All Calm on Convento

Thursday, September 12, 2013 – All Calm on Convento

Nothing special to report at the moment.  Elliott has a new nickname, “Cookie Monster,” since I discovered his recently acquired habit of munching a dozen or so of Trader Joe’s Triple Gingers when he gets up to take his 3:00 A.M. pain killer.  I guess I’m partly responsible for this middle of the night snacking.  I’ve been encouraging him to eat more and to eat more often in order to put on a few pounds.  He has clearly taken this advice to heart.  In addition, he’s been practicing his wedding walk, i.e. walking without his walker so he’ll be ready to march down the aisle with Elisa.  And I’m getting ready for the wedding by doing the housework in high heels.  

 

We’re both feeling fine, but our 2001 geezermobile is ailing, which we discovered a couple of days ago at its annual inspection.  I guess twelve years is old age in car terms, but we’re not ready to replace the silver Lincoln Town Car yet.  It’s having some fairly costly therapeutic procedure done at the moment. 

My GMU class is going well and our study of late 19^th and early 20^th century American art is fascinating.  One of my first assignments was to view an exhibit at The Phillips Collection in DC related to the 1913 Armory Show in New York City.  It gave me some insight into how the taste of Duncan Phillips developed from his earliest days of collecting.  According to his journal and letters (on display in the exhibit), he initially considered artists such as Matisse and Cezanne “damn fools.”  When he first encountered their paintings in Paris in the summer of 1912, he referred to the work as “a hideous patchwork.”  At the time, Phillips saw their work as a complete break from the traditional art he was accustomed to seeing.  Likewise, he had a negative assessment of the Armory Show in New York the following year. 

The exhibit at The Phillips Collection commemorates the 100^th anniversary of the Armory Show in New York City, where European and American artists who rejected the constraints of traditional academically sanctioned art were able to show their work.  Among those European artists were Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, Kandinsky, and Redon.  American artists exhibiting at the Armory Show included Maurice Prendergast, Arthur Davies, William Sloan, Robert Henri, and Marsden Hartley.

Although Duncan Phillips failed to appreciate the work of these artists at the time of the Armory Show, he later modified his opinion, as he acknowledged in his book, The Enchantment of Art (2^nd edition, 1927).  In fact, in a 1929 article, he stated that he recognized modern art as “a connection to, rather than a violent break from, the past.”  By this point in time, he was already adding work by many “modern” artists to his personal collection.  This exhibit at The Phillips runs through the end of the year.  Even if you can’t visit the museum in DC in person, you can learn more about the exhibit, as well as view much of the museum’s wonderful permanent collection, by going to The Phillips Collection website.