A Five-Sense Psyche

When I was twelve, I spent a lot of Saturdays at the museum, staring at the Corots. Until recently, in the reflective paternalism of memory, I had gauged those half-dull, mindlessly brown reveries as the first clear signs of an aesthetic feeling separate from all the other lymphatic swellings of the adolescent self. It would be possible, of course, to interpret into that communion with those cobweb Barbizon forests, landscapes carefully dreaming as only the nineteenth century could dream, the first properly saloniste stirrings of sex. Fortunately, my fantasies in that direction took place in quite another red room of verse, sound, sobs, and touch, all floating with the naked human figure, male and mine, in which I had as yet no interest one could call classical. No, what I was seeing in those paintings, and with the exquisite recognition of relief, was something much more literal than either case–the trees. At the time, of course, I must already have been suffering from some sensibility. But also, in those days of irregular eye-tests, I had a mild myopia, as yet uncorrected by lenses. I knew what trees tended to look like “artistically” to other people–from the wintry black-and-white of etchings at home to the luscious green clumps of colored advertisement. But here on the museum wall, if I got close enough, was comforting testimony that once upon a time another vision, and one considered worthy, had seen real trees exactly as I saw them, on my walk in Central Park–now.

What I was experiencing, as I would later be told in college, was the well-known phenomenon of the “element of the familiar” in art–in visual art, or perhaps in any art, the prime satisfaction of the novice; but to the artist himself, and to the people who can learn his vision, the most primitive. “It’s what makes people say, ‘Look, just like the barn at home!'” said the instructor. “But you can find that satisfaction on a postcard. If postcard naturalism is all you are able to see, or have learned.” He was being loftily modern. And he went on to be what he thought was witty. “But, until you can also see the composition and color–relationships the artist poses, you too will be up against a barn door!” Unknown to both of us, we there in front of him were already hopelessly far beyond him in what our eyes saw as reality normal to us–and in the music that would seem sonically normal to our ears, and in the literature already dropping unalienly into our minds, as well. For he, born circa 1880, was talking principally of the components of objective art–which to him was still the principal art. And we, still gazing so innocently up at him according to his own predilections, with Greuze-blue eyes perhaps, and here and there a Jacques David curve of odalisque above our wool kneesocks, already had the cells of almost another reality–non-objective, atonal, anti-heroic–in our bones.