Polish Diary. "The Soil".

It is always wrong to reduce a whole museum to just one work of art. However, if I absolutely had to do it here, at the National Museum in Warsaw, I would go to Ferdynand Ruszczyc and his masterwork "The Soil". That is a painting of such internal power and primordial intensity that you have to make sure you take it all in slowly, calmly, getting lost in the rough textures of what you are seeing. Because it is not even about the details. This time, it is all about the sheer grandiosity of those horrifying clouds that the lonesome farmer is carrying on his shoulders. 

Oddly, I have always believed Ferdynand Ruszczyc to be a Belarusian painter. He was born in Belarus and died there (Bohdanow village in the Western part of the country), he spent his childhood in Minsk and he identified as Belarusian. However, Poland claims Ruszczyc as its own, even despite his early education in St. Petersburg as well as the fact that much of his life as an artist was spent in Vilnius. Having said that, the artist held Polish citizenship and it was in Poland that he got his recognition. To me, the point of the argument centres around the very painting. "The Soil". This bold, challenging work was rejected by St. Petersburg for its radical break with conventions but was accepted in Poland that immediately recognised "The Soil" for what it was: a masterpiece of impressionistic realism. That, as well as Ruszczyc's subsequent career in Poland, guarantees the rightfulness of Poland's claims. 

The National Museum in Warsaw displays great works of international, and internationally recognised, art. In its essence, however, it is a Polish museum. The first floor is devoted exclusively to religious paintings, icons, sculptures and installations, which subdues your spirit and sets the mood for the whole experience. And then, upstairs, Gustave Courbet and Paul Signac, while certainly good, do not really overshadow the works of Polish art. Alfred Kowalski's travelling stories of grim realism, Piotr Michałowski's striking portraits from the 19th century, Aleksander Gierymski's early impressionism... These are all works that give credibility to Polish art, which is precisely the point of any national museum.

Still, while I was impressed by the story behind Stanisław Wyspiański's creepy "The Mulchs" and the tasteful, slightly mysterious expressionism of Konrad Krzyżanowski, it is Ferdynand Ruszczyc and "The Soil" that have really stayed with me. I remember how once, in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, I spent an inordinate amount of time staring at "Woman with a Parasol" (which could qualify as my favourite painting of all time). Well, the National Museum of Warsaw gave me something similar in the sense that I could not look away from Ruszczyc's painting even as people were rushing by me and a group of Polish children were listening to a lecture behind my back. Monet's masterpiece is a work of ecstatic beauty and subtle impressionism, but this is something completely different. 

With "The Soil", it is the physical, physiological effect that absorbs you. The painting is huge, but that is the only way for it to exist (I am enclosing it here, but it has to be seen live). It is not that "The Soil" drags you into its frame - it is that the painting bursts out of it. And you feel small, and insignificant, and utterly gripped, and a tiny step closer to discovering what art really stands for.

My Cultural Lowlights: MARY CASSATT

These days, when you walk through the wonderful selection of Impressionist paintings in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., you are bound to notice a dozen or so works by Mary Cassatt. I say a dozen, but you will end up thinking there is a good hundred of them. They will jump at you from behind a striking view of Paris captured by Pissarro or they will glare at you from under the newspaper of Cézanne's father or they will, in all honesty, bring you back to earth after the beautiful reverie of staring at Woman with a Parasol. 

I think there is an elephant in the room here, and the elephant is done with crude brush strokes: Mary Cassatt's paintings are simply not that good. 

The most offensive thing about them is that they look like copies, not original works. Degas is all over these paintings, but, really, they are influenced by any number of Impressionists. They are not second-rate as the technique is there and the colours have that rough, rich quality to them. Rather, I would argue that Mary Cassatt's works look second-hand. They look like someone had already done that particular scene, and done it better. 

Besides, it is hard to look past those faces. The two ladies from The Loge (1882) are off. There is no mystery about the eyes, no personality to the facial features. They look plain, and that is one crime Impressionist artists could never commit. I am almost reminded of a scene from The Man Who Wasn't There where a piano teacher has this to say about the playing of a young and promising girl: "She plays too polite". Which is also true for Mary Cassatt. She painted too polite, too safe, and at times it feels that the best her paintings could amount to was a faithful homage. After all, Monet's "The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil" is hanging right across the room.

Now obviously there is another elephant in the room here, and this elephant is even bigger and it has to do with why Mary Cassatt is there in the first place, on those huge white walls, alongside Renoirs and van Goghs and Sisleys. But this elephant I would rather not touch, or it might explode into a million dots that would not assemble into anything quite as beautiful as a painting by Georges Seurat. 

Truman Capote by Henri Cartier-Bresson

My working desk is often a kitchen table, sometimes a cafe table and rarely an actual desk. But what stays, what absolutely has to be next to me when I write, is this picture of Truman Capote as taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson:

It's an iconic image, one that I first saw a month ago at the Lucca Centre of Contemporary Art. It was a lovingly compiled retrospective devoted to Cartier-Bresson's American work that, quite frankly, blew me away like no other exhibition in recent memory. From Igor Stravinsky fondling a dog to the two nuns contemplating Matisse to a small black girl in a white dress, this was black and white photography with an edge. And while I was dizzy halfway through, the image of young Truman Capote provided the final punch. 

There are many things for which I love this image, but really it's all about the way Capote stares at you. It's a look of apprehension, defiance, slight unease. There is a hint of that Kubrick stare about the whole thing but it's too elusive to grasp. 

And this image moves. Every day, it puts me into my writing mood regardless of a desk or a table I may be writing on. 

The Classical

When you fall in love with an Impressionist painting, you do not have to respect it. You see the primitive olive trees of Matisse or else the straw chairs of Van Gogh, and respect is only an afterthought. Because first - there is love. You do not really have to think about the time and the sheer effort that Ingres put into his meticulous gowns of pure silk. And then, later, you delve deeper and in some dusty gallery you see the early drawings of Van Gogh and Matisse, and realise they could paint your classical still life as well as any Flem from the 16th century.

Now, suddenly, there is respect, and you may try to find some use for it.

Speaking of music, free jazz is very similar to an Impressionist painting. Albums like Coltrane's Ascension or Coleman's Science Fiction attack your senses the way Gauguin did (the latter was once called a 'virgin with savage instincts'). But then again, you will never forget that Ascension was released just one year after A Love Supreme, and Coltrane's free jazz was an experiment, a discovery. 

Ornette Coleman's story, however, is quite different, and a fascinating interview with Charles Mingus from some old issue of the New Yorker magazine featured this intriguing story. Once, during some jazz festival in the 60s, Mingus and friends pushed Coleman into the corner, gave him the saxophone and instructed him to play "Willow Weep For Me" and to play it straight. Classically. The punch line of the story was that Coleman couldn't. Not without a free interpretation, not without putting a spin on it. 

Having first read that story, I was forced to ask myself if it in any way diminished my love for the man who recorded The Shape Of Jazz To Come. And the truth is, it did not, because in art as well as every day of the week - love trumps respect.

Icarus

There's a young man I will never write about. I do not quite understand why, but there are сlauses you'd rather not trigger. Places you'd rather not go. 

He works in a modern art gallery, like so many of them do, and I see him in places as different as Warsaw and Dublin. His job is to walk around the room with landscapes by Gabriele Münter and to make sure that no one gets too close. Or else his job is to sit on one of those basic chairs and stare blankly at the visitors.

The visitors say something, on occasion, like "her genius was underrated" or "wasn't her ambition a little bit too studied?" Sometimes they would even broach a wider issue and whisper: "Gauguin almost works for me, but doesn't" and "Cezanne almost doesn't work for me, but does". Most often, however, they settle on "My God this is awful". 

And through all of that, he looks bored but intelligent. Aloof yet self-confident. A man of mystery. 

But here's the funny thing: they do not notice the young man. Almost no one does. I try to cut him open with a sideways glance, but my knife is much too blunt. I can't get in, though not for want of trying. He's been here for days, weeks, months, in this tiny room overlooked by red cubes, black squares and disfigured farmers. To him, we are hopeless drifters. I think that in all this time surrounded by Kandinsky and Pollock... well, he must have learnt some underlying mystery, but his eyes give away so little.

There is, however, a chance that he knows no mystery. All these years in the sun are fake years, they taught him nothing beyond the fleeting backs of a million visitors.  

Either way, I can't write about him. For if I do, a story or perhaps a novel, something stretching beyond this brief sketch here, I'm afraid that I could accidentally find him out.

Хоппер и Магритт

Что делать в музее?

Ты думал так часто, а тебе так часто говорили. "Выбери одну или две, забудь про все остальные". Но вот ты снова выходишь из зала с чувством, что не понял или упустил. Они остались там, Хоппер с Магриттом, а ты растерянно и немного пристыженно смотришь на входящих и думаешь, что эпифания была где-то рядом.

"Бери блокнот и записывай имена и названия". Но ты знаешь, как это глупо. Блокнот затеряется на дне сумки, а сумка будет выброшена в реку. Если однажды ты вновь увидишь имена и названия, небрежно написанные твоей рукой (или..?) в Дрезденской галерее или Метрополитене, то связи с моментом больше не будет. Эпифании не случится. Ты уже не тот человек, и это был совсем другой мир. 

"Фотографии?" Те самые фотографии, которые в любом альбоме и на любой открытке будут выглядеть в миллионы раз лучше?.. И потому ты снова упустил возможность и едва ли чем-то отличаешься от беспокойного ребенка, обежавшего галерею за двадцать три минуты и восемь секунд. Ты тот, кто снимает концерт на камеру вместо того, чтобы слушать музыку, о которой мечтал полжизни. 

Что еще? "Картины лечат". Но ты уже спускаешься по ступенькам, а насморк все не проходит.

Остается одно. Чтобы запомнить рассказ, роман, книгу, нужно представить, что читаешь его глазами другого человека. Так, чтобы понять картину или хотя бы создать эту иллюзию, нужно не пользоваться ею глазами три секунды или три часа, но смотреть глазами прохожего, матери, друга, случайной дамы из конца 19 века. Хоппера или Магритта, ни один из которых, конечно, не увидел бы в ней того, что увидишь ты.