stars still wonder

I wandered through the National Gallery of Art this afternoon. The West Wing, that is, where all the good classic stuff is. (East Wing is modern stuff.) And while looking at things like Adriaen van Ostade's The Cottage Courtyard and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's Forest of Fontainebleau and Meindert Hobbema's The Travelers, I got to wondering why we don't still have nice landscapes and quotidian scenes being painted today. Or, more to the point, why museums don't display those types of paintings from our own time period (since someone, somewhere must still be painting in those styles; you still see some of those sorts of paintings in independent galleries). Those nice landscape and portrait styles were in fashion for centuries and we still admire them in museums. So why is all the modern art shown in museums modernist?

Yes, we've had the Industrial Revolution and we really don't live like that anymore, but there are still nice countrysides full of sheep to be painted or farmers in fields or beautiful buildings and gardens. So I don't see why all the modern sections of museums have only dots and splatters. (Which, okay, some of them are interesting, but for the most part I only breeze through one or two galleries of "modern art", while I pause to pick out all the tiny details in the "classical art". I miss those tiny details. There's so many stories in those details—the way someone is looking at someone else across a crowd, the way a hand strokes a lapdog, the angle of the moonlight over ancient ruins.

Maybe it's just because I am a storyteller; I look for stories everywhere. And they (of the era of "classical art" and before) were storytellers, too. And we're not anymore. They told stories by firelight, in farm fields, beneath the stars. We watch TV and play on our computers—and what are those made up of but tiny dots and splatters of colour? We don't even look at the sky properly anymore. We've lost touch with our storytelling culture. And that makes me incredibly sad.

So naturally I thought of this incredibly sad poem "about suffering" as painted by the Dutch masters:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

       ~ "Musee des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden

See? Look at all those little details in the paintings that Auden points out. (You can see the last painting Auden refers to, about Icarus falling, here.) And they all tell a story. Sad stories, but still stories. And not all the old paintings are sad. But it's very true that we've lost that quotidian touch.