Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Smut is banned

Pierre Bonnard’s Open Window [Phillips Collection, 1921] ...
... is an invitation to reverie. It is a hot, lazy summer day of a painting, as palpably warm as Monet’s winter scenes are shiveringly cold. Sit back, relax, let your thoughts wander. How can you do anything else in this heat? Here is a room where the walls glow orange like hot coals, a veritable oven of a place. If you touch that patch of wall below the curtain, it will burn you. And the white curtain itself has no cooling effect; against the sweltering orange, all the wintry associations of whiteness are burned away and the curtain looks white hot. Understandably, our eyes don’t linger long in this broiler of a room. We rush toward the large open window, and our visual escape into the window’s green and blue is like leaping into cool water on a 90° day. That band of blue sky is the painting’s relief: coolness, depth and distance combined with transparent lightness. It is a soothing tone, as calm and quiet as a Rothko rectangle. As we look at the painting, that illimitable blue is the focus of our waking dream.
I am a vandal.

8 comments:

Dr.KennethNoisewater said...

It's about damn time.

Jennifer said...

I'm waiting for the big Monty Python foot to come down.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

I think my mom was a relative of Gill O'Tine...
~

Substance McGravitas said...

Now we make the head cheese.

Unknown said...

Swirly tiger makes Smut butter?

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Smut shan't be back!

Smut Clyde said...

That reminds me, I haven't voted.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

I have voted many times, and yet the sha'na'na forces only lead by two?
~