Friday, 30 January 2009

• Fine Art Friday:Cassatt

  

  Young Woman Reading, 1876                                              Mary Stevenson Cassatt
  Oil on Canvas 13-3/4 x 10-1/2 in                                          Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

  Better to Receive is the title of Chapter 6 of All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes by Ken Myers.  It's the subject of an online book club which is providing me with much food for thought. So, this entry is really a bookmark meant to help me organize my thoughts on C S Lewis's book, An Experiment in Criticism, which is the focus of Myer's standard for analysis.  Here are a few clips from Myers's book.

  1.  According to Lewis, learning to "receive" a work of art does encourage habits of the heart that have effects in other areas of life.  Lewis suggests that one think about how to transcend one's limited viewpoint in the three other areas of experience:  love, morality, and the pursuit of knowedge.

  2.  In the case of music and painting, Lewis says that one is "using" a work if one approaches it as a means of calling up memories, of reminding one of something else. 

  3.  With a work of art, whether visual, musical or literary, one will miss what it holds if one enters into subjective "play" before allowing it to "work" on him/her.

  Hmmm, that's particularly insightful since I'm trying to shake the habit of touring an art exhibit like I'm reading a newspaper - headlines only.  Here's Lewis exactly:

  We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it.  The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender.  Look.  Listen.  Receive.  Get yourself out of the way.  (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

  So, instead of relying on Myers's interpretation only (albeit good), I'm ordering Lewis's book for my personal library, a worthy reference book as as I continue to learn to assess my culture, a response to the exhortation to get wisdom.

  FWIW (for what it's worth)

  I chose to highlight Cassatt today because 1) I never have mentioned her in all my FAF entries; 2) I, like Carol, collect pictures of people reading; 3) I've seen this particular one in exhibit at The High; and 4) I gave DH a silk tie in the pattern of the sofa - pretty orange stripe.  Note to self - get a photo of that.

   

  Also, can you tie a  tie?

  Currently An Experiment in Criticism (Canto) By C. S. Lewis see related

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