I can vouch for the truth that there is no better way to celebrate a birthday marking the all too swift passage of the remaining years than a jaunt with beloved family to the Getty Villa. We went yesterday, Ellie and I, with our daughter Sarah and her boyfriend from the Netherlands and her rambunctious young 10-year-old, Luka—another constant reminder, if one were needed, of my own declining years.
I noticed, even on the path from the parking garage to the villa, that there are judgments to be set aside on such a visit: judgments about extreme wealth and the means by which it was acquired; judgments—based on nothing but rumor, reputation and news reports---about the character of the man who amassed it; judgments about the use to that extreme wealth to plunder the cultural heritage of distant nations…
All these, and judgments too about the nature of humanity itself which arose, for me, the moment I set foot in the exhibition “Assyria: Palace Art in Ancient Iraq”, testimony to the truth that extreme wealth could buy you whatever extravagance you pleased no less in the ancient world than in today’s; that violence, warfare, plundering were as rife in those early days as they are today; that men—yes, alas, mostly men—were even then capable of acts of unimaginable cruelty, depicted in vivid battle scenes replete with disembowelments, impalements, beheadings. And while not committing acts of terror on their fellow human beings, they were inflicting them, for sport, on beautiful animals in the hunt...
All of which having duly noted, there is art. One wonders—well, I wonder, and I realize this is by no means an original thought—how those two starkly contradictory impulses can coexist in the human mind. But there it is. They do. And to walk through the Getty Villa is to be reminded at every turn of the artist’s obsessive need to get it right. To get every detail exactly right, unsparing of effort or skill. You have only to look at the patterned tiles on the marble floors...
... the paintings on the walls, each leaf, it would seem, on those rows of beautiful plants and trees...
—let alone the “art works” that fill the galleries.
I wander through those galleries, amazed at what those ancient artists achieved. The detail—passionate, sometimes explicitly sexual, sometimes gently humorous—of ordinary human interaction represented on the painted surfaces of those Grecian vases is astounding...
... I can, as they say, relate. The faces on those portraits carved in hard, ungiving stone and in bronze speak with as much human presence, today, as they did centuries ago...
The gestures and postures of those sculptural torsos, even left limbless by the passage of time, still manage to convey their own peculiar body language with profoundly moving power. Extraordinary, for example, that a male torso deprived of his genitals—whether by prurient vandalism or simply the ravages of time itself—can exude the pride, aggressive physical strength and pure spunk of masculinity.
Revisiting all of this, I realize how deeply I love art. Not just the “contemporary” stuff with which I was involved professionally, as a writer, for many years. These days, I have to say, I am more profoundly moved by these expressions of the ancients, testimony to the irrepressibly noble aspects of the human species, and a reminder, always, of my own humanity.
So, much gratitude for this day. Much learned, and re-learned. Much love in the shared experience, of the occasional glimpse of my grandson...
... almost despite himself, lost for a moment in the contemplation of a presence of pure beauty.
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