Illusions

Last Wednesday I had one of those days to keep me going and living in Omaha.  First, the Sci-Fi Channel had as its daily marathon Roswell, a high school series above other high school series for me (titled in the UK Roswell High, its original working title here), because (a) New Mexico is one of my favorite states, which I've covered as thoroughly as Wyoming and Montana in several trips;  I've been, then, to that notorious UFO center several times; (b) this alien invasion is benign, involving a brother and sister and another couple from royalty on a dying planet, saved the way Clark Kent/Superman was.  Max (the handsome Jason Behr) and Isabel (Katherine Heigl, more famous now on Gray's Anatomy and in Knocked Up) are adopted by an ordinary human, very loving couple, just like the Kents.   Michael 's (Brenden Fehr, later in CSI: Miami) adoptive father is an abusive alcoholic, and Tess Harding doesn't show up until the second season after Max has his romance with a beautiful little waitress, Liz Parker (Shiri Appleby).  The brooding Max has the superior gift of magical healing, a nice change from often ugly aliens trying to destroy us.  By holding his hands over Liz's fatal bullet wound or cancer-stricken children, he makes them well, a major secret of the series, of course, like Clark Kent's being Superman.  The villains are government agents trying to ferret out dangerous aliens as security risks, familiar enough.  The cast are the usual 20-somethings masquerading as high school teenagers.

I didn't watch much of the marathon, one episode after another from 8:00 to 3:00 usually, because I wanted another visit to Joslyn Art Museum's current big show, "Spared from the Storm:  Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art,"  the premier showing here of about 90 of the most prized pieces, covering 300 years.  The advertising says the New Orleans Museum is arguably the South's most important, certainly supported by this exhibition.  The museum sustained multimillion dollar damage from Hurricane Katrina, had to fire most of its staff (who saved all the artworks), had to close for six months, and is still recovering. 

Immediately at the beginning is the 10-foot-tall Marie Antoinette by the 18th century's "greatest woman artist, Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun."   The works are arranged chronologically, all superior, though I'm not as interested in the early academic centuries, the fussy baroque, with some smashing exceptions, a large Copley portrait, a Tiepolo of his own lively red-haired son (8?  10?) looking boldly out at the viewer, an Ingres drawing plotting out the composition of his famed Apotheosis of Homer, the figures almost all nudes (all clothed in the final painting), penciled lines graphing out the drawing for enlargement.  (Ingres is one of the supreme drawers of all time, this study representing his careful preparation.)

However, the 19th and 20th centuries will mean a few more visits, since I see more each time.  The first visit is always overwhelming with names and first impressions, like a banquet of too many rich foods.  I need a digestive break and a nap before I come back for more, at least here where I can.  (One-time visits leave my eyes hurting from necessary excess.)  One of the highlights is the Degas grouping, including a portrait sketch, a bust of him by another sculptor, and a huge unusual painting of his American sister-in-law arranging flowers, not at all like his well-known concert and ballet pictures but somber and expressionistic.  Most people don't know his mother was an aristocratic New Orleans Creole, though they may have seen some of his New Orleans paintings done on family visits, like the popular Portraits in a Cotton Office in another museum.

Besides the Rodin male nude, The Age of Bronze, a woman had to scold some giggling girls over, the show has several huge portraits through all the periods (I mentioned the Copley), including larger than life Robert Henri's The Blue Kimono (1909) and John Singer Sargent's Portrait of Mrs. Asher B. Wertheimer (1898), high society all in white draped with lengthy strands of pearls.  Robert Henri made his reputation back East in Philadelphia as one of the Philadelphia Four, but his real name was Robert Henry Cozad, until his father killed a rancher near the central Nebraska town founded by the family, and flight and name changes--and pronunciation, Hen-rye--were in their best interests. I've yet to see the small Henri museum in Cozad in the artist's childhood home.

Sargent's flair has always fascinated me, most recently with his dashed-off, dashing watercolors, as sensational as Winslow Homer's.  Standing in front of regally white Mrs. Wertheimer, I am as astonished as always at the slapdash of paint daubs that merge at a distance into a realistic illusion.  Jewelry, especially like pearls, requires deft handling of light reflections to create realism, and these are smashing, long smears of dirty grey paint with small circular slashes of white full of confidence, and voila!  A pearl necklace dripping from her neck. 

Light is always the key to such illusions, in photography as well as painting.  The Dutch are astonishing masters at it, like a still life in Joslyn's own collection with glinting gold and crystal goblets, the Rembrandts Simon Schama showed on his current The Power of Art TV series (based on his book, which I have), or the Vermeer I saw in Washington, D.C., the most flabbergasting I've ever seen of thousands of tiny points of white-paint light painstakingly re-creating jewels (pearls!), clothes, table items.

But Sargent's pearls are right up there, and my current favorite in the show is Gerome's much smaller Turkish Bashi Bazouk Mercenaries Playing Chess in a Market Place.  The show has artistic pairings such as Joslyn's own two Bouguereaus on the south side, New Orleans' on the north wall.  One of Joslyn's Bouguereaus, Le Printemps/The Return of Spring, is a huge coy nude surrounded by naked cupids, attacked once here by a madman shouting it was obscene and featured in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, an Edith Wharton novel.  Besides a bust of Gerome, Joslyn has the small The Muezzin (Call to Prayer) and the large The Grief of the Pasha, both exotic like the New Orleans', the latter featuring the pasha seated beside his dead pet tiger showered in rose petals, on a figured carpet in an Alhambra-like hall of ornate Moorish architecture.  Its subject is so odd, I've looked at it repeatedly over the years.  The New Orleans' chess players is a tour de force in paint's illusions, in the fabrics, a silk vest of gold reflecting oranges and reds, an unwinding red turban with satiny white design, embroidered robes and blouses, pleated skirts and turbans, a tasseled tapestry on an overhead beam, an ivory hilt, a glinting brass hookah, an embossed gold wallet, pale and dark skin, four of the five men in a pool of light set off by a small black blob of a crow closest to the viewer on a pale ochre foreground wall.   I would have given my soul to have painted that gold silk-satin vest, gleaming more than any camera could do justice to.