This is the color of my dreams

Al Filreis

Philippe de Montebello — whose long career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art spanned nearly a third of the institution’s entire history — retired a few years ago after more than thirty-one years as director. At the time of his reitrement the curators of the various departments each dug around in their collections and chose to feature acquisitions made during the de Montebello years, their favorites. And that's one of the exhibits I saw with my wife Jane in late December 2008. Some pieces were chosen more because the story of the acquisition is fascinating than because the artwork itself is tops. So the show was a hodge podge, arranged, room by room, according to the date the work came to the museum rather than its year of creation. Exhibit goers got a bit of whiplash moving from the 18th-c. wooden bust of a powerful Russian politician to Segovia's favorite Spanish (actually Austrian) guitar to some Tahitian faces drawing by Gauguin in 1899.

So Jane and I went. We saw an especially large Brancusi bird-in-space sculpture, made in 1923 and acquired in 1995. We saw and loved Jasper Johns' 1955 White Flag. Prior to getting this big canvas the Met had never owned a single Jasper Johns. The director and modern painting curator went to Johns' place in Connecticut to purchase it from the artist himself. White Flag is the largest of Johns's flag paintings and the first in which the flag is presented in monochrome. It's been described as having a "lush reticence," and I'd say that's exactly right.

And, to my mind, the most compelling piece in the show was Miro’s 1925 "Photo: This is the color of my dreams," a fine instance of peinture-poesie. Miro was thinking about a photograph and then painted a painting “about” it while at the same time making no effort to reproduce the photo visually. It’s not a painting about a photograph but, rather, a painting about the poetics of photography.

Damn, I forgot to bring my good camera and so took these not-so-clear shots with my phone. Forgive me, but you get the idea.

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The Miro painting/anti-painting show at MoMA was open at the same time, through mid-January of 2009. "I want to assassinate painting," said the artist in 1927 and these works date from '27 to '37.

November 12, 2011

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modern painting

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.