Thursday, October 06, 2005
Wednesday I took advantage of an overcast mid-afternoon to spend a couple of hours at the Seattle Art Museum, which is presently exhibiting early works by a 19th century landscape artist named Frederic Edwin Church. The handful of featured pieces were produced by Church in his early 20s, following the death of his mentor, Thomas Cole, to whom he was apprenticed at age 18. I’m not a big fan of landscapes in general, but I have to say these are remarkable in the way they convey sunlight. I don’t recall ever having seen paintings that appeared to be lighting themselves from within, as though they didn’t merely depict sunlight but somehow managed to capture a piece of it and set it discreetly in the background so as to illuminate the rest of the painting. (By the way, Thomas Kinkade, The Painter of Light™, can officially kiss my ass on Church’s behalf.)
Also noteworthy was a collection of Australian aboriginal totem poles and ceremonial death masks that were colorful and exquisitely, painstakingly detailed. In addition to the boldness of the individual pieces — including a half dozen totem poles measuring 15 feet or taller — the collection won me over with its explanation of “sorry business,” which is what aboriginals call anything having to do with death and which I am officially nominating for induction into the Euphemism Hall of Fame.
For me, though, the highlight of the museum was Jackson Pollock’s Sea Change (1947), which was actually donated to SAM by Peggy Guggenheim herself and which, in my opinion, is the star of its permanent collection of American and European modernists, outshining works by such other notables as Warhol, Ruscha, Rauschenberg and de Kooning. The image to which I’ve linked above doesn’t come anywhere close to doing the Pollock justice, nor could I even begin to describe it with my limited artistic vocabulary, except to say that I found it so stunning and complex that I returned twice to view it again before leaving the museum.
