MODERN AMERICANS IN THEIR PLACE AT CHICAGO ART INSTITUTE: AN ARTICLE

                                                                                                                       Arshile Gorky, After Khorkum, 1940/42                                         © 2018 The Arshile Gorky Foundation / The Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

This essay first appeared in Brilliant Corners in 1975 and is republished by ASAP/J for the first time since its original appearance. Please also read Nick Sturm’s essay on Notley’s work here.

                                                                                                          to be read by people too young to have museum claustrophobia. Who are “educating” themselves about art or get all damp and glowing with color and light in front of a famous masterpiece, and also enjoy air conditioning nymphets baskets access to a coffee shop and, too, a gift shop full of unattainable beautiful jewelry.

                                                                                                       I hang out at the Chicago Art Institute––since 1972 I guess, when pregnant I would come panting home from a visit with the paintings and announce to my husband “The history of art is hilarious” or “I finally realized today that it must be as great to be Vuillard as deKooning.” He would look up just a smidgeon wider-eyed then resume reading the latest Travis McGee. Later, I found out I could go out and get away from the kids, at the CAT, and have long flights of ecstasy and with my very own membership card read in the Institute library Art in America, or weep over Kahnweiler’s version of the death of Juan Gris. After the lovely weeping I would go examine the (usually) four Gris’ on exhibit upstairs; look at the portrait of Picasso and wonder at the intimacy between more or less screwball idea and fullblown beauty. Systems and all light. Picasso does after all look like a waffle iron with a permanent wave. At home later I would write

   I see the checkerboard through    the newspaper the table    through the checkerboard and the    checkerboard the newspaper    and the table, and the wall-    paper rose and guitar for    each and the somber tipsy glass

because painting was teaching me what a word like “tipsy” could do to the flat. Like in Gris’ Abstraction (Guitar and Glass), what that most pretty rose  does in that painting which is all straight lines and severe curves. I guess I did have Gris then figured for a tipsy melancholic sweetheart, and I plagiarized also many good lines, for my poems, from his letters. You can too. I also I hope learned something about “heroic constancy” with regard to talent or its seeming lack.

     However, I didn’t know it but I was mainly doing a number with Excavation by deKooning, sort of knocking at the door all the time; and incidentally having a Gorky itch in the rear right-hand area of my brain. I WANTED IN. 30 years behind the times but lots of people are.            And what I found out was: The thing about Excavation is that you have to allow yourself to be seduced, or actually just fall right into the excavation. One day I was weak and swooned on in. (To be continued)                                                          ________________

                       (Next Day)

     Excavation you see is very discrete even given its size––from across the room an almost non-color well-mannered painting and you could walk right by it. Philip Whalen did, and I thought he just didn’t like deKooning and he being my hero (Whalen, not to mention deKooning) I quiveringly kept any mention of the painting stuck at the top of my throat. When we got home my husband said to him How did you like Excavation? Excavation! he thundered, was it there? I didn’t even see it!

     It is now impossible to miss because it and all the modern American paintings have been installed in their own good space beside huge windows and a garden, there’s no railing or roping before it you can go right up to it and bathe and find all the other colors and ride around on the black lines and visit the new faces and monsters that pop up. I am a mere simpleton. Excavation is a real person.                             And the new installation of the paintings is a real improvement. On a bright day you can see the blue in Franz Kline’s Contrada. If you have trouble with works that don’t have “colors” on them you can see the sculptures period (Though the poet Maureen Owen’s favorite is Richard Hunt’s The Chase because she is appallingly pun- conscious). You can see, because of the lighting the greater space, the works you were ignoring because the names weren’t “big” enough, Estaban Vincete’s Growth, Stamos’ Classic Boundaries e.g. Sweet delights you want to press your cheek to.

     At first I didn’t know what was happening to all the American works. Last fall they started disap- pearing roomful by roomful. Excavation! would I ever see it again? Had Joan Mitchell’s shitty-rainbowed Cityscape so dear to my heart been stuck in the basement forever, with the Gorkys the Institute claimed to have but never seemed to hang? Suddenly only Alex Katz’s Vincent And Tony was left – boy was it painted and paint on the huge white wall near the staircase the whole museum could have been built just for it for our happiness. Their full paint soft lips. Katz I think wants to kiss many people long and hard, not an incomprehensible desire.

     Everything then began reappearing along with a few surprises––Andy Warhol’s decadal coup and master- piece of Chairman Mao. Would the other paintings survive it? Whose minds had been boggled during the making of so big a silkscreen? and then the masterfully acrylicked it, and Mao’s Cheek and Button. Well Jules Olitski Born in Snovsk and Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park No. 45 hold their own space fine beside it, in part of course because there’s that space now              too                  would you believe over and over Philip Guston’s Rite? with those almost flaccid forms that so cohere that it is one of the most mysterious miracles in your life? Go up and touch David Smith’s Cubi VII, when no guard’s looking, and find out how small and grand you are.

………….………….………….……One day, After Xhorkum, Gorky, appears and my life changes. (Where are the other Gorkys besides The Plough The Song II, Mr. and Mrs. CAT? what happened to him and his mother; and the workout-in-crude vase of flowers? that I so much wanted to write a poem like. I saw the drawing 1936 of his mother, my muse, last week and absorbed it into my whole physique. She has marvelously flowered intestinal shapes about her left ear, to mention the idiosyncratic because I cannot survive the sublime sublimely.) After Xhorkum has become for me Numero Uno. I think it is the most beautiful and perfect work of art I have ever seen.                 ________________

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  Alice Notley

  Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently Certain Magical Acts. Forthcoming are Eurynome’s Sandals (PURH) and For the Ride (Penguin Books). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She lives and writes in Paris, France.