Fine, well bred museums abound in Washington. Aside from being with family and friends, one of my joys in visiting the city is to wander rooms and galleries filled with painting, sculpture, video projections and other works that stimulate the imagination. A favorite so far on this trip is a portrait of Gertrude Stein made out of spindles of colored thread hung on long chains suspended from the ceiling. Gertrude would have loved it.
Besides the interplay of light and shadow in long corridors, I love the interaction of museum-goers with marble figures and sculpture...the way the present and the past juxtapose one another. People moving among these immovable objects and, in some way, communicating with them. Communicating with the figures itself. "Who were these people?" "Who are these people?" An idealized beauty alongside our ordinary beauty.
And is the message between these marble figures and ourselves? It could be a message of beauty alone, of harmony or, equally, of disquiet and protest, of love or violence. This communication is what touches us, causes a reaction, brings us toward the object or away from it. Perhaps it is a form of communication not that far off from the early cave paintings....leading us to reflect on something quite beyond ourselves.
But even in these galleries and rooms, we are drawn back to our daily lives....a cafe set up amidst the elegant figures attunes us more to the possibility of food than of a deeper communion. And that is part of the fun of these museums....the way the timeless interacts with the present moment.
