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.
                ________________

• 

  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.