Elizabeth Hoover Norman

When I started this blog about a year ago, I called it "the world's museum." I meant to evoke in that phrase the curious and thoughtful looking that I associate with museums, the way we pause, admire, critique, ask questions, try to remember objects that the museum presents us. What if the world were a museum, then? What if we, walking across fields, reading a book, looking at a garden, visiting a new place, thought of what we were seeing as cared for by curators, as "framed" to invite us to contemplate, the time we spend there precious and significant?

I came this way of thinking from many others who seem also to know this, from my father, my friend George Allen, my wife, my brothers and sisters-in-law, cousins, teachers, students. This week I lost one of my dearest museum companions, my cousin Elizabeth Hoover Norman, who died Tuesday.

Elizabeth was the daughter of my father's youngest sister, who followed him from southern Georgia to Cambridge, Mass. There they roomed together and she studied Shakespeare with the G. L. Kittredge, who was my father's dissertation advisor. And he introduced her to Herb Hoover, not the president, but a young architect from Idaho. He built a collection of stunning modernist homes in Lincoln, Mass., including his own home. No wonder that Elizabeth, and her twin Lucretia, and brother Harry, grew up wanting to talk about art -- and music, and books, and mountains -- as if these were part of a vast museum.

Elizabeth, like her sister, studied art history at Oberlin, using the same wonderful art museum that I now teach in and write about. Later she took an MA at Harvard -- while I was an undergraduate there, and I would visit her at the Fogg. When she married John Norman, she moved to England with him and taught art history at several places, most recently at Hallam University in Sheffield. She finished her PhD at Leeds just a few years ago, in her late 60s!

What she most loved was public art, art that doesn't hang on the walls of a real museum, but occupies public space in cities or in fields. She took us a couple of years ago to the Yorkshire Sculpture Garden on a blustery November day, full of energy despite her cancer, bounding across fields and paths to find the next Goldsworthy.




I loved visiting England's historic homes with Elizabeth. Last fall we went to Haddon Hall, an Elizabethan house that I had never seen. We lingered -- despite the freezing cold -- in the courtyard, the great hall, the chambers, the galleries, talking all the time about the architecture, the furnishings, the people who had lived here, above all just trying to evoke for each other the sense of the wonderful patina of the place, its layered historicity. John gave up after not too long and went ahead to watch a video about the re-creating of a sixteenth century banquet in the hall.

Just weeks before she died, Elizabeth went to London to give a talk about public art at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was about a project she was passionate for, the "Fourth Plinth" project in Trafalgar Square. There are three big plinths occupied by statues; the fourth has been empty for most or all of its time. The artist Andrew Gormley devised a plan to fill that plinth not with images of famous people, but with actual ordinary people, all day and night, all summer. Elizabeth signed up to be one, and was delighted to be chosen in the random drawing process. Late one night, at one am, she was put on this plinth by cherry-picker and proceeded to spend an hour doing her Indian Club exercises. We and others watched by streaming video as she deliberately paced off the area, swung the clubs in wonderful great arcs, and her amplified shadow followed her, projected by the arc lights onto -- where else? -- the front of the National Gallery. The indoor museum as a screen for the outdoor museum! Here the link to her part of this event -- you can actually watch her swing the clubs! 

Elizabeth was an exceptional curator of that world's museum that she and I shared.

Burchfield at the Whitney

In NYC for a wedding, we went to the retrospective of Charles Burchfield at the Whitney. As an Ohioan -- no, a northern Ohioan! -- I had known of Burchfield and have seen his watercolors before. But THIS exhibit: what an eye-opening set of rooms!

Burchfield makes of watercolor -- normally a pastoral medium -- a stage for the tragedies of nature. His trees are vital, scary, independent of humans (as I guess he might have been as well). They have their own agendas.
This little back yard is so fraught with danger and with life! Look at the little buzzy verticals above the bush: I think they represent insect songs.

I can't find images of most of the pictures I saw. One was a swamp in the afternoon (he loved swamps, apparently). What watercolorist would position himself IN A SWAMP, in the AFTERNOON, looking INTO the sun! but here was the sun, glowing, its super-nuclear fires evident in the normally-placid medium of watercolor: the medium that in Burchfield's hands, vibrates with fear, anger, awareness...

He did attend to the great depression, though he really loved nature, and produced a great body of realist, regionalist work about the thirties. Here's his image of an equinoctial storm -- nature beating down on shabby workers' houses as it did on the bald head of King Lear.

One particularly bizarre piece: the front of a house stands alone, a movie-facade, while builders take down everything behind it. It is ONLY the front, nothing else.

He wrote about one piece: "Astonishment and wonder are the keynotes of hte picture -- Eliminate all else." What a mantra for an artist to live by!

This is an Orion picture -- December Ohio sky.  Aren't these stars and these trees astonishing and wonderful???

I think of the great American poet Theodore Roethke -- like Burchfield, he grew up in the midwest (Michigan) -- and knew the connections of nature's insistence and the soul's obsessions. His father ran a greenhouse -- who better to know of how nature's pressures are to grow, and grow, and grow?

Here's Roethke's famous and wonderful poem about the roots in a root cellar. I think I knew these roots when I was 13 years old, too.

Root Cellar by Theodore Roethke

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

One last Burchfield: he called this "Decorative Landscape," but like Roethke's roots, these are far from decorative. He must have been a great ironist!

Oberlin at the Metropolitan Museum

Oberlin's art museum is closed for renovation, and in the meantime works are at Akron, Cleveland, and now, just opened, in a show at the Metropolitan in NYC. "Side by Side" puts 20 Oberlin works in the galleries of the Met with their own (incredible) collection.

I went last week and loved the show. It didn't hurt that Central Park was buzzing with blossoms and bicycles as well.

I loved especially how the paintings that I have worked with for years at Oberlin now take on new meanings when they are in a new context.

Oberlin's museum has its own blogsite, so I wrote a piece for that -- this click should take you there. Here I am in front of one of my favorites:

Fires beneath the surface

Just before Christmas, we went to Bellevue, WA, where the Bellevue Arts Museum had an exhibition of Robert Sperry's ceramics. Sperry taught for decades at the University of Washington, and evolved from a fairly standard ceramicist (teapots and vases) to a funky and then a profound abstract expressionist. He died in 1998.

Ceramics are hard for me to appreciate, but I'm trying to learn. How to appreciate randomness, for example? Some of Sperry's transitional works were raku, I think: at any rate, they had that rough texture and almost random coloration that wood ash gives to Japanese pots. As you can tell from this blog, I tend to like order in art -- I think I might actually be still living in the Enlightenment period -- but here I started to see why the randomness matters.

For me, the connection is fire. I love watching, tending, feeding fires. . . .  the smoke, the swirl of flame, the transformation of neat logs to ash that clings to surfaces. So now when I see the finished pots that come out of such fires, I try to re-imagine the flames. The cold pot starts to glow with a fantasy heat; the museum (God forbid!) starts to fill with eye-watering smoke. And ceramic, I realize, becomes a liminal thing, a threshold piece, between our safe world and the dangerous fires beyond.

In Sperry's last pieces, the fire matters, too, but with a different aesthetic. These are abstract plates, big in scale, useless as household objects. They are massively crinkled, the glaze and the slip broken in deep gullies. There are blobs of clay, often at the center, sticking up from the plate surface. The upshooting blobs eat into the space of air and coolness around these plates, dangerous vestiges (or sacred orifices) of fire. They ooze with a deep pigmented blob around them, as if lava or blood were coming up out of the center. There is a pent-up energy in these pieces that is belied by their cool abstraction, the neatness of their circular outline and the coolness of their white glaze. Like manuscripts overwritten, they hold vestiges of the energies that have both created and wiped out, that have written, erased, rewritten, torn, and poked through the surface of meaning.

Gerard Manley Hopkins knew about fires beneath the surface: the end of his wonderful sonnet on "The Windhover" -- a bird of prey, turning from calm soaring to a steep dive, like a coal in the fire suddenly falling open:

. . . and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Or, in a more elegiac vein, Shakespeare, in his sonnet about growing old:

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie. . .

(Interesting that in both poems, the verbs for these fires are "g" words: "gall," "gash," and "glow." Does anybody know what that might mean about language?)

Blake's power

William Blake was so many creators: poet, engraver, painter, mystic, prophet. You probably know the great poem "Tyger, tyger, burning bright" from Songs of Experience. Here you can see the poem not just in its printed version, as we probably learned it in high school, but in one of its original magnificently colored and intricately lettered forms. I just saw this at the J. P. Morgan Library and Museum in New York, where there's a wonderful exhibit of Blake's original prints and paintings, images that are amazing in the original.


What a strange poem this "Tyger" is: contemplating creation as the work of a blacksmith at his anvil, hammering iron to create the sinews of a great tiger. That tiger is surely the French Revolution, striking terror and hope into Europe as Blake was creating these poems. It is also the poem/print itself, etched into copper with acid as biting as the rhetoric of Revolution and Terror. And yet -- how doubly strange -- this tiger is depicted as no fiercer than my cat. It is easy to forget how these poems of "Experience" -- bitterness, struggle, sometimes despair -- were paired by Blake with his lovely, pastoral "Songs of Innocence": "Little Lamb, who made thee?" The tiger and lamb may be, as he said, "contraries," but they are inextricably bound to each other.

This image is "Job Rebuked by his Friends." For Blake, the bible was a series of poems, texts he read not for fundamentalist truths, but as windows into the strange workings of the spirit. Here is Job, covered in boils, having lost his wealth and family, in misery, all because of Satan's dare to God: let me test your righteous servant, he proposes, and God agrees.

Here Job is visited by his "friends," who assert that he must be a sinner: God only punishes those who break His commandments. These friends are hateful figures of accusation, terrible, and terribly wrong: Job is righteous.

And yet these rebukers are beautiful, powerfully expressive (look at those hands!), and in some ways they are right. Job's righteousness has blinded him in some way; it has in itself been his failure. As Blake read the book, Job worships a God he has essentially created out of his own soul: a God who is like him, righteous, exacting, strict to the law. He needs to be awakened to a different divinity (a lamb?), and these horrible accusers (these tigers?) are doing just that. It's a revolutionary reading of that great book of the bible. There are 22 prints in all in the Job series, each a miniature masterpiece.

For a wonderful novel about Blake in his London and revolutionary contexts, I recommend Tracy Chevalier's Burning Bright.  The exhibition is William Blake's World: "A New Heaven Is Begun" and it is on until Jan. 3.

Dovedale

The layering of history in England is neither more nor less than the layering of history anywhere in the world, I know. But in England, I'm more acutely aware of it.

By layering, I mean the way one can sense the years and centuries underlying the surface of life: the way the road very occasionally gives up its manic curves and straightens out for a few miles, and you realize that it's following one of the roads cut efficiently and uncaringly across the landscape by the ancient Romans.

Or, going even deeper, the way the crags here in the Peak district show those long-past sedimentations, heaved up in the incline from southwest to northeast in geological time; that happens all over the US, too, but here an extra layering brings them to consciousness, for they are the evidence by which Lyell and the other 19th-century geologists propelled the world from biblical theo-history to geological evolution theory.

(I hope soon to read Tracy Chevalier's new book about the English fossil hunter Mary Anning -- not yet released in the US, I think).

I walked in Dovedale yesterday. It's a famous place in England, a Yosemite on a tiny scale, only 3 miles long. I came  because I love walking with my cousin Elizabeth and her husband John, and because I wanted to see a place where the geology tells so much about the layering, and where poets and artists that I'm trying to know more about have come in the past.

Here was Wordsworth, a kid walking (yes, walking) home from his freshman year at college, stopping by to see the valley. He wrote a little "blog" entry about it, too, storing up his impressions for some future use.

Here was Joseph Wright, the painter of Derby, who loved light so much. He must have walked this valley late at night, and he painted this beautiful picture that now hangs in Oberlin's museum and that I take my students to see.

Here was Miss La Roche, in the 18th century, who picnicked by the river Dove, and then climbed on a horse with the elderly Dean (cathedral Dean, not academic) to climb out of the valley. Near the top, the path became too steep, the horse slipped, the Dean fell to his death, and the young lady survived to write to her mother about the event.

And here was I, at one moment in time, a fold in the strata of history, gratefully balancing on the stepping stones planted two hundred years ago across a river that still flows today.

Gauguin's waves

Having just plunged into this blog by creating my metaphor about the world as museum, I'll make that metaphor literal with last week's experience in an actual, non-metaphorical museum. At the Cleveland Museum of Art, a show just opened called Paul Gauguin: Paris 1889. It explores, and virtually recreates the exhibit that Gauguin and his friends created at the Café des Arts in Paris, as a resistance and alternative to the establishment paintings shown at the official exposition.

Collaboration amongst these then-unknown artists, in the interests of self-promotion, created a nexus of images that circulate among them, motifs that appear and reappear as one and then another tries his (yes, they are all men) hand at a motif. It reminds me of Keats and his friends' sonnet contests ("write a sonnet on the River Nile"), this time with French motifs, such as the fierce waves of the Breton coast.

The central work in the exhibition is In the Waves (the picture's from the CMA website).

I grew up with this picture. My grandfather, Frank Hadley Ginn, bought it, probably in the 1920s, and hung it in his house in Gates Mills, Ohio, outside Cleveland (my parents gave it to the museum in 1978). The exhibition helped me see that my grandfather, a corporate lawyer who built a beautiful but quite conservative stockbroker-Tudor home, had a radical taste in art. This image even now sears the eye with its powerful colors, its strange surreal flatness, its oscillation of focus (the articulated back of the nude bather; the Japanese-stylized waves; the strange and haunting green of the sea; the fascinating outline of the intense red hair). I would like to know more about what he saw in it, but since most of his personal papers are gone, I can't.

Museums at their best take images that you've lived with (perhaps not as literally as for me in this case) and make you look as if you've never seen them before.