Unmet need

"Religion and Ecology" had a field trip to the Met today, to see "Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature" and take a stroll through the Asian art wing looking for Buddhist works, but, as often happens, many students weren't able to come. The museum is too far from school for students with classes immediately before and after ours to be able get there and back. I'd asked those whose schedule didn't allow going today to go on their own time, and everyone to share a few pictures with some thoughts online, but many probably won't go. How to make them want to? Here are the pictures, with comments, which I posted... 

I found myself going back and back to this early ink painting of Friedrich's - this is the lower right corner. I don't know how he manages to convey misty moonrise light so well...

Seeing this famous painting, familiar from many a book cover, in the context of Friedrich's other works, was quite revealing. In no other work is the human form so large or dominant. The human is lost or exalted or absorbed in nature in most of the others... making this a most unrepresentative work of his!

I think Friedrich's landscapes pulse with sentience, especially when uncluttered by explicitly Christian symbols! "Bushes in the snow (From the Dresden Heath II)" is one of a pair which flummoxed viewers when originally displayed for the depicted trees' unremarkableness, and one an otherwise enthusiastic reviewer of this exhibition found uncanny and threatening. Is nature so inhuman?

In Friedrich's painting of the Alpine peak "The Watzmann" (this is a detail), he's put the mountains he knows and loves in the foreground, with the mountain peak Friedrich never saw (but a friend had sketched for him) in the background. I'm charmed by his familiar trees, and intrigued by the intermediate mountain he conjures up...

The different meanings people projected onto this painting are fascinating. Is the forest friendly or, as some of the nationalistic interpretations after the defeat of Napoleon imagined, hostile, even murderous - at least toward invading Frenchmen?!

This is another wonder of atmosphere. It looks misty but if you get close, every detail of the tree's branches is there - as if you'd approached it through a fog. This is also my favorite of his explicitly Christian works, perhaps because the crucifix is not facing us but looks away into the distance...

This 14th century painting of Kannon (Avalokitesvara) in the Japanese collections is one of the few Buddhist works with natural details beyond the figures of enlightened anthropomorphic beings...

Closeup of the 6th century Chinese stele in that first hall of Chinese art, with glorious animated trees (which reminded me of Friedrich's "Bushes in the Snow" above). Or maybe it's a single double-stemmed tree, relating to the story of how the (male) disciple Sariputra took the form of a woman - that's them on both sides of the tree(s)!...

It's worth going to the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition just to see this amazing painting. This isn't all of it, but registers my surprised discovery that the human figure, perhaps a monk, is not alone before the sublimity of sea and storm and sky, but is kept company by birds.

Doesn't this make you want to go too, for a closer look of your own?

Inlaid

One of my favorite places in NYC, the Met's "Gubbio Studiolo."

Mandalic

The atrium of the Robert Lehman wing of the Met has been turned into a giant (secular) mandala by Tibetan American artist Tenzing Rigdol. The whole is called "Biography of a Thought," whose acronym - BOAT - appears on the left edge of the first panel, as a figure, representing the painter, is pitched from it into

one of many mandala-inspired circles, reflected in the handmade carpet below, which incorporate symbols of contemporary challenges (like George Floyd). These bob in an agitated ocean beneath a segmented sky on three sides before one arrives at calm sea. The exhibition itself unspools in the rooms surrounding.

Extra dimensions

There's much to love about the Met's "Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350." One is the chance to move through a world where the two- and three-dimensional are not yet distinct - part, I suppose, of the argument that it was in places like Siena that the potential of flat surfaces to offer greater depth than sculpture or architecture was discovered. I felt this already early in the exhibition with the "Annunciation" by Duccio, above, one of eight panels from the predella to his enormous "Maestà" reunited here, where everything seems to be moving in and out of spaces as provisional as a folding screen. Not just the angel, who seems to be in three different spaces, and the holy spirit, dispatched through the open ceiling from above also through three spaces, but even Mary, whose robe seems to be reaching out of her space toward us. How fitting for depicting the moment when the incarnation is announced, and enacted.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "Madonna del Latte" is less complex, but this Mary seems as ready to bust out of the too narrow niche she's been placed in as the squirmy baby at her breast is to escape her grasp. Can a sculpture give you that sense of overflow, that sense you might be called on to catch this so human child?

And then there's the scene below, one of several narrating the life of St Nicholas, also by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, where not just space but time is torqued. It takes a little while to realize that many episodes of the story of St. Nicholas resuscitating a young boy are shown: the child wanders away unnoticed from a dinner happening at upper right, encountering a devil on the stairs at whose bottom the boy is then strangled by him; at bottom right we see the child twice, once dead on a bed, attended by a mourner, and once rising up, as two powerful beams come through a window, one to the dead and one to the revived boy - beams issuing from the mouth and hand of St. Nicholas, who is inside and outside the picture at left. Space-time is Möbius twisted like that staircase, fitting, again, for depicting the miracle of overcoming the finality of death. Can you do that in just 3-D?

Talking my way through this I realize that part of the charm of these works, ably conveyed by an exhibition design which moved around curves and corners and along unexpected diagonals, is that they are portals to a world beyond this one - beyond but bursting in.

1300s

Met some friends at the Met to see "Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350," a gorgeous show we were not the only ones to enjoy even on a Friday night (as the photobombing hand at left can attest). But we arrived at the museum a little early, and took a peek in the Chinese galleries, where a scroll painting almost exactly contemporary with the Sienese awaited, 羅稚川 Luo Zhichuan's "古木寒鴉圖 Crows in Old Trees."

It's hard to make out (I had to come home and check the website) but this was painted in color. The two male pheasants (at the foot of the gnarled tree on the left and to his left) with colorful plumage and red necks at lower left must have stood out against the wintry colors of snow, bare and dried branches and white collared crows. (Download the image from the site and zoom in to see the splashes of color.) The caption suggested the crows might have represented opportunists serving the Mongols who had recently conquered China, banishing the educated ru who traditionally filled the civil service.

End of summer

 

 

Can it be the end of August already? I've only had ten days to delight in this image on our Metropolitan Museum calendar of New York in art, part of Mark Tobey's delirious "Broadway" (1935-36).

White knuckles

The Met's London plane trees 

have been freshly pollarded!

Dragon-tamer

This 12th century German "Monk Scribe on a Wyvern" (a kind of dragon), in a room I've never noticed on the Met's ground floor west of the Spanish court, reminded me that I am just weeks from being on leave! Seven more class sessions and I get to find myself a wyvern to perch on and write!

Bodhi tree #26

Lo, the tree beneath which the Buddha attained enlightenment! But it's not the one you think. This is one of five similar scenes depicted on the outer railing of Bhargut Great Stupa in Madhya Pradesh, ca. 150-100 BCE. 

What gives? This Indian fig tree isn't the one beneath which our present Buddha achieved Enlightenment but the one where Koṇāgamana, one of his predecessors, did. You can see the scene (in this early stage of Buddhist art, Buddhas were represented as absences) in a new exhibition on the origins of Buddhist art just opening at the Met. 

For the record, Koṇāgamana was the twenty-sixth of twenty-nine known Buddhas. He's the second of the five in the current kalpa. Our Gautama is the fourth. So stay tuned: when Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, achieves awakening, it'll be under a tree like this too!

[Correction: Maitreya will seek out a different tree, a mesua ferrea.]

Background trees

I thought the exhibition "Van Gogh's Cypresses" at the Met would be one of the highlights of a treeful summer but I'm underwhelmed. Cypresses are key to the landscape of Provence, and capturing their strange darkness in a region of luminous colors seems to have been one of Van Gogh's aspirations in Arles. But the 40 works on view, few as compelling as the New York City stars brought together in the poster, tell you little about what cypresses meant to Van Gogh, or should mean to us. They're associated in western art with death (as in Arnold Böcklin's "Toteninsel" paintings, one of which hangs in the Met) - was Van Gogh working with or against that? We never find out. He didn't know, as we did, that the two years in which he painted cypresses (among other subjects) would end in his death, or did he? 

It's not that I didn't find works to like, such as "Landscape from Saint-Rémy" (June 1889), from the section of the exhibition where cypresses are not the main concern. (This was included also because its landscape is a precursor to the painting at the center of this show.)

Arguably the cypress wasn't a particular object of the luminous "Tree in the Garden of the Asylum" (October 1889) either, where leaves of all colors are dancing together in a bath of light and wind. Cypresses were around, but so were olives and mulberries. I wasn't convinced they were of special interest. 

Except in one place, a small canvas he painted while confined to his room in April 1890, "Reminiscence of Brabant." There are many 

more colors here than initially meet the eye, but this landscape shows a different, duller world. Except for the cypresses which have snuck in at the left! 

What are they doing there? Now I'm interested. Or could have been... Reviews I've read of the show are similarly unpersuaded by its premise, if grateful for the chance to spend time with a concentration of works by a great artist. For my part I wonder that the show didn't bother to tell us anything about cypresses - what they look like, how they've otherwise been represented, how they are like and unlike other trees in Van Gogh's oeuvre and imagination.

Double takes

Two glimpses from exhibitions: an anonymous trompe-l'oeuil at the Met (not an engraving, not paper, not wood); 7000-year-old female figurines from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.  

Pollards

A visit to the Met today provided a chance to check in with its 

pollarded London Planes, gnarly knobs fingering future foliage

Dishing the gods

Among the strange wonders at "Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Mayan Art," which just opened at the Met, was this 7th-9th century platter from Mexico featuring, we're told, two young gods shooting blowguns at a supernatural bird pictured at center. Their skin is ridden with black sores, symbolic of humility and sickness, contrasting with the bird's ostentatious appearance. This story is pretty straightforward compared to another roughly contemporary dish, where the rain god Chahk emerges[es] from the dark waters of a sinkhole. Exuberant tendrils emerge from his head, terminating in personified flowers, a roaring jaguar, and a serpent while celestial beings gather above and the Maize god sprouts from the submerged rhizome of a water lily.

Centrifugal Trinity

Among the many splendiferous objects in the Met's blockbuster exhibition on the art of the Tudors is an enormous 15th century tapestry, the only survivor of a set of ten stretching 300 feet, showing the Trinity creating the world. Over six days of creation and the seventh of rest, that makes twenty-one identical scepter bearing figures, doing their thing, and quite upstaging the celestial and terrestrial objects they're calling into existence! Here's Gen 1:11-12:

And God said "Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it." And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. (NRSV)

The tapestry's sun and moon and plants and fish and animals are lovely but tiny compared to these engaging triads, each in a different moment of almost ludic divine sociality; only the humans created in their image are big enough to catch the viewer's eye. 'Tis a sight behold, and towers suitably over (it's 14 feet high) an exhibition whose narrative tells of the divinization of an upstart royal line. 

There are too many other splendors to mention, but other tapestries remind us of royals as destroyers as well as creators. Henry VIII apparently specially commissioned this scene of St. Paul directing the burning of heathen books, billowing smoke meticulously woven.

Tree revelations

When I threw together the course description for "Religion of Trees" I didn't quite know what the course could be about - just that it would be fun, and bring together things students and I are interested in. Now a few weeks into reading more deeply around trees I can feel the course taking a different shape than I'd dimly imagined. 

What had I dimly imagined? That we'd look at trees in world religions, noting similarities and differences. Similar would be verticality if not quite Eliade's axis mundi, differences might emerge from comparing world trees and trees of life with the gnarled survivors of Zhuangzi. But all the trees I imagined were sublime - vastly larger or older than human beings, images of transcendence rooted in the depths of the earth and reaching to the sky, sheltering us. (I've yet to scope out the Bodhi tree and if it plays any such role.) We'd turn then to new tree science, perhaps by way of the tree of life in the Book of Revelation, which manages not only to offer all manner of fruits and healing herbs but to be on both sides of a river - a nod toward the subterranean networks and relationship of trees, as Catherine Keller has suggested? The parts of trees our visual imagination fixes on are hardly the most important (emblematic our attachment to leaves which change color just as they cease to serve a purpose for the tree).

Evergreen and deciduous trees, Emojipedia

I suppose my thinking began to change when I decided the class might incorporate tree drawing, and imagined a sequence of lessons: draw how you imagine a tree, then some actual trees, then some tree architectures, then eventually root systems and forests connected by mycelial webs. Along the way we'd consider how each of these might offer different religious morals. As we became more enmeshed with actual trees we might start learning something from them, perhaps that God is like the "mother tree" of a forest (as Process theologian Jay McDaniel has suggested), perhaps that everything is sentient and so interdependent. Along the way we might notice ways in which we - individually (sic), collectively - are more treelike than we imagined... 

But the tree drawing, I discovered on trying my hand at it, is hard! And some of the philosophers and literary folks who write about plants and trees are goofy. While enjoyable, accounts of hearing the voices of trees after a "diet" of tree bark, etc. left me cold. (Must everything be psychedelic?) The more I read the less convinced I was that the myriad and marvelous forms of aborial sentience and communication being revealed by scientists (and ingenious artists) had anything to do with, or to say to, us. Call me a skeptic; part of what speaks to me about trees is that they don't speak to us, or speak (in some very broad sense of the term) but not to us.

Then I happened on William Bryant Logan's Sprout Lands, a work framed by the challenge of pollarding London plane trees in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (at top is a picture I took of one of them this morning) and finding nobody to turn to for help. Logan's an arborist and a poet, who thinks the heart most illuminated when in harmony with the hands. His book takes apart the idea that humans have ever had relationships with trees which didn't involve working with them - cutting, pruning, grafting... This was no less true of trees in woods than in orchards or gardens; indeed that contrast falls apart too. Our image of stately trees with clean lines are the result of English post-enclosure ideals. In the new picturesque landscape, man became the spectator of an idea of nature that he himself had made in the image of a primordium that had never existed (29). None of the world's "wild" forests - even the Amazon! - weren't in fact shaped by human beings. Logan suggests we think of woodlands as like lichens, the symbiotic work of trees and humans. Our icon of a tree should be the spray of a copse or the knuckles of pollarded trees.

So those images of stately transcendent tree solitaries are not so venerable after all! Our ancestors knew trees in quite different ways. More than a few of those ways resonate with things discovered (sic!) by botanists, and all involved enfleshed relationships with our arborial kin - Kimmerer's work remains indispensable here.  What does this mean for a course called "Religion of Trees"? For one, we need to revisit the old traditions with less anachronistic images of trees in mind. Logan sprinkles his text with biblical quotes, especially from the Prophets (and of course Job) and helps us see horticulture front and center. He suggests trees were where humans encountered immortality - and in a way that leaves individualism behind. It'll be fun to revisit the trees of life, of the knowledge of good and evil, and others with copses and pollard knuckles in mind.

But there's another angle. Human beings have been able to make worlds with trees because of what Logan calls the "generosity" of trees; by this he mainly means the irrepressible resilience of sprouting. But trees have been doing their thing, together with their fungal and other symbionts, for a lot longer than we've been symbionts with them. And we're rather more symbiotic, not to say generous, creatures than modern imagination permits. Are their religious ideas which emerge from that deep shared history?

Another pic from in front of the Met: someone trimming an allée of linden, one blooming

Fashion high

The most striking part of the cinematic exhibition of historic American fashion in the period rooms of the Met is surely Thom Ford's reimagining the 1973 "Battle of Versailles" between of French and American design as a freeze frame fight movie in the panorama room. Other rooms curated by other film directors offer other more domestic moods. But I was most taken, probably unsurprisingly, by Chloe Zhao's unflashy imagining of Shaker leader Ann Lee as a levitating Christ figure, surrounded by figures in Claire McCardell's sober, practical "monastic" and "cloister" dresses.

Zhao's director's statement notes: 

The Shakers believed that God is both male and female, and their religious leader was a woman, Mother Ann Lee, whom they believed was the Second Coming of Christ in female form. This aspect of the Shaker religion was incredibly radical and progressive in the 1800s. Upon seeing this room and its occupants, most people from that era would feel unease, confusion, conker, curiosity, shock, or even distaste and anger. I hope to invoe some these feelings in you ...

Flask

In the Study Collection of Greek and Roman works I discovered looking for Pan at the Met, some of the oldest things look the newest - or is it the brilliance of the curation that lets them float free of time, in supportive convo with shades past and present?

Panorama

The "Pantheologies" class had a field trip today to look for representations of Pan at the Metropolitan Museum. While satyrs abound, Pan figures are relatively few, and it was fun to seek them out (with the help of the online collection guide). This dynamic 1st century Roman marble statue and the contemporary 

marble mask

are in the main hall and quickly found us. Each seemed a little crazed by the nubile statues they couldn't touch, though the mask, which a student had described as menacing but looks more confounded, especially from the side, reminded us that we can't read the affect of ancient figures.

This late 4th century BCE Greek bronze box mirror, in one of the adjacent galleries, was a little harder to find, and is beautiful in ways mainly found in much later art, from a time when the human form was considered safe from animal transforma-tions. But the real fun came 

with tracking down a blissed out little late 5th-4th century BCE Peloponnesian statuette (which might not even be Pan!). In part this was because the deserted mezzanine gallery it was in proved a vast collection of glass cases overflowing with works of all kinds, and it wasn't with all the other bronze figurines! By the time an intrepid student found it with other archaic works from Boeotia, Laconia and Euboea, we had been exposed to myriad beings mixing animal, human and divine forms. This terrific entourage reminded us of the porosity of all these categories. Pluralistic pantheism indeed!