My father being an art dealer, we spent some of my summers growing up going museum-hopping.
I remember, on one such trip at 16, admiring a gorgeous landscape in a room full of natural Western scenes from the 1800’s, and an artist friend of Dad’s, Nat Leeb, asking me, “What’s wrong with this painting?”
Nothing was wrong with it, it was beautiful!
Look again.
*confused look*
Then he pointed it out: the light is coming from this direction, lighting up this area and leaving that area in shadow–but over here, in this one corner, look: the shadow goes in the wrong direction. The light also should not have caught that detail; it’s in the wrong place for it.
M. Leeb decided to teach me a lesson on how to draw as we waited for our meals at a restaurant. “You observe for ten minutes. Draw for one.” And then he grabbed the paper placemat and drew a horse by sketching a perfect series of quick connecting-Slinky ovals that surprised me: he was right! It was a horse! Here, he told me, you draw it like this and learn the shape of it before you draw it in a different form.
I knew I was getting a lesson from a master but struggled with my teenage desire to harrumph that I knew what shape a horse was. I had the sense to simply nod and say okay.
(Side conversation with the folks just now: Anne rode her bicycle a good ten miles+ each way down the C&O Canal towpath during her summers in high school to get to those lessons. It’s funny what you don’t remember about your siblings that was so day-to-day to them way back when.)
So. Today Dad wanted to see the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. After the Loma Prieta quake, the museum was closed for years and years, needing millions to rebuild and redo, and now he could finally see it again.
It was way better than the building that was destroyed. The marble walls and high, ornately done ceilings of the new, the rotunda at the center, all reminded me of Washington, DC: the Capitol building, the Senate offices, and on and on. I said that to Mom and she gave me a look of, Oh yes!
I’d seen last summer’s exhibit with my niece, but the place is surprisingly large and with her toddler in tow we hadn’t made it upstairs.
There’s no way Dad was going to miss upstairs. He had waited too long for this. There’s way more than all those Rodins and a few paintings to be seen.
Two Picassos up there! I’d had no idea.
But what intrigued me most was one small plaque: it said that with the completion of the transcontinental railroad–remember, Stanford was a railroad baron, and two of the ceremonial spikes from the joining of those rail lines was in a box downstairs on display–with that new transportation, the land that, as the plaque put it, had belonged only to dimestore novels and Twain and Brette Harte were suddenly open now to artists. At a time that landscapes were considered the pinnacle of art in popular American culture.
And so they came.
We’d been on our feet a long time and I finally sat in front of my favorite there to wait for Mom and Dad to finish. It was a painting of the head of the American River in California. It was huge and the details were exquisitely done. You could almost feel the slipperiness of the moss on the twiggy brush near the river, the white of a rider’s shirt catching the sunlight exactly so as it filtered between the mountain peaks to burst on the area of greatest interest. There were men on horseback, a burst of cloud at the top of the falls, rushing, falling water that splashed on the canvas, twists and turns of desert plants. The thing was just gorgeous.
