There are photographs, there are mirrors. There are children who grow and parents who age, not to mention the all-too-short lives of the animals we love. There’s the relentless novelty of changing technology. Sometimes, for me, nothing marks time’s passing more bluntly than the sudden realization of how massive the trees around me have grown.
And then there are works of art. I’ve walked through the Art Institute for more than 40 years, with over 25 of those years as a museum employee. As I move through the galleries, I catch glimpses of artworks that affected me profoundly when I saw them as a young man. Curious to measure the effects of time, I recently stood in front of three of these paintings.
Franz Marc’s The Bewitched Mill
The instant I first saw The Bewitched Mill, I got sucked into its churning motion and burning color. It felt like a living thing, and I didn’t know where to rest my eyes. On top of that, the work exuded compassion and empathy, emotions that were usually painted with restraint. And who has time for restraint in their 20s?
Marc painted nature as if he was an active part of it, not an observer. I felt the same way, or so I liked to believe. I wanted to stand under the falling water with the animals. Marc’s intense connection to nature was an essential part of his spiritual life. It came as no surprise that he’d wanted to study theology as a young man.
My favorite part of the painting is how Marc’s birds take to the water as if it was the element they were truly meant for. I love their delight and have come to realize how important it is to find something that’s elemental to your being and to let it wash over you. To find something that inspires delight, even if only for a moment.
Marc’s painting not only captures that momentary something but expands it in order to make room for the whole of the world.
I don’t think I outgrew the painting, but maybe, like a piece of clothing, I wore it out. Now, after years of doing my best to impersonate an adult, the work has grabbed me again. I find myself thinking: Of course, the mill is bewitched. There’s nothing that isn’t bewitched. More and more, life feels like a divine spell. The trick is to fall under it without losing your head. Or your heart.
George Inness’s Early Morning, Tarpon Springs
Like artists and writers from William Blake to Carl Jung to Daniel Burnham to Helen Keller, to name only a few, George Inness was influenced by Emanual Swedenborg, an 18th-century Swedish scientist and mystic who believed that the physical world and the spiritual worlds were intertwined. Inness, especially in his later works, seems to want to get at the nature of nature. He paints what creates and animates the surface.
That said, my first thought upon seeing Inness’s painting was, I want that red hat.
Rather, I wanted to be the figure wearing the red hat. As a young man, I wanted transcendental experiences so badly I tried to manufacture them. While this painting didn’t grab me at first the way others did, it captured what I recognized as a transcendent moment. Though the sky may be lit by the rising sun, it’s that red of the figure’s head that is burning. Was Inness suggesting that consciousness is a kind of fire? And what feeds that fire? It seems to be the entire landscape, from the buildings in the near distance to the birds in the branches above to the dead tree lying on the ground. This figure blooms like a luminous flower right where it was meant to grow.
The older I get, the more I feel that life and the world are flowing through me, especially when I’m still. It’s like I’ve somehow become less corporeal, less solid, maybe more open to the world. Maybe I too will bloom someday, and maybe, like this figure, I’ll be the only one who doesn’t see it.
Picasso’s The Old Guitarist
When Picasso painted this iconic image, he was a young starving artist and had recently lost a good friend to suicide. It’s such a powerful image that it could serve as an illustration of the concept of melancholy, a word that isn’t used much anymore, perhaps because it’s been broken down into its component parts. Instead of being paralyzed by whatever possesses him, however, the old man plays the guitar. He makes music.
As an adolescent, I was an aspiring guitarist and had a small poster of The Old Guitarist hanging in my bedroom. It wasn’t until I saw it in person that I realized what made it so powerful: it was the first artwork I’d seen that captured what it felt like to play the guitar. It was more than the mood evoked by the blue on blue palette. It was the way his angular body was contorted, the way he closed his eyes and hung his head—that was music flowing through his blood.
A couple of years ago, I saw two arty-looking guys having an animated conversation in front of the painting and wandered over to eavesdrop. It turned out they were musicians. I told them how research using infrared light had discovered three figures from an older painting underneath the existing one: a young woman with a child, an older woman, and an animal, maybe a cow or a sheep. I pointed out how you can see the young woman’s face, like a ghost, hovering next to his head.
One of them said, “Oh yeah man, that’s the woman who broke his heart.” We stood there, nodding.
When I’d first seen the painting, I had no idea about the hidden figures. Now I can’t stop thinking about them. Was the older woman his mother? Or was the young woman his mother and was he the child? Or was the young woman someone he had loved and was the child his? Whoever they were, Picasso made them part of the story. In the act of painting the old musician, Picasso placed the others within him, creating ghosts. They are both the old man’s memory and his audience.
I know that there are ghosts behind every surface, especially paintings. Until I started to write this, I had no idea how many I’d accumulated. Wherever I go now, I feel like a multitude. But that’s fine, because it’s easy to get lost in a crowd, and even easier to lose all sense of time, especially if it’s a crowd of ghosts.
—Paul Jones, associate director, Communications
