On a Saturday in June

On a Saturday in June, we celebrated and natural and man-made beauty with two activities: a musical nature walk and a museum visit. Tomorrow is the summer solstice, so in the morning we gathered with the East End Song Studio at Nine Mile Creek* Trail to sing, to play movement games and circle dances, and use our imaginations. We set off like treasure hunters with a hand-drawn map. *The other side of the road, leading off the larger parking lot, is the Nine Mile Run Trail--easy to confuse!

I catalogued the different colors we saw: orange, white, periwinkle, and purple flowers; orange and blue butterflies or moths; and dragonflies with electric blue or green bodies. And of course, many shades of green. The creek even smelled like moss--a very green smell.

Jett’s programming appeals to children of all ages, including an elderly man named Pete who was walking the trail and joined in for one of them. Then we had brunch under the trees, and the cool green-ness of it all reminded me of nothing so much as the Central European hygienic habit of “forest bathing,” except we were fully clothed.

Next Dear Husband went to church to play a wedding, and I went home to do this and that. We reunited in the late afternoon at the Frick Museum, where we met a friend who has lived in Pittsburgh for a quarter century and had never been before. Our object was the opening of a traveling exhibition from the Brooklyn Museum of Art on French modernist painters.

Sold as "French Moderns: Matisse / Renoir / Degas," we saw works by Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Henri Matisse, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Auguste Rodin. Also Gabriele Münter, I think the only female painter, who had lived a couple of years in Koblenz(?), the village our guest is from. The style of the paintings and sculptures included realism, impressionism, post-impressionism, symbolism, Fauvism, cubism, and surrealism, spanning the century from the 1850s to the 1940s. 

Goustave Courbert's The Wave was one of my favorite paintings, because it reminded me of one of my favorite works of glass art, a solid hunk of clear glass that nevertheless gave the feeling of movement.

I feel as though I have seen a similar vita in Frick Park, with a high path overlooking a tree-filled valley and buildings in the distance.

This one was large and stunning in person. The fact that you can tell the artist painted her left arm multiple times to get the angle right gives the painting a sense of movement.

I thought the curator(s) had done an excellent job choosing and staging the works so that we could appreciate multiple landscapes together, portraits (backlit peasants in fields, humble figures rich and poor, full-length middle-class icons), still lifes (including a painting of a basket of freshly caught fish, still bloody from having the hooks removed), and another set of portraits they entitled “Bodies” that mostly consisted of nude female bathers. 

Left: a Cardinal smelling flowers--the level of detail without visible brushstrokes was captivating.

Right: The Philosopher. reading a newspaper. He was displayed amid bathing women. I think the only other nude male was a half-life-sized bronze by Rodin made after the Franco-Prussian War.

As a historian, I find it valuable to be familiar with the culture of the time that I study, and attending an exhibit such as this helps me recalibrate my mental timeline of. I/We? have a tendency to think of modernity coming with the world wars in the 20th century, but artists were already challenging norms and perceptions in the second half of the 19th century. 

Before the museum closed, we sped through a couple of the free, permanent-collection galleries, although these are updated with some regularity. For instance, I don't remember seeing this peeved St. Catherine of Sienna with her  tortured expression before.

I was tickled by the juxtaposition of the painted wig on the left and the photographed "wig" of shaving cream on the artist's daughter on the right.

Magnificent composition of the painter's studio, in front of a room filled with ceramics:

Then we dodged the raindrops back to our cars and reconvened at a local French restaurant to eat and catch up. It was a wonderful way to celebrate the midpoint of the year.