Grace Schulman
Repentance of an Art Critic, 1925
Existe-t-il une peinture juive? —Fritz Vanderpyl
Some learned the palette is the devil’s platter,
the brush a crucifix: by law, no icons
no graven images “made unto thee.”
Yet Soutine dries creeds in the Paris sun,
his strokes prayers for pardon. Others are freer.
A mystery. I find no common style,
no ism, as in penstand, nest for thought.
Marc Chagall’s villages, Soutine’s dead turkeys,
Sonia Delauney’s rings, make an odd stew.
In Kisling’s painting, “Kiki” of Montparnasse
lies on flowered silk. Nearby, a window opens
on more windows. Air, light. Still I say
could Michelangelo have carved “La Pieta”
without belief, his trust only in stone?
Even Rouault, godless, hunted by God,
painted Christ’s head slashed with lines. How faith crushes
and builds. But not them. Torn up from dry soil,
replanted, pruned back, they blossom again
like horse chestnuts under a new god.
Their only faith, if one can call it that,
lurks in this day’s sunlit buildings, leaves
that still sparkle with raindrops, and brushstrokes
that catch the glimmer. Some fled pogroms.
But take Modigliani, from Livorno,
whose women, swans, gaze with clouded pupils.
The painter’s stare. Doorlocks pried open,
they blink under puff-clouded skies,
talk at Le Dome until the paint runs free,
then, each to his easel, gather beliefs
like lilies that die as the canvas blooms.
Can the most foreign of the new Parisians
share anything besides a lost law?
I’ve said no. Was I wrong? In a small gallery,
I gaze at a Kisling until it seizes me.
A voice rises in me from so deep a place
I know it can not be my own: Exactness
of bowl, knife, apple, keeps us from loss
by capturing the day that does not end.
In Kisling’s vision of his studio,
two forms stand at either end of a table:
Within the oil is his oil of a nude
darting furtive glances, and Modigliani’s
long head. Between them are paintbrushes
poised like rockets waiting to explode,
a pipe, a half-filled glass, and a hand of cards.
From issue no. 158 (Spring–Summer 2001)
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Im Museo gab es wirklich einfach alles. Die Namen aus meinem Kunstgeschichteunterricht und meinem Kunstleistungskurs klingelten in meinen Ohren. Paul Klee, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, die Delauneys, Sonia Delauney, Robert Delauney, Georges Braque, Emil Nolde, Henri Matisse, August Macke, Vincent van Gogh, Camille Pissaro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet,..
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