12 September 2008

still wandering the louvre

The Louvre is, indeed, insane. There’s just so much to see – and so much of it is amazing – that it confounded my usual Museum Attack Plan. (Get in, see a few great things, and get out… ) I wandered and wandered for hours, backtracking to take another look at a Joshua Reynolds portrait (Miss Kemble, at bottom of linked page) specially displayed this month, or to go find that classic Dürer self-portrait I missed.

I found myself obsessed suddenly with Dutch and Flemish still lifes – those stiff alien tulips and lush leaves, laden with detailed insects and fat drops of water. I had a long Hour of Hands, skipping from painting to painting looking at odd gestures and skinny thumbs. I hovered over Vermeer and sighed audibly in Ingres’ room. And I got completely lost trying to escape.

On the way out, however, I came across an Anselm Kiefer installed in a stairwell, the first permanent installation at the Louvre in over 50 years. Another one of my early influences, Kiefer has always had a greater impact in Europe than in the States. I think to us he tends to look a little dated and overwrought (which, of course, I love. I am dated and overwrought!) Too, I believe we forget how much History Europeans live with day to day, being as we are so skilled in Amnesia – a necessary ingredient for American ReInvention…

Anyway, it was Kiefer’s alchemy – both of the Earth and the Stars – along with his mystic religiosity that drew me to him when I was a teenager, and I’ll never forget that first flush. (Nor will I forget seeing an amazing retrospective in Berlin in 1991…) The work at the louvre was perhaps a perfect capsule of my Kiefer, all in one room: the alchemy of lead and gold; the hope and sadness of a metal sunflower without its seeds and petals; the books; the words; even the human draw of a figure within his usually-opaque painting…

Thinking about Kiefer and Alchemy struck a real chord with me regarding my work. I heard the sound and saw a color light up on an imaginary Wheel of Influences – a Great Circle of all those things that formed my Artistic Sensibility, many of whom I mentioned last month. Kiefer’s in the bottom left, somewhere between the Kienholzes and Nauman. I need to draw this Circle. It will map my location, and show just how far I have to leap to escape…