September

He sits, stares at a single painting 

in the afternoon, rather abstract,

neo-abstract, perhaps neo-realist 

or post something, he doesn’t know

but it doesn’t matter, the painting

and its moment, the painting

in its moment is what matters

to him, speaks to him, he doesn’t

understand why but he’s beyond 

understanding, beyond veneration,

having arrived at veneration,

the painting is an icon, he thinks, 

the painting should be carried

properly by priests in cassocks

and belts of rope, priests

with long beards, as they carry

the icon flanked by acolytes

with candles down the steps

to Fifth Avenue and turn south. 

Painting: September, oil on canvas by Gerhard Richter (2005), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This poem is a repost from Sept. 11, 2014.

Afternoon at the museum

He sits, stares at a single painting

in the afternoon, rather abstract,

neo-abstract, perhaps neo-realist

or post something, he doesn’t know

but it doesn’t matter, the painting

and its moment, the painting

in its moment is what matters

to him, speaks to him, he doesn’t

understand why but he’s beyond

understanding, beyond veneration,

having arrived at veneration,

the painting is an icon, he thinks,

the painting should be carried

properly by priests in cassocks

and belts of rope, priests

with long beards, as they carry

the icon flanked by acolytes

with candles down the steps

to Fifth Avenue and turn south. 

Painting: September, oil on canvas by Gerhard Richter (2005), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Life without Beauty

For a long time, longer than I really care to admit, I was a cretin when it came to modern and contemporary art. I had this tongue-in-cheek attitude that summed up my thinking on the subject in general: if I could do it, it wasn’t art.

Gradually, that attitude began to break down. I read more. I looked more carefully. I stopped rejecting exhibits or installations out of hand (although, I have to say that the installation of several television monitors talking to each other at the St. Louis Art Museum may still fit my tongue-in-cheek attitude).

But there was a moment, some years ago, when something happened that changed my attitude about contemporary and modern art. It was a series of three paintings at the St. Louis Art Museum by Gerhard Richter, titled individually November, December and January. (That’s December at the top of the page).

I still can’t explain why, but the day came when I looked at those three paintings closely, and realized they represented something far more, far larger, than various shades of gray paint on canvas. I looked at those three paintings, and I felt physically cold, as if I was in the very real presence of a representation of weather.

Richter was the doorway through which I walked into contemporary and modern art. The St. Louis museum has other Richter works, like Gray Mirror (1991), four mounted panels of gray glass, and Betty, a portrait of the back of Richter’s daughter at about age 12. And then I began to read about his work. And moved on from there. Twenty years ago, if someone had asked me who my favorite artist was, I would have likely Cezanne, pr perhaps Andrew Wyeth. Today, I would answer the question by saying Makoto Fujimura.

And I surprise myself even more by finding significant contemporary and modern elements in a painter like El Greco.

The art itself didn’t change; I changed. I understood what I didn’t understand before. The biggest change came in my understanding of creativity.

In Life After Art, Matt Appling says that “human survival never demanded that a poem be written or a song be sung or a play be performed or a story be told or any number of other beautiful, emotional, moving things be created. Beauty is never essential to survival. Yet humanity has spent millions of hours on unnecessary, nonessential creation.

“God’s life is not just about existing. It is about beauty.”

And I found beauty in what I previously didn’t understand, expressions of the creative self that we carry with us because we are made in God’s image.

Over at The High Calling, we’re reading Appling’s Life After Art. To see the discussion today on “Life without beauty,” pleasevisit the site.

Related:

My review of Life After Art.

Broken Hallelujahs, a poem inspired by Gerhard Richter’s December.

Painting: December, oil on canvas by Gerhard Richter (1989).

Broken Hallelujahs

Shards of hallelujahs

litter the floor, shredded like

waste paper, forgotten, not made

I was here once before,

walking on broken hallelujahs,

the cuts leaving a blood path

Hymn-less, I sing a song

bordered in gray, etched

in black, pushing my words

into the chorus of night, hearing

the broken response, the fading

echo of broken hallelujahs

Over at dVerse Poets, the Poetics prompt today is all about Leonard Cohen. To see more poems submitted, please visit dVerse Poets.

Painting: December by Gerhard Richter (1990), St. Louis Art Museum.

September change

Standing in front

of the Metropolitan, next

to the street, he stares

as she disappears, enclosed

in yellow, surrounded

by the vaporous exhausts

of a hundred thousand sets

of moving parts, wheeling

forward, going somewhere,

leaving him standing, not

comprehending, daffodils

dropping singly from his hand

to his feet. He looks up

to the entrance

of the Metropolitan, back

from the street, and knows

he must sit in front

of one painting,

only one, the one called

September.

At dVerse Poets today, the poetics prompt is change. To see other poems submitted, please visit the site.

Painting: September, by Gerhard Richter (2005), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Gerhard Richter's "September"

Everything that could be said today is being said today, and I won’t add words, or many of them.

In May, we were in the bookshop of the Contemporary Art Museum in Chicago, and I found Robert Storr’s September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter. I don’t agree with everything Storr, the dean of the School of Art at Yale University, has to say about 9/11 in the book -- too much of the East Coast liberal in him, and too much of the Midwest conservative in me. But I was taken with Richter’s painting. I had had a post over at High Calling Focus earlier this year about a Richter work at the St. Louis Art Museum, but I wasn’t aware of this work.

It’s small, approximately 20 by 30 inches. And while it doesn’t have the clarity of so many photographs, and the tragedy, horror and pain reflected on so many human faces that day, for me it represents much about what happened that day, what happened to all of us. 

Painting: September by Gerhard Richter (2005), The Museum of Modern Art, New York