, much ground escapes manicure. The idealization I'd preferred was English, of a small country with a long history of land ownership, whose every hectare has been manicured, by farmer or gardener.

While viewing the Durand paintings, I found a parallel. The difference between idealized English trees and natural American trees is like the difference between idealized figures in Medieval art and realistic figures in Renaissance and later art. In the book My Name Is Red, by Orhan Pamuk, there is the drawn figure of, indeed, a tree, which speaks and, in defense of its Oriental/Medieval, idealized style of rendering, says, “I don't want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning.” (I am currently reading My Name is Red for the World Literature Book Club, which I organize.)

I grant the famed beauty of English countryside. The aesthetic has bequeathed its legacy to America, in the form of some of our finest urban parks; bastardized, in our suburban landscapes; and in the country aesthetic Angloxified into our appreciation for nature. A childhood neighbor of mine, in the country rapidly developing into suburban sprawl, cleared all the underbrush from her small forest, because she, "wanted to make an enchanted forest for the kids."

But what I want to tell you is this: an American tree is better than an English tree, and a natural tree is better than an idealized tree. For two reasons.

First, an idealized tree is imbued with a meaning. While this meaning may be useful, perhaps beautiful, to those who believe it, it is only a meaning, not the tree itself. To give a tree but one meaning is to exclude all others, as well as the tree's independent existence. It is creative to believe, to ascribe meaning; but it is destructive to believe in one superlative meaning. It is destructive to idealize.

Second, a natural, American tree is better than an idealized, English tree, because nature is infinitely more sophisticated than human consciousness, individual or collective. Sophistication proffers better instruction to the intellect, intelligent and spiritual. Learning about natural harmony and beauty from a mere idealized tree is like learning about the ocean from a cup of tea.

Back down on the first floor of the museum, I perused the book shop. I bought a William Morris Postcard Book. Thirty postcards for just $9.95—suhweet! I'm hanging them, in series, in my “garden room.” They are themselves idealizations of flora. Simplifying texture into pattern. They are pretty, they are comfortable.