Museum going

I haven’t been watching any movies lately as I’m currently road tripping across American East Coast for the very first time in my life. But I have had more than a pit stop at Washington DC where I decided to visit art galleries the size of Texas across the nation’s capital. 

It was the most surreal experience of my life to enter the main lobby of the National Gallery of Art. 

I straightaway went to see the French Impressionists on display at that opportune moment, as part of the “Eighteenth Century French Painting” exhibition. Edouard Manet’s electrifying Railway greeted me with the unforgettable gaze of a lady and an infant while her daughter is ostensibly looking at a rail engine that was a curiosity in France in late 1880s.

As someone who never saw the masters before, it was gooseflesh-inducing for me to see Georges Seurat, Claude Monet, Édouard Vuillard, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Rembrandt, Camille Pissarro under the same roof. 

Going from room to room filled with these redoubtable masterpieces reminded me of my favourite instances of art experience in cinema and literature.

The imposing facade of the gallery made me want to run across the museum à la the three characters at Louvre in Jean Luc-Godard’s Bande à part. I wonder if I could have matched their eight-minute record of seeing every painting while running considering there was a Frédéric Bazille retrospective, which was truly wonderful. He never got much recognition like rest of his peers because of his relatively short career but the works at display were inestimably brilliant. 

His still-life paintings were the highlight. His masterpiece “A Family Gathering” struck a chord with me for the way Bazille made sunlight pierce through the trees where his family is looking together. 

It made me think a lot about Ben Lerner’s debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station. The narrator, an American poet on a scholarship in Madrid, woos a local girl, tries to create poetry and is apathetic to bombings in the city. Despite him being a borderline insufferable jerk, I sort of rooted for him because Lerner’s protagonist keeps visiting art galleries where he talks about experiencing art by “thinking of the artist for a while”. Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours is a must watch for a gallery hopping person. A Vienna museum guard befriends a visitor at the majestic Kunsthistorisches Museum and they bond over a Brueghel painting. The movie shows how art can heal wounds in the best way possible.

I also happened to visit the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, situated across the street, where I saw a bunch of contemporary art that was alternately fascinating and discombobulating. Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway gave me the chills for the way he fused American pop culture with the social fabric of the nation. He basically dehusked this corn by representing each American state by video footage in old television sets reflecting his personal association and that of his artist friends with them. The lifesize artwork is neon lit and is the most perfect thing I could have wished to see on the Fourth of July. I also saw an Edward Hopper (People in the Sun) and Alice Neel (a pronounced self-portrait) here, even though both were their unheralded works. 

Visiting these places made me believe that what India lacks the most is the gallery-going attitude. Most of the big galleries have huge collections, people we have never heard of and there’s such a wealth of material to see. I find galleries very tiring, too much on display, not much time to calm down and really observe. It’s like running a marathon, just get terribly tired and sort of worn out. Trying to see them all at once made me feel like a high-speed voyeur. 

In the developed world, the public is given access to the art galleries across all sections (it was free for everyone at the museums in DC). Wish I had access to such art throughout the year. Before we turn into a country of philistines where the only work of art we know is Hindi cinema, the government should right this gross wrong. 

jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in