“flash and sparkle”

A week ago my wife and I spent a delightful afternoon at the Art Institute of Chicago. Laying eyes on American Gothic was a highlight for me.

They do need to talk, don't they? And wouldn't the museum experience be so much more amusing if all the pictures were captioned like New Yorker cartoons!
 
The clear highlight for her was all that Impressionism, especially Monet (Kieran Setiya flags Julian Barnes's appreciation this morning).

I've never quite grasped the special allure of that artist, but a former guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art sheds light. I especially like Patrick Bringley's invocation of Emerson's lively language to describe the artist's uncanny way of transcending mere vision, showing us how to see beyond the literal surface. Next time I'm in an art museum, I'm going to talk to a guard or two.

"If you want to know if something is funny, see if it makes you laugh. If you want to know if a painting is beautiful, see if it evokes an equivalent response, one as definite as laughter though usually quieter and shyer to emerge. I step up to a landscape painting called Vétheuil in Summer, close enough that it swallows my field of vision. I find that my eyes can accept its fictive world as real. I see a village and a river and the village's reflection suspended in river water, only in Monet's world there is no such thing as sunlight really, just color. Monet has spread around the sunlight color like the goodly maker of his little universe. He has spread it, splashed it, and affixed it to the canvas with such mastery that I can't put an end to its ceaseless shimmering. I look at the picture a long time, and it only grows more abundant; it won't conclude.

Monet, I realize, has painted that aspect of the world that can't be domesticated by vision—what Emerson called the "flash and sparkle" of it, in this case a million dappled reflections rocking and melting in the waves. It is a kind of beauty that the old masters seldom could fit into their symbolic schemes, a beauty more chaotic and aflame than our tidying minds typically let us see. Usually, we are looking around for useful information and dampening or ignoring a riot of irrelevant stimuli that threatens to drown it out. Monet's picture brings to mind one of those rarer moments where every particle of what we apprehend matters—the breeze matters, the chirping of birds matters, the nonsense a child babbles matters—and you can adore the wholeness, or even the holiness, of that moment.

When I experience such a thing, I feel faint but definite tremors in my chest. I imagine that a similar sensation inspired Monet to pick up a paintbrush. And with this picture, he has trembled his feelings over to me." — All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley