Sorry, folks – I’d intended to write a nice, beefy entry for you this evening, but I just drove in from DC, with the last hour spent sitting in traffic waiting to get on the Palisades Parkway off of I-95.  I’m feeling wordless and charmless.  Which is a shame, since it was a very nice weekend, with plenty of things to write about.

In brief, we went down to visit the National Gallery to catch an exhibit by a fairly unknown fellow traveller of the Impressionists, name of Gustave Caillebotte.  At least, he was unknown by me, but its entirely possible that I slept in the day they covered him in Art History.  Anyhow, the reason I say ‘fellow traveller of’ and not simply ‘an Impressionist’ is that, although he exhibited with them (on his dime, since he came from wealth) his work remained steadfastly straightforward and representational – one might even say, illustrative.  He did do several light and color studies that were influenced by Monet, but for the most part, his interest and talent seemed to lie in exploring the quotidian (pardon my appropriate French) life.

I’m not convinced Caillebotte was a great painter, but he did produce some great art.  Which probably sounds a bit contradictory (or at least, semantic), but here’s what I’m getting at: he hadn’t honed his chops to the level of the masters, yet he was never able to let go of enough of his training to fully break out into something truly idiosyncratic.  But the truth is, sometimes the best art exists at that barrier point – where the artist is trying for a goal that they can’t quite achieve (or perhaps, can’t quite conceive).  It’s in the attempting that the excitement lies.

Caillebotte’s canvases (canvii?) thrum with the life of a Paris long gone, in ways that most of his more famous and accomplished peers simply don’t.  Georges Seraut, who painted similar scenes of the city and its people, brought incredible vision and color to his pointillist masterworks, but at no point do you ever forget you’re looking at a diagrammed and idealized representation.  Caillebotte’s work is almost transparent – that is, he’s done his job so well that you forget the painter is there, and just see the canvas as a small, luminous window into a lost age.  Like a less-staged Vermeer, with Vermeer’s careful glazes replaced by the sloppy and vigorous brushwork of a Rembrandt study.

Maybe all this art analysis is a little too ‘inside baseball’ for a blog entry – but it’s late, and I’m tired.  And I simply can’t get the image out of my head that occurred to me as Yesenia and I sat down to lunch after we left the exhibit: I felt for a moment the life within and around us take a millisecond pause. I was sure that we were living in a lost painting – a glimpse of an age long past, hanging in a corner of a quiet gallery, waiting to live again for just a moment in some curious visitor’s eyes.

– D.