Archive
12/29/08 - (1)
Special Exhibit Sunday afternoons, in my younger days, Were perfect for journeying through the art museum In the heart of St. Louis's Forest Park. Doing so certainly used to beat watching TV — Those dreadfully repetitive professional football games, Whose entertainment value seemed less than negligible, Their successes and defeats ultimately meaningless. Yesterday, I was lured to our city's grand collections, By ads for a special exhibit of de Kooning and Pollock, To conclude soon after the new year unfolds. It had been a decade, perhaps, Since I'd strolled those spacious main-floor halls, Galleries, corridors, alcoves, with their periods and styles Chronologically imposed by curators, historians. By the time I arrived, tickets for the last hour were sold out. The admission line was too long, anyway. I wandered among Renoir's pastel-soft lily pads, Picasso's one-eyed ladies, Homer's one-room school, Richter's glopped-on angstscapes of World War II Germany, Van Gogh's sinuously impastoed fields... Chagall, Monet, Lichtenstein, Matisse, Beckmann, Johns. Nothing much resonated. All those paintings seemed staged, Each a statement expounding on inertia, stasis, All those pigments and hues, subjects and postures stale, tired, Lifeless, bloodless, irrelevant, obsolete, self-indulgent. Whether it was because the "masterpieces" were second-rate Or merely that, over the years, between youth and old age, I'd grown jaded, or something else, I couldn't tell. One thing was clear enough: the magic had faded. All those celebrated names and legendary, iconic images, Those paintings staring back at me, face to face, Had become mere two-dimensional planes. None spoke to me — Ghosts no longer haunting the living or the dead. I suppose that, long ago, my poems had painted over them.
12/29/08 - (1)
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