Bianca Steele

Di Chirico and Art History

At The Wisdom of the West, Jim H. has a painting by Di Chirico up.  I think a lot of people could identify Di Chirico’s style—it’s kind of Escher-like, a little more filled out—and have probably seen a few of the paintings he did.  Fewer, I’d guess, could place him in his historical context.  I’ve been thinking about this since I saw an exhibit a few years ago at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.  The museum has been expanding and renovating, and in the process of doing that they decided to display their entire collection of art from the first half of the twentieth century, some of which was already on permanent display, and some of which had been in storage.

Since the choice of works to display was already made, there could be no imposition of some curatorial vision that manipulated the viewer into believing some modern, fashionable idea that in the end might turn out to be only the idiosyncratic opinion of the probably youngish curator and their circle of friends.  Only the division of the paintings into groups (by geography: England; France, Spain, and Italy; Central and Eastern Europe), and the order in which they were placed (Picasso’s mythology-inspired paintings interspersed with the more run-of-the-mill mythology-inspired paintings done by his contemporaries, later Picasso’s cubism-inspired paintings ditto, and so forth), imposed any narrative at all.  It was impossible by the rules self-imposed on the curators to exclude a painting that didn’t fit what they wanted to say, or to add a painting that made their pet theories more plausible.  They included what they had and excluded everything else.  This meant that no real narrative emerged.

I’m not trying to make a distinction between “traditional” and “fashionable” ways of thinking about art.  There are people who do make that distinction; they complain that, as they think, too many people these days try to impose new, false, probably politically-inspired ideas on art to which these ideas are actually totally foreign.  I’m just pointing out that ideas about art do change over time, and that it is really possible to make a specious argument that isn’t really supported by the evidence (the evidence, in this case, being the paintings).  But people who think of themselves as “traditional” can make specious arguments too.  A specious argument is an imposition no matter what point of view the person making it has.  Even a good argument can be an imposition, for one thing because it usually has to exclude a lot in order to get made in a reasonable amount of time.  The exhibit was interesting in part because it had so much stuff in it: way too much stuff for any theory to be convincing.

Columbia College's Core Curriculum

President Obama, like me, is a graduate of Columbia College, the 350 year old Ivy League undergraduate college in New York City. (When he attended the College, it admitted only men. Columbia was the last school in the Ivy League to go co-ed. It began admitting women to the freshman class only in 1983. However, women were permitted to cross-register for classes if they were enrolled at Barnard, across the street, or at the graduate schools and affiliated schools in the neighborhood such as the Manhattan School of Music and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Barnard and Columbia also shared most non-first year dorms, but as a transfer student, Obama would have had almost no chance of getting into oncampus housing.)

Therefore, he would have been required to enroll in the College’s famed Core Curriculum, established in the wake of World War I in order to provide students with a background in Western values. The Core was one of the College’s best selling points -- for those who were interested in that kind of thing -- for others, especially science students (it was relatively easy to place out of the one-year science requirement, at the time, if you had taken AP courses at your high school, but the Core was absolutely mandatory), it was an unpleasant opportunity to read lots of boring books and write a lot of essays. (Barnard women and engineering school students were permitted to enroll in a limited number of Core courses, though the latter found it extremely difficult to find a slot in their class schedules for a liberal arts elective.)

The Core consists of four courses (at least it did in the mid-eighties when I attended): two year-long courses, Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, and two half-year courses, Arts Humanities and Music Humanities. The year-long classes were small and taught by professors from various departments. (You can find the current reading lists here.)

However, transfer students (of which Barack Obama was one) were required to take only half of the Core, one each of the full-year and half-year courses. It seems amusing to wonder which half of the Core Obama elected to take. But it doesn’t seem too difficult to guess. Surely he would have enrolled in CC and Music Hum. Those would have been my choices, if I had had to pick at the age of seventeen. I’m glad I didn’t have to. I enjoyed Music Hum a lot, and learned a lot too, but I probably would have picked up most of it over the years even without taking the course. If I hadn’t taken Lit Hum, I would not have the following books on my shelf now: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (pants I break-a your leg), Aristophanes; Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Inferno; Gargantua and Pantagruel -- but, again, I might have found many of the same books, and read them in the same way, after I had graduated. The one core course I would never have taken the equivalent of unless I had been forced to do so was Art Humanities.

My mother had a handful of art books in the house, but I’d never really gotten much out of them. I don’t think I got much out of school art, either, except that I knew who Leonardo da Vinci was (he was a multifaceted genius, unlike us Penn- and Drexel-bound sixth-graders, who couldn’t even do one thing poorly). In Art Hum, I learned that painting, sculpture and architecture were traditions that each successive artist learns to emulate and to excel. I spent time at the Met, in class groups and by myself, taking the crosstown bus through Harlem, in order to write essays about an eighteenth-century oil painting or a Baroque sculpture of Bacchus. I learned that one of my classmates thought it was either interesting or funny to ask -- of each and every painting we looked at as a class -- how much it had cost. I learned words like “painterly” and “atmospheric perspective.” I learned enough to know that Dan Brown is full of it, and so are whatever people persuaded him of the art-historical “facts” he writes about.

There are a couple of arguments people use to defend the liberal arts from the accusation that studying them is useless; one of them is that when you are old or middle-aged, you will be glad that you know about them, and glad you had learned to read them. That argument is usually made about reading, though, not about art. But at age forty-two, I am glad of the ability to spend an hour or two at an art museum and enjoy it.

Modern Architecture

Say what you will about neoconservatives (I won’t contradict you), they provide employment to plenty of arts critics.  Christopher Caldwell has a thoughtful piece, at the Weekly Standard, on Robert Venturi’s antimodernist postmodern manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas.  Caldwell agrees with the first part of that epithet:

Josep Lluís Sert's ghastly Holyoke Center still occupies the spot in Harvard Square where Massachusetts Avenue's beautiful line of Victorian brick was ripped apart to make way for it in the 1960s. Gerhard Kallmann's Boston City Hall still sits like a Stalinist mausoleum on an empty, windswept plaza, for which dozens of ancient city blocks were razed.

No one will defend the new City Hall (though I’m not sure the Holyoke Center is really that bad), but I’m actually a fan of modernist architecture and always have been.  Those stark, internally monotonous broad towers and sprawling glass boxes can be terribly beautiful.

Yes, it‘s true, “terribly” is appropriate here; their beauty is the sublimity of an enormous object that provokes just a little irrational fear: there is nothing pretty about them.  They possess beauty in the same way that the smokestacks of a nuclear power plant do, seen from a few miles away.  Or one of those fifty-foot Buddha statues.  Or San Diego’s Mount Soledad cross.  Their aesthetic power stems precisely from the sense of a small thing enlarged hundreds of times the appropriate size without a corresponding increase in detail.

The example of the Mount Soledad cross in particular suggests that the beauty of these structures depends on their exposure to the weather.  It’s not just the building itself, but the contrast between it and the sky, the mountains, or the desert.  Which means they do best when they stand isolated from others like themselves.  There are few places where large conglomerations of them work truly well.

Postmodern buildings can look silly, with their overcolored stone veneers and their seventh-story portholes.  However, probably mostly because the area was built up only in the past twenty or so years, the stretch along Boston's Central Artery has a bunch of glass-and-steel postmodernist towers that, as a group, are really very pretty.