Skip to main content

A last day at MOMA


Today it was the turn of the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco.

 It is a very impressive building (which, I know, is a little like saying a book is printed on good paper). 



Here there was a very interesting German painter: Katharina Wulff on show. She reminded me of Edward Burra in the way she encompassed both the urban street and landscape and incorporated, as did he, elements of the surreal, the humorous and the shadowy. One of her landscapes, untitled, is above. She does not, however, have Burra's depth - neither the depth of re-imagined place: Burra's are particular, actual places, Wulff's fade into the non-specifics of dream nor of metaphysics: of the exaltation and tragedy of Christianity that haunts Burra's spaces, as here, in Landscape near Rye.


There was a wonderful room of Mexican painters - Rivera, Kahlo and Rufino Tanayo. Tanayo I had not seen before but there was a delightful painting of his 'The Lovers' a stylized man and a woman holding hands in a sitting room all tenderness and delight in an utterly domestic yet symbolic setting. In the background, a subtle, ambiguous touch: a caged bird - the capitivity of love that is both delight and potential shadow. 


Then it was occasional pieces, among the grind of the contemporary, those vast canvases of unrealized colour or its absence with which I have a glancing sympathy at best or the 'conceptual' whose sterility I am afraid never ceases to amaze. There was an Edward Hopper of a solitary woman at the cinema that displayed all his gifts of the realistic symbolic, a Mondrian so orderly and light filled, and a fabulous Rothko. Sitting in front of this pulsating painting that saturates, I realized you have to be very grounded to receive that intensity of transcendence and,sadly, Rothko was not. In Zen, after satori, there is the practice of 'polishing the stone' of being en-grounded in 'enlightenment', finding it in the contours of the everyday. You have to able to withstand truth as well as understand it. Spirituality has to be horizontal as well as vertical.

I went for a last walk, dropped in on City Lights once more and guiltily found several books I wanted, and noted them down for later internet purchase. I could excuse myself with the thought of long distance travel; however, guilt won out and I bought a book on Cranach and Luther. 

On my way back to the hotel my final stop was to call into Grace Cathedral (Episcopal/Anglican) two of whose Deans I have known (I realized). It is spacious, wealthy and prim.The stained glass, however, is rich and luminous and tracing its narratives is enjoyable and often unexpected. Martin Buber pops up in one for reasons I could not trace!

Tomorrow it is on a jet plane...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more