The Art Institute of Chicago has always seemed to me an unsurpassed urban splendor, a Beaux-Arts chunk of the sublime carved out of Indiana limestone. “It is not unlikely that the Chicago Art Institute … has done more for the people of the Middle West than any of the city’s great industries,” Willa Cather wrote in 1895.
Over the past century, a large number of writers have drifted along with everyone else through the light-filled galleries. The experience is indelible, and many have felt special affinity with a collection at once so suggestive, so surprising, and so diverse, both intimate and expansive, central, transfiguring.
How well I remember my first solo trips to the museum in the mid-1960s: the nervous excitement of coming downtown on the “L,” the freedom of drifting through the crowds on State Street toward the open spaces of Lake Michigan, the scarcely concealed exaltation of rushing up the stars between the tutelary bronze lions. Like innumerable others, I countered my world by entering the Art Institute’s imaginative precincts.
Over the years many poems, short stories and personal essays have been written about the art in the permanent collections. Some of those pieces are represented here. Last year, on behalf of the Art Institute, I invited a number of writers to contribute their responses to work in the 19th and 20th Century collections.
The feeling for the museum runs high and the response was immediate and enthusiastic, unwavering. It would seem that the Art Institute was a secret each of us had discovered on his or her own. Many felt called upon to testify to what they had beheld.
Together, these old and new writings comprise a rich variety of responses to works of art that mean a good deal to many of us. Time and again, these writings ask us to redefine what we are viewing. They collect and focus our attention. They teach us to look and look again.
The pieces printed here and in the book “Transforming Vision” are filled with intimacies attained, with reflections, refractions, revelations. The writings and the reproductions of works of art are before us here in their complex interplay and correspondence; a collection of sights crossed by sounds, of visionary transformations.
EDWARD HOPPER’S NIGHTHAWKS, 1942
JOYCE CAROL OATES
The three men are fully clothed, long sleeves, even hats, though it’s indoors, and brightly lit, and there’s a woman. The woman is wearing a short-sleeved red dress cut to expose her arms, a curve of her creamy chest; she’s contemplating a cigarette in her right hand, thinking that her companion has finally left his wife but can she trust him? Her heavy-lidded eyes, pouty lipsticked mouth, she has the redhead’s true pallor like skim milk, damned good-looking and she guesses she knows it but what exactly has it gotten her so far, and where?–he’ll start to feel guilty in a few days, she knows the signs, an actual smell, sweaty, rancid, like dirty socks; he’ll slip away to make telephone calls and she swears she isn’t going to go through that again, isn’t going to break down crying or begging nor is she going to scream at him, she’s finished with all that. And he’s silent beside her, not the kind to talk much but he’s thinking thank God he made the right move at last, he’s a little dazed like a man in a dream–IS this a dream?–so much that’s wide, still, mute, horizontal, and the counterman in white, stooped as he is and unmoving, and the man on the other stool unmoving except to sip his coffee; but he’s feeling pretty good, it’s primarily relief, this time he’s sure as hell going to make it work, he owes it to her and to himself, Christ’s sake. And she’s thinking the light in this place is too bright, probably not very flattering, she hates it when her lipstick wears off and her makeup gets caked, she’d like to use a ladies’ room but there isn’t one here and Jesus how long before a gas station opens?–it’s the middle of the night and she has a feeling time is never going to budge. This time though she isn’t going to demean herself–he starts in about his wife, his kids, how he let them down, they trusted him and he let them down, she’ll slam out of the goddamned room and if he calls her SUGAR or BABY in that voice, running his hands over her like he has the right, she’ll slap his face hard, YOU KNOW I HATE THAT: STOP! And he’ll stop. He’d better. The angrier she gets the stiller she is, hasn’t said a word for the past ten minutes, not a strand of her hair stirs, and it smells a little like ashes or like the henna she uses to brighten it, but the smell is faint or anyway, crazy for her like he is, he doesn’t notice, or mind….She’s still contemplating the cigarette burning in her hand, the counterman is still stooped gaping at her, and he doesn’t mind that, why not, as long as she doesn’t look back, in fact he’s thinking he’s the luckiest man in the world so why isn’t he happier?
1989
EXCERPT FROM HUMBOLDT’S GIFT (”SANDVIKA, NORWAY,” CLAUDE MONET)
SAUL BELLOW
He was waiting between the lions in front of the Institute, exactly as expected in the cloak and blue velvet suit and boots with canvas sides. The only change was in his hair which he was now wearing in the Directoire style, the points coming down over his forehead. Because of the cold his face was deep red. He had a long mulberry-colored mouth, and impressive stature, and warts, and the distorted nose and leopard eyes. Our meetings were always happy and we hugged each other. “Old boy, how are you? One of your good Chicago days. I’ve missed the cold air in California. Terrific! Isn’t it. Well, we may as well start right with a few of those marvelous Monets.” We left attache case, umbrella, sturgeon, rolls, and marmalade in the checkroom. I paid two dollars for admission and we mounted to the Impressionist collection. There was one Norwegian winter landscape by Monet that we always went to see straightaway: a house, a bridge, and the snow falling. Through the covering snow came the pink of the house, and the frost was delicious. The whole weight of snow, of winter, was lifted effortlessly by the astonishing strength of the light. Looking at this pure rosy snowy dusky light, Thaxter clamped his pince-nez on the powerful twisted bridge of his nose with a gleam of glass and silver and his color deepened. He knew what he was doing. With this painting his visit began on the right tone.
(1975)
WOMAN BEFORE AN AQUARIUM
PATRICIA HAMPL
The goldfish ticks silently,
little finned gold watch
on its chain of water,
swaying over the rivulets of the brain,
over the hard rocks and spiny shells.
The world is round, distorted
the clerk said when I insisted
on a round fishbowl.
Now, like a Matisse woman,
I study my lesson slowly,
crushing a warm pinecone
in my hand, releasing
the resin, its memory of wild nights,
my Indian back crushing
the pine needles, the trapper
standing over me, his white-dead skin.
Fear of the crushing,
fear of the human smell.
A Matisse woman always wants
to be a mermaid,
her odalisque body
stretches pale and heavy
before her and the exotic wall hangings;
the only power of the woman:
to be untouchable.
But dressed, a simple Western face,
a schoolgirl’s haircut, the plain desk
of ordinary work, she sits
crushing the pinecone of fear,
not knowing it is fear.
The paper before her is blank.
The aquarium sits like a lantern,
the green inner light, round
and green, a souvenir
from the underworld,
its gold residents opening and closing
their wordless mouths.
I am on the shore of the room,
glinting inside
with the flicker of water,
heart ticking with the message
of biology to a kindred species.
The mermaid–not the enchantress,
but the mermaid of double life–
sits on the rock, combing
the golden strands of human hair,
thinking as always
of swimming.
(1978)
SEURAT’S SUNDAY AFTERNOON ALONG THE SEINE
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
Time passes: nothing changes, everything stays the same. Nothing is new
Under the sun. It is also true
That time passes and everything changes, year by year, day by day,
Hour by hour. Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine has gone away.
Has gone to Chicago: near Lake Michigan,
All of his flowers shine in monumental stillness fulfilled.
And yet it abides elsewhere and everywhere where images
Delight the eye and heart, and become the desirable, the admirable, the willed
Icons of purified consciousness. Far and near, close and far away
Can we not hear, if we but listen to what Flaubert tried to say,
Beholding a husband, wife and child on just such a day:
Ils sont dans le vrai! They are with the truth, they have found the way
The kingdom of heaven on earth on Sunday summer day.
Is it not clear and clearer? Can we not also hear
The voice of Kafka, forever sad, in despair’s sickness trying to say:
“Flaubert was right: Ils sont dans le vrai!
Without forbears, without marriage, without heirs,
Yet with a wild longing for forbears, marriage, and heirs:
They all stretch out their hands to me: but they are too far away!”
(1959)
