Mistress and Maid, c.1667, Johannes Vermeer
The first work of art to make me cry was Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid in the Frick. I saw it at the end of a long day of masterworks on a student trip to New York. My classmates and I had come down from McGill for a weekend of treasures-in-the-flesh. This must have been the one too many.
There’s something about the brightly lit mistress covered in clownish luxury (that preposterous earring!). She’s wrapped in the Hansa yellow of noisy prosperity, trimmed in ermine. And there’s something about the contrasting maid in a rough brown smock bearing a letter. She hands it ominously into the light: a profane annunciation. Their parted lips exchange words. The envelope catches the light like a blade, at just the angle for brightness, causing the mistress to stop writing. Her fingers question her chin about it. I’m moved by the ironic optimism of the silky golden curls, by the soft, powdery skin and all those glinting pearls: despite them, she’s about to become tragic.
The maid knows more than she should; her expression disquiets. She struggles to suppress the smirk of Schadenfreude. Her eyes are avid to witness what the mistress mustn’t betray. These women are not allies. Overwhelmed by emotion, I start to cry. I cry for the mistress who dares not cry. I cry for the maid’s damaged humanity and for Vermeer’s telepathy, still vital after centuries. His green tablecloth has faded to blue: more sadness.
Initially, the artist had set the scene before a rich tapestry of colourful figures, but repented in favour of drama. He spread a dark heavy curtain over it instead, too darkened by time for us to discern. This was long thought to have been a posthumous correction, a conjecture that science has since refuted. Vermeer cancelled the tapestry himself. A pitiful softness covers everything, as if to prime my eyes. The porcelain skin of the mistress is barely more than underpainting. Perhaps the confidence of such economy and the uncanny plumb-ness of the composition sparked my emotion. A large picture for its genre, it imposes in the Frick’s august West Gallery. The steel baron acquired it just before dying in 1919 at the age of seventy, one last marvel for his elegant new house.
Untitled (n.9), c. 1957, Paul-Émile Borduas.
The second picture to make me cry was a late black and white abstraction by Borduas. Still at McGill, I went to see his show at the old MAC on Isle Ste-Hélène. A section of the show described the extraordinary efforts that saved these thick late pictures. Too poor for good supplies, Borduas’ cheap paint began falling off the canvas like tiles when it finally dried years later, requiring tricky injections of polymers. I was taking a survey course on Canadian art at the time. The prof started us off with “the hard stuff,” Borduas’ Automatistes, then worked backwards in time. Borduas’ story had moved me, so the MAC show was timely.
A working-class kid from the sticks apprentices with Ozias Leduc to decorate the local church. Impressed by the young man’s talent, a priest sponsors him to study religious art-making in Paris under Maurice Denis, but he returns converted to a new religion: modernism. With a position in a Montreal trade school where he’s a popular art teacher, he publishes an ‘aesthetic liberation’ tract with some younger artists. It’s now the mid-40s under the reactionary Duplessis regime in Québec where the priests still have authority. Anti-religious passages in his manifesto get Borduas fired, like a modern Socrates, for ‘poisoning our youth.’ He moves to New York where Martha Jackson signs him among the first of many key artists. But, struggling with English and New York’s “insane” cost of living, he moves to Paris where he’s less successful, overshadowed by his former student Riopelle. And yet he’s making his strongest work. Alone in his garret, emaciated from malnutrition and too many Gauloises, he dies of a heart attack at 55.
Some short years later, Le Refus global, the pamphlet that had upended his life, including his marriage, becomes the ur-text of French Canada’s Quiet Revolution. For me in those days, Borduas was a saint in art’s Golden Legend, a self-sacrificing visionary who inspired a whole society. With all this in mind, I saw the heavily textured picture and suddenly felt a strong, material connection to the dead artist. It was mystical. Blunt and deliberate, the picture looks like nothing so much as a detail of a melting chessboard, the transit of one order into another. He ruined his health and his happiness to reach me psychically across time with a painting of paint! My face got all wet.
The Only Good One’s a Dead One, 1994, Willie Doherty
A video installation was the third work to make me cry, but the circumstances were different. I cried every time I saw it, which was often over the course of a year. Willie Doherty’s The Only Good One’s a Dead One was in my 1996 show Being and Time: The Emergence of Video Projection. It travelled to three US cities after the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, where I worked. I gave many a tour of it and cried a lot. As if it were pressing a button, there’s a moment in the narrative when a phrase I dare not repeat caused me to choke up on cue. It was like a parlour trick. I even started suspecting that there might be something wrong with me, something broken in my head.
The work is about hatred and the sectarian violence in the Ireland of “The Troubles.” Two video projections are shown side-by-side: the view from inside a vehicle speeding down a country road at night, and a sulphurous intersection seen from a parked car. The shots are Hollywood shoot-em-up clichés: the car chase and the stake-out. Over them, you hear a thickly-accented Irishman switch imperceptibly between the voice of an assassin and that of an assassin’s prey. A single voice reveals what it’s like to hate someone viscerally and what it’s like to be so hated. You are put on edge, of course, and keep expecting to see something horrible—a crash, a killing in a forest, a shoot-out, an explosion in the dead of night—but nothing happens. Your anxiety is the point.
My enthusiasm for the great material freedom of contemporary art is its ability to represent things—emotions, ideas, perspectives—that traditional art media cannot, or certainly not as effectively. For the Irish, this work will have an obvious resonance, especially given the affecting voice of the narrator. From 1988 to 1994, the Thatcher government banned broadcasting Gerry Adams. As the leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, he did plenty of meaningful speaking back then. Working around the censorship, UK media used an actor to repeat Adams’ words on the nightly news. Doherty hired that same “Gerry Adams” for his work’s voiceover, amplifying its gravitas. By the way, his title paraphrases Snowball, the charismatic pig in George Orwell’s Animal Farm who is referring to humans in general. I’ve been getting the animal’s point lately.
Making me weep is not a requirement for a work of art to earn my respect. Those that have managed to fully invade my consciousness never did. The Vermeer probably triggered a minor case of Stendhal Syndrome after a surfeit of wonders. And my youthful interpretation of what’s going on in the picture says more about my state of mind at the time than about Vermeer’s intention, which may have had nothing to do with the class struggle. Maybe the maid is happy for the mistress. Maybe the envelope is full of glad tidings. Borduas' life is a classic tragedy; it would make for a gripping opera. The last scene? His funeral in Paris with its pathetic four mourners. His beautiful painting was not the cause of my tears, but the vector of a larger sadness about him that had been building in my student brain for weeks. The Doherty has me stumped because it’s so odd. Upon reflection, though, all those tears likely resulted from my anxiety about crying in front of others, something that Latins like me do more easily than we’d like to. I do remember actively trying to suppress tears when anticipating “Gerry’s” chilling words, a struggle that struggling undermines. These are all powerful works that belong to my story, but no one can say that the artists intended for me to cry. Tears come from elsewhere.
Very moving trilogy -- for crying out loud! Exceptional writing.
Thank you so much, dear Larry!