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A PARAGRAPH ON A MUSEUM TRIP
TO DALLAS/FORT WORTH

Museum review and article with "Dickens".

Dr. Richard Cutler, Phd. writes and lectures on topics of aesthetics appreciation and spirituality.

"Dickens Inside an Expression of Design"

First FORT WORTH Noel Robbins, my painter friend and I took in the Turner show at the Kimball in Ft. Worth. It is well-curated with the first few galleries situating Turner among precedents and contemporaries. Turner's draughtsmanship is evident from the beginning in the small red ink sketches of Venice after Canaletto. Lots of atmospheric white space of the paper has the familiar artist's subjects arising from the mists. Noticeable was Turner's love of the shapes made by the intersecting lines of the sails of small boats. People are dwarfed by the sky and water. Their dark coals of eyes were haunting, like late Goyas. Early on Turner's sky is dramatic. Coupled with his love of water reflections and humans often reduced to silhouettes, Turner is clearly the romantic. Absent from this show are the many highly charged sea battles or tempests where churning sea and dense fog grip humans in vise of elemental battles. Clearly evident though, is Turner's love of the shimmering haze whose illumination fills the center of the painting with the glow of an epiphany. Phantasmagoric disorienting light of these sublime oils struck Noel and I as the inspiration for Odilon Redon's opiate dreams of a half century later.
Equally prescient of later enclaves of atmospheric paintings were the watercolors of 1840. Here was the Turner I was after. That year seemed to be prolific, and I wondered if his commissions for epic oils didn't give him the freedom to create looser, calmer, and almost abstract color compositions in his consistently chosen palette of Venetian red and ultramarine on brown paper. Some were so dark as to prefigure the Nabis of 50 years later. Patches of color had figures drawn in masterful strokes of brush loaded ink. People and barques were executed with the efficiency of Japanese masters.
After 1840 my attention was toasted, that is, until the final works. In these oils the skies and seas that had previously been tours de force of layered light took on surface and opacity that left behind the sublime and spoke of the raw joy of painting. Dry skins of white scumbled over nubby surfaces to form complex horizontal layers of clouds. Thick impastos with their smooth skin trimmed in the delicious ridges that flow around a knife's edge swept back and forth across the surface. I was reminded of a show I saw at the Met of deKooning's large late works in which he allowed the fussy gestures of his femme period to expand and breathe into exultant tracts of color. In all, I was toasted. The show was really long and chocked full of watercolors that seemed interminably the same Venetian red ink vertical lines of Venetian buildings reflected in the water and ultramarine haze.

...then DALLAS
After an Italian lunch of vongole in linguini fini and garden salad, Noel and I headed to Dallas and the new Nasher Sculpture Garden. We just missed the last day of a Picasso sculpture show. Highlights of the collection are Surrealistic David Smiths with the flat frontality of a candelabra in harmony with a thoughtful, erect front-and-back human sort of Noguchi composed of arm-like limbs inserted in slots.

Outside in the garden by a pool is one of the most evocative Henry Moore's I've ever seen. The 1968 Henry Moore Vertebrae is three highly polished bronze vertebral lumps nudge and nuzzle like a family unit fit for the foyer of an insurance company.
The most fascinating work though was a chamber with a square overhead that created of the sky a slowly changing painting. Inside the chamber we slumped down on slate pews so as to not crane our necks upward for too long.
The experience was so refreshing that we returned a few hours later to watch the triangle of ivory white light created by the overhead frame illuminate the chamber walls.

Birds and planes created depth for what was otherwise a very 2-D experience in forced reflection. We talked about reflecting pools and other devices to get us to arrest our hectic urban pace. This one was very successful. Another memory is of people standing looking and thus joining the Segals in suits walking away from them.Inside the Nasher is a small gallery featuring the wax-faced molds of Medardo Rosso. Their impressionistic warmth in photos becomes melancholic mortuary art when seen in series and groups in person. I quickly lost my initial enthusiasm for these works that we've all seen in art books.

"The breathtaking Chihuly glass blossoms cascading down the wall of the cafe in the Dallas Museum of Art"

Before the day ended we managed to squeeze a quick foray into the Dallas Museum of Art to view American landscapes. Noel had been troubled over his approach to figures -- very direct on with an Asian or pre-Renaissance perspective -- and to landscapes as either 2-D compositions or photoreal like places beside the road. I happened to comment that paintings were like windows onto the world that was not outside our walls but were where we would like to be. That was very freeing for him. He said, "I know what I'm going to do now." Windows on the world. Drop the figure and embrace Nature. Outside, we crossed a plaza and were drawn up the steps to a cool exterior of a sculpture garden that encircles the Trammel-Crow building with late 19th century and early 20th century sculptures, primarily naiads and nymphs, several trying vainly to cover their brazen nudity. Next time I want to see T-C's Asian collection.

Too toasted. After so much looking at landscapes we drove home through a painting of the lush green and gold of springtime Texas where abundant new tree and shrub growth frames fields of harvested grain and knee high corn. Noel was so happy for having lifted the weight of what to do. After this our second day trip to Ft. Worth to see landscape, I'm getting the itch; I've got the sketchbooks, arches watercolor pad, and my old Windsor Newtons -- if they haven't dried up along with my creative output.

"Dickens" Richard H. Cutler, Ph.D.

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