Up to Albany this morning, to see the large collection of Hudson River Valley paintings - as you can see, the Museum and Art Gallery wasn't exactly overcrowded. I became obsessed by two Thomas Cole paintings of the Van Rennselaer manor - but that's for another time and place. Seen en masse, it was fascinating how the interpretation of the river's banks swerved around between it being a site for idealized pastoral or a bourgeois leisure location. At last one other group of three people came in - after about an hour - and I took a nasty vicarious pleasure in seeing them identify (in another Cole painting) the monastery at Vallambrosa ("thick as autumn leaves that strew the brooks," etc) as the Catskill Mountain House (all identifications were on a separate handout sheet - no wall panels).
And then the skies cleared, at last, and the Catskills themselves became visible, and I drove back down there - and the clouds descended, so they weren't. So I parked the monster car at one end of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, and walked across it and back - absolutely stunning. There's a separate walkway - but the noise of traffic thudding and rattling was exhausting.
This did mean, however, that I could see the final Cross-Pollination installation: Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw/Cherokee)'s The Spirits Are Laughing (2021) - a long set of panels asking one to contemplate land, dispossession, endurance, extinction, and one's own relationship to the natural world, with, of course, the magnificence of the river in the backbround.
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