Personal Essays

Fortunately, I did find my way to the old homestead, as it were. It was on the complete opposite end of the museum from where I had thought it was, but as soon as I saw “American Paintings, 1905-1945,” it was like seeing a long-lost brother again. I’ve never been able to explain why, out of the thousands of years that people have been putting paint on things, those forty years have influenced me the most. Edward Hopper, the Ashcan School, Alfred Stieglitz’s circle – I can't even begin to measure the debt I owe them. I worry sometimes that it makes me seem like a stodgy reactionary, considering all that’s happened in the art world since then, but I’m learning to make peace with that.

For the next three hours, I wandered around, watching people’s reactions to what they saw as much as experiencing my own. I felt a vicarious thrill when a man walked right up to Edward Hopper’s Lighthouse at Two Lights and peered at his brush strokes exactly as I had done the first time I saw it. I listened to a young woman discuss Georgia O’Keeffe in great detail with a girl who looked to be about eight. I checked off names as I went: Demuth, Hartley, Brancusi, Giacometti, Picasso, Klee, Chagall. It was like going to a family reunion where no one had changed or gotten older but me.