Pictures & Tears
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Pictures & Tears Pictures & Tears A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings James Elkins Routledge New York and London Excerpts from “A Rake’s Progress” by W.H.Auden. Copyright © 1951 by W.H.Auden. “On the Death of His Wife” by Mei Yao Ch’en, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, and “A Dream at Night” by Mei Yao Ch’en, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, from One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, edited by Kenneth Rexroth, copyright © 1971 by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Published in paperback in 2004 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue NewYork, NY 10016 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2001 by James Elkins Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Elkins, James, 1955– Pictures and tears: a history of people who have cried in front of paintings/ James Elkins. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-97053-9 (pbk) 1. Painting—Appreciation. 2. Visual perception—Psychological aspects. I. Title. ND1143.E442001 750’,1’1–dc21 2001019659 ISBN 0-203-99032-3 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-97053-9 (pbk) Contents Colorplates v Preface vi Acknowledgments viii 1 Crying at nothing but colors 1 2 Crying no one can understand 15 3 Crying from chromatic waves 30 4 Crying because you’ve been hit by a lightning bolt 42 5 Weeping over bluish leaves 57 6 The ivory tower of tearlessness 70 7 False tears over a dead bird 84 8 Crying because time passes 100 9 Weeping, watching the Madonna weep 124 10 Crying at God 136 11 Sobbing in lonely mountains 148 12 Crying at the empty sea of faith 159 Envoi: How to look and possibly even be moved 166 Appendix: Thirty-two letters 176 Sources 197 Index 203 Colorplates 1 Mark Rothko, interior of the Rothko chapel, 1965–66. Photo by Hickey- Robertson. Courtesy of the Rothko chapel, Houston. 2 Caravaggio, Young Bacchus, c. 1593–95. Florence, Uffizi. Alinari/Art Resource, New York. 3 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Young Woman Who Weeps over Her Dead Bird, late eighteenth century. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland. Courtesy National Gallery of Scotland. 4 Giovanni Bellini, The Ecstasy of St. Francis, mid 1470s. New York, Frick Collection. 5 Dieric Bouts, Mater dolorosa, c. 1460. Chicago, Art Institute. Photo ©1987 The Art Institute of Chicago. 6 Anonymous, Nachi Waterfall, late thirteenth century, Kamakura period. Japan, Nezu Institute of Fine Arts. 7 Caspar David Friedrich, Memories of the Riesengebirge, 1835. St. Petersburg, Hermitage. Preface THIS IS A BOOK about the ways that pictures can move us— strongly, unexpectedly, and even to tears. Most of us, I think, have never cried in front of paintings, or even felt anything very strong. Pictures make us happy. They’re bemusing. Some are lovely and relaxing to look at. The best are gorgeous, mesmerizingly beautiful—but really only for a minute or two, and then we’re off to see something else. Our lack of intensity is a fascinating problem. I’d like to understand why it seems normal to look at astonishing achievements made by unapproachably ambitious, luminously pious, strangely obsessed artists, and toss them off with a few wry comments. Are pictures really nothing more than spots of beauty on the wall, or (in the case of people in my line of work) index cards for intellectual debates? What does it mean to say that you love paintings (and even spend your life living among them, as professionals do) and still feel so little? If paintings are so important—worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often— then isn’t it troubling that we can hardly make emotional contact with them? The playwright Georg Büchner has a wonderful line about how dry people have become, and how parsimonious they are with the little bits that they do manage to feel. “We will have to start measuring out our spirit in liqueur glasses,” one of his characters says, raising a tiny aperitif. Büchner is right: most of us have so few really important, moving experiences with art that they stand out against the parade of routine afternoons in museums. These days a visit to the museum is an opportunity to learn something, and take a little sip of pleasure here and there. For some art, that’s just fine. But many artists, from many periods, would be entirely disgusted with us. That need not be so. Paintings repay the attention they are given, as I hope to show in this book: the more you look, the more you feel. This isn’t a manual of tears—there’s no way to teach strong reactions, let alone crying—but I have tried to capture the frames of mind that have led people to cry. Paintings can exercise a strange grip on the imagination, but it takes time and an openness to unusual experiences. I don’t mean that just any picture could bring you to tears, or that it’s a good idea to walk around museums with a handkerchief in your hand. Pictures have many things to say, and there is pleasure in even the most sober history lesson. From books on Monet you can learn that he began by drawing caricatures vii (an interesting business for someone who later spurned the human figure), and you can even learn that the little river that runs through his garden, which he painted many times, is named the Epte. I love history, and I wouldn’t give up any of its richness. But paintings can also work differently, in a way that isn’t easily put into words, that slides in and out of awareness, that seems to work upward toward the head from somewhere down below: a way that changes the temperature of your thinking instead of altering what you say. That other kind of experience can tunnel into your thoughts and bring tears to your eyes. It’s the one I want to find in this book. Happily, there is no lack of evidence that people have had strong responses to pictures. It turns out that viewers cried in front of paintings in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and again in the eighteenth century, and again in the nineteenth, each time for different reasons and with different pictures. Few centuries, it seems, are as determinedly tearless as ours. Some people still do cry over paintings—a small group, nearly invisible in the masses of unmoved museum visitors. To find them, I posted inquiries in newspapers and journals, asking for stories from anyone who had responded to a painting with tears. I wrote my colleagues and people I knew who cared for art. I suppose I didn’t expect many replies (I might not have responded to such a letter myself), but I was surprised: in the end I got more than four hundred calls, e-mails, and letters. Most are confessions from people I don’t know—a remarkable gesture, given that in many instances the writers had seldom shared their experiences. (Some had told their husbands and wives, but no one else until I had asked.) The letters are an invaluable source, because they show that the reasons people cried in past centuries are still with us, even though they are muted by collective disapproval. I refer to the letters throughout the book, and I’ve put a number of them in the Appendix. Initially, I thought that crying would prove to be very personal, and that it would come in as many varieties as there are people. Again I was surprised, because the scattered stories started falling into patterns. I saw that people cry for particular reasons. Roughly half the cases converge on two kinds of experience that are very close to each other, and yet completely opposed. In one, people cry because pictures seem unbearably full, complex, daunting, or somehow too close to be properly seen. In the other, they cry because pictures seem unbearably empty, dark, painfully vast, cold, and somehow too far away to be understood. From there the road begins to twist, and I don’t want to give it all away. (It takes time to acclimate to tears.) The story progresses in stages: every other chapter, starting with the first, explores a single painting and someone who was moved by it. The alternate chapters (the even-numbered ones) are meditations on those encounters. That is the best way I know to show how pictures can be moving, and it lets me edge my way slowly toward the central problem of our nearly perfect tearlessness. James Elkins 2001 Acknowledgments MANY SPECIALISTS HAVE helped me round up the available facts; I want especially to mention Ann Adams, Leah Garchik, D’Arcy Grigsby, Elizabeth Honig, Margaretta Lovell, Marilyn Lavin, Tom Lutz, Richard Lowry, David Morgan, Loren Partridge, and Tomaš Vlček. Frank Tarbox helped reorient the much-rewritten preface. Bertrand Rougé wrote me a series of brief letters without preparation, on the spur of the moment: all the more amazing, then, that they have crystallized so many of the thoughts that follow.