Friday Five

1. What is the first painting that you remember seeing (I am talking about originals only, and they neither have to be famous nor painted by someone famous, although in my own answers I will exclude children's art as well as any of my own or Melanie's pieces that are around the house or studio. Feel free to make your own exclusions)?

2. What is the last painting that you saw?

3. What is the next painting that you expect to see?

4. What painting have you not seen that you would really like to see?

5. Describe a notable time when a painting did not make such a big impression on you when you saw it, but continued to come back to your active memory and thus engaged your thoughts.

I have to run right now (we have a tour of an ice cream factory to get to), but I will post my answers in the Extended Entry section this afternoon.

UPDATE: I posted my answers in the Extended Entry section, as promised.

1. This is a hard question for me, since my parents have been taking me to museums since I was born, as we do with Amalia. I sat down and thought back to the first painting I remember, and I think that it was a Miro. I have many memories of Miro from way back, because my father is a big Miro fan, and was always hunting down Miro paintings when we were in a town with a decent museum. What I remember, though, is a generic Miro painting, rather than a particular Miro painting, so I am not counting it.

I also have many early memories of Clyfford Still paintings, mostly because SFMOMA has a good collection of them, and they are always in their own room (those who understand the situation with Still will take this as a given: Still, you see, was such an egotist that he gave many canvases to museums with the stipulation that they must be in their own room or section. If the museum in any way fails to meet his terms, the paintings go to his heirs. Since the paintings are worth a lot of money, the heirs have pretty good cause to strictly enforce Still's will), although my early memories are fuzzy as to which one first stood out as distinct from the others.

So, even though I have earlier memories of Miro and Still, I will have to point to Sunday Morning in the Mines by Charles Christian Nahl as the first painting that I really remember as a painting. It hangs in Sacramento's Crocker Art Museum, and is a really exciting example of mid to late 19th century (1872 to be precise) California Art.

2. I am not counting any painting in my house or my parents' house, so it would have to be Mike Henderson's North Beach (oil on canvas. 1989), hanging in the Oakland Museum of California.

3. Let's see. I probably will next see a painting at mass, and I think I will be going to mass at the National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi in San Francisco, so probably the murals in the front of the church. They date from the 1920's. are rather mediocre, although they do what they are supposed to do, and I cannot remember the name of the artist. It is entirely possible that I will see the North Beach mural at the corner of Columbus and Broadway or the various murals on City Lights Bookstore or Caffe Vesuvio before getting to the church. If I end up going to mass at St. Margaret Mary's in Oakland, I am not sure. We might even make it to SFMOMA tomorrow, in which case I really don't know.

4. I am going to count a painting that I saw but was too young to remember, and that is Matisse's dancers in the Hermitage. I was two years old and may have been asleep. I do not remember the Hermitage, although I have a few memories of Eastern Europe from that age. At that age all the gold leaf at the summer palace and the "snail shells" (that's what I thought of - sea snail shells) of St. Basil's fascinated me more than any painting.

5. During the Robert Ryman retrospective at SFMOMA back in 1992 or thereabouts, I was impressed with his work, but did not realize quite the impact that it made on me. There was one piece in particular, that was basically small staccato zinc white strokes on a well-oxidized iron ground that at first I saw as a good, tightly rendered minimalist/expressionist painting, but somehow really lodged in my head, as I can almost trace each of those strokes.

When SFMOMA moved into its new digs on 3rd Street, they had a room specifically dedicated to Robert Ryman's work (which they changed into something else a few years back). When I first walked in there in 1995 or whenever it was that the new museum opened, I was overjoyed to find that little painting hanging there. When I was able to get to SFMOMA on at least a weekly basis, I went back to that painting each time and just soaked it in. I never expected to like it that much when I first saw it at the retrospective.

Posted by erik at July 23, 2004 10:02 AM | TrackBack