Busy, Busy

The hectic end-of-semester rush is here, and I'm really feeling it this time. I sort of put off-slash-kept changing my mind on what to do for my project for Dr. Cooper's class, with the result that I finished my two other projects early and now have to throw myself into this 110% before my presentation on December 1. Naturally, with Thanksgiving coming up, I have even less time, plus there's so much else going on around this time of year, so it's been rather stressful.

Yet as much as I begrudge the time that I could be spending working on my project and feeling less like I'm going to expire from a heart attack at any moment, I had some fun this week. I covered two classes for my friend Amy on Thursday at the Ambler campus, which is 20 minutes from my house and a world away from the downtown campus--it was like a cute, miniaturized version of Fairfield (really miniaturized, really; I couldn't help but think of what these kids were missing out on versus the main campus). Her first class was an Arts of the Western World, and the kids were...mouthy, verging on disrespectful. There were like three different conversations going on during my lecture--in a small class of only 25 or so. Once or twice I asked them to be quiet, but it's hard to be authoritative when you're basically a substitute teacher. It didn't bother me much, though, for that same reason--they're not my students, and the other kids did seem interested. One girl asked me after class what else I teach, and expressed interest in my Heritage survey next semester because "you seem to actually know what you're talking about." Um, OK--that was an awkward compliment, because was she suggesting that Amy--whose lectures notes I was using, mind you--doesn't?

The second class was much more awesome--it was a class on mythology in art, and I was handling the early Renaissance, so Botticelli, Pollaiuolo, etc. The class was smaller and had many more adult students, and everyone was so eager to participate: they knew the myths in question, they had pertinent observations, questions, etc. A teacher's dream, in other words. Everyone has the most fun with this painting, Botticelli's Venus and Mars, which probably decorated a piece of furniture like a chest in early Renaissance Florence:


Mars has passed out after sex and Venus is looking at him like That's it? What the hell kind of god are you? Five hundred years later and some things haven't changed. Also, imagine how pissed Mars is going to be when that satyr blow the conch shell in his ear (Venus probably put them up to it). After class, several of the students complimented me on the lecture and told me they really enjoyed it, which hey, it's always really nice to hear, especially when these aren't even your own students and are thus clearly not sucking up (unlike the girl who came up to me after class once, pointedly complimented my green coat, and then asked for an extension on her paper. Brown-nosing fail.)

Thursday night, there was a lecture on campus that I had been grumbling about having to attend, but it turned out to be really great. The speaker was Jonathan Lopez, who wrote a book called The Man Who Made Vermeers about the Dutch forger Hans van Meegeren. He was arrested by the Dutch government in 1945 on charges of collaborating with the Nazis, since he had sold Hermann Goering, the number two man in Germany, a priceless Vermeer, Christ and the Adulteress. In order to evade that extremely serious charge, van Meegeren admitted that he hadn't sold Goering anything priceless--it was his own forgery. It later turned out that he'd been forging Vermeers for years, and they had been accepted by art historians and curators around the world, including the National Gallery of Art in DC. His forgeries even included the Supper at Emmaus that was considered, at the time, to be Vermeer's masterpiece.

But the real fascination of this story is not so much that van Meegeren was able to produce forged Vermeers that fooled everyone; it's that the Vermeers he produced look nothing like real Vermeers. For example, these two paintings are legitimate Vermeers, the Geographer and the Girl with the Red Hat:



This is van Meegeren's Supper at Emmaus:


Not for a second would anyone today think that the same artist painted that third image as the other two, and yet this fooled everyone. Lopez' most interesting argument was that fakes rely on subliminal references to contemporary culture that make the picture oddly resonant to the viewer and thus more likely to accept it; however, after a few decades (he suggested 40 years is the timeline) the power of those contemporary references has faded, leaving people surprised that anyone could have been tricked all those years ago. In the case of this painting, Lopez traced its relationship to the style of volkisch painting being promoted in Nazi Germany, of which the Dutch van Meegerem was a huge supporter (he sent Hitler a note in 1942 thanking him for doing such a good job. Seriously. It was in Lopez' slideshow), as well as the resemblance between the facial physiognomy of Christ here and Albrecht Durer's famous Self Portrait:

Durer was enthusiastically held up as the paragon of "good" German art by the Nazis, and they had specifically identified his physiognomy as the "ideal" Germanic face. Thus, by incorporating those elements into his completely fake painting, van Meegerem made it subtly more attractive to his contemporaries, who were already "used to" seeing paintings that looked like this.

This is only a small fraction of Lopez' argument, both about this painting and about van Meegeren's forgeries in general, but it was really fascinating to listen to.

Still Life

Raphaelle Peale, Blackberries, c. 1813, oil on panel

One of my classmates gave her presentation in our Caravaggio seminar on the relationship between Caravaggio and 19th century American still life painters. Typically the American still life tradition has been linked to the long history of Dutch still lifes, but my friend discovered that the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts had exhibited a still life attributed to Caravaggio in 1811, just before Raphaelle Peale and others began to paint the kind of tenebristic composition shown above.

The location of the painting itself is a mystery, but the fact that it was identified as a Caravaggio in the early 19th century, when his reputation was basically in the gutter (he wouldn't be catapulted to the megastardom through which we know him today until a historic exhibition in Milan in 1951) suggests that it was a secure attribution. Only one independent still life by Caravaggio is known today, this incredibly illusionistic work of 1599 (it's like you could reach out and stroke the wicker of that basket!):


Yet we know he painted more of them--and one of them, it seems, found its way to Philadelphia and had an impact on Peale, a member of a prominent family of Philadelphia artists.

Now, I'm not usually a big fan of still life. Caravaggio's marvelous little picture is an exception to this rule, on account of its general awesomeness, but in general, blech. Dutch still life, in particular, is probably the genre of Western art I like least.

Clara Peeters, Still Life with Flowers, 17th c.

I know they're full of hyper-specific symbolism and they constitute warnings about vanitas, but I just find them so. damn. ugly. My friend knows all this, so she was teasing me in advance about how I would probably be bored to tears by her paper, but to my surprise, I really enjoyed not only her argument, but the images as well. Don't Peale's blackberries look good enough to eat? She also showed this late 16th century drawing of irises by a Florentine naturalist named Ligozzi (not technically a still life, but it's still something I'm not usually intrigued by):

I have a fondness for irises, so this really struck me as lovely. However, I remain resolute in my hatred of Dutch still life. Gah.

Fun with Professors

A few weeks ago Jasmine, Agnes and I went to see "Never Let Me Go" at the Ritz in Old City, where tickets are $6 for students. One of our professors, Dr. Bolman, happens to live in that neighborhood. Now, Dr. Bolman has always had something of a fearsome reputation as the professor who puts the fear of God into undergraduates and graduates alike, the professor whose constant watchword is "professionalism." Not a professor who gets buddy-buddy with her students by any means. Thus, I was a little surprised to get an email from her saying that if we went to another movie at the Ritz before she left for Egypt on December 1, she'd like to invite us to her apartment beforehand.

Apparently, the recent retirement of her mentor at Bryn Mawr caused her to re-evaluate her attitude toward students (well, not all students. A few select students. Us, basically.) She told us last night that her mentor never showed any fondness for her students until they completed their PhDs, at which point she suddenly started signing her emails "Love, Dale." Dr. Bolman told us she had this epiphany where she realized she didn't have to be like that and didn't want to be. So, voila--we got to visit Dr. Bolman's fabulous apartment.

The building was old, completely modernized except for some cool features like the 20-foot ceilings, exposed wooden beams, and original dark wood floors (the nails had square heads, which was interesting). She has more books than I have ever seen in anyone's personal collection. Her office was lined with bookcases, her hallway was lined with bookcases, the living room was lined with bookcases! It was pretty incredible. It was also decorated in a really cool fashion, which I don't think I can really describe, and her furniture rocked. Like, a ridiculously comfortable leather couch that also incorporated a chaise longue--from Ikea, although I never would have thought so (apparently they do have 'higher end' furniture." There's an odd sense of intimacy in being in a professor's home and putting your coat and bag down in her bedroom, or using the bathroom and seeing all her makeup. Jasmine and I agreed on the ride home that at first it was a little bit awkward, because we weren't quite sure what to say (we wound up talking about school, naturally). Luckily there was wine to drink and cheese to nibble on.

We had invited her to join us for the movie, and she accepted, so off we went in the cold to see "Hereafter," which we were expecting to be a sad movie. Dr. Bolman announced herself as a crier and made us promise that if she cried we wouldn't tell anyone, but in the end it wasn't really a crying kind of movie. There were some sad bits, but none too heart-wrenching, and the ending was happy in a contrived sort of way. I don't think I'd really recommend it to anyone else, it was fine, but nothing special. Anyway, after that we went to a Persian restaurant near Dr. Bolman's apartment for takeout, to which she treated us, using her "voice of command," as she called it, on Jasmine when she seemed about to insist on contributing. That was pretty hilarious, especially the way Jasmine immediately obeyed and sat down. Then we went back to her apartment to eat. As we were getting plates I noticed that among the items on her fridge were two magnets of Bella and Edward from Twilight. WTF?

We did wind up having an interesting discussion about psychics and talking to the dead (Matt Damon plays one in the film). I asked if the others would consult one. Dr. Bolman told us that twenty years or so, she used to visit a psychic regularly! (I managed not to let my mouth fall open, but it was a close thing). She said that she was looking for some kind of confirmation that there was something else out there, some other dimension, and she would go to this woman who claimed to read auras and tell you vague things about your future. She could also tell you things about people in photographs if you brought them in; Dr. Bolman said she was thoroughly convinced by this woman's ability to accurately describe people she had never met and only seen in a photograph, and that the vague predictions about her future always came true, but she realized ultimately that it was drawing too much of her attention and money, so she stopped going.

Jasmine said she wasn't sure if she would consult a psychic, Agnes said probably not. I told them about how my mom consulted a psychic on her birthday once and was quite convinced--the person told her she saw a red-headed woman who wanted to know if my mom was still angry at her (she was) and a large man with a breathing problem (my dad had sleep apnea), who wanted her to know that he was OK. I said that I wasn't sure either, partially because I'm a skeptic and I don't believe in life after death, and partially because I don't feel the burning need to talk to my parents. I mean, what would I say to them? I miss you? Duh. And what would I want to hear back, that they're fine, that they're proud of me, etc? Since I don't believe in an afterlife of any variety, I'm not concerned about them being "fine," and I know they were proud of me. I think trying to communicate with them, even if it were possible, would just be more painful than it'd be worth. Jen, on the other hand, would leap at the chance, I'm sure (in fact, I'm shocked she's never done it). However, even though I don't believe in the afterlife, I'm not completely skeptical about psychics. I mean, we only use a fraction of our brain power, so who's to say what could be possible for people who can somehow access the rest? After all, we only perceive time as completely linear; maybe they do catch glimpses of the future.

We also wound up discussing our favorite works of art. I was surprised to learn that Dr. Bolman's favorite was Simone Martini's Annunciation in the Uffizi (she's a Byzantinist/Coptic specialist, so I thought it'd be something there). Agnes' favorite was a painting from the Waddi Natrun site she's worked on in Egypt. Jasmine's favorites are two Saint Cecilias: Raphael's painting, and Stefano Maderno's statue. I had serious trouble thinking of favorites; in the end I said El Greco's View of Toledo, and Canova's statue of Pauline Bonaparte in the Borghese.

Anyway, we had a really fun time last night. I heart Dr. Bolman!