Adolph Gottlieb - Apaquogue

Adolph Gottlieb - Apaquogue, 1961

I saw this piece, not for the first time, at the Fort Worth Modern a few days ago, and something about it hooked me on this visit.  One of the values of art.  It doesn't stop talking.  The voice is always there, and we don't hear it until our ears and head and heart are aligned right.

I went to the Modern for quiet.  To touch pieces in my mind, and to wander about them in my body.  To settle out some noise, and clear my head for my own creative needs and get some parts of stories onto paper (yes, actual paper.)

I have an odd practice with art - well, relatively odd compared to what most people appear to do in museums.  Maybe they just do it less obviously than me.  I walk up close; I step back; I wander side to side; I come 'round to one edge and walk past with the art in 'my peripherals;' I tilt my head back and forth and up and down.  I know the artist saw the piece from a thousand angles while working on it, and I guess I'm trying to retrieve a sense of that dynamic.  How did he or she perceive it when approaching it cold? When coming back after days of frustration with it? While fighting with one stubborn mix of color or of tone or of texture.  What did the artist love and hate about as it loomed in front?  What did the artist see as they turned and walked away, maybe for the last time?

On that visit, this piece in particular rang - insistently - so many of those bells.

I saw the beach road the piece was named after.  I saw the sun coming up again and again as he processed things, as he saw the piece come into definition, maybe even before paint came to canvas.  I saw the grasses along the shore moving in the wind.  But ... I also saw flotillas of boats racing toward a beach that was covered in landing craft and tank traps, enmeshed in chaos, under the heat of sun and the harried glare of signal lamps. There was, on the one hand, the calm of Gottlieb's Hamptons vista, but also my own brain's insinuation of years of war coming to a head on Omaha Beach.

I wasn't there.  I've never been either place. I don't know the inherent truth of those places. I only know what I brought, and what my brain splashed onto the canvas in response to what was already there.  

Gottlieb owns what lives permanently inside the fibers and pigments of Apaquogue.  I own, for now, what I brought on Sunday.  I'll continue to own traces of it, even as my viscera settle.  On my next visit, I may have different filters and perspectives that will interact with the permanence of Apaquogue.

I know people - plenty of people - who don't "get" modern art. It's too stark, too bare, too inhuman.  I understand the words they use and the context they move within, but I don't "get" their "not getting." It's a harder dialogue, to be sure, at times.  Perhaps we have to be quieter for modern art and we have much less quiet than we used to in our daily lives.  But that's of value to me.  When I go to the altar of art, I have to bring my own quiet along, and make good use of it.  Then I leave and the quiet lingers long enough to bear fruit.

Rilke says that “Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ” I think we can say the same about art, modern or not. Even there, the divide between creativity and intimacy is paper thin.  Even there, we meet and give birth to new things.