August 30, 2020: Today's Distraction, Cocktails with a Curator -

I've been enjoying Cocktails with a Curator, a series of YouTube videos put out by the Frick Collection in New York, and I commend it to you as today's Distraction.*  I've watched maybe four or five of these, and they are terrific, like shortened lectures from that Art History class you took, or meant to take, years ago. 

The videos are about 15 to 20 minutes long, and feature one work of art from the Frick Collection, as discussed by one of the curators there. At the beginning, the curator gives the recipe for a cocktail that might be vaguely relevant to the painting (and on the website, they give a mocktail as well). (There's a Bloody Mary, for instance, to accompany Holbein's" Sir Thomas More.") Then they raise their glass to toast the audience, and they are off. 

So far, my favorite is curator Xavier Salomon talking about Whistler's portrait of Mrs Frances Leyland:    I won't spoil it for you except to say that here's part of Mrs. L, who was a close friend of Whistler's, as painted by him: 

And here she is again, in a portrait by Dante Gabriel Rosetti:

If you are struggling to see these as depicting the same person, you are not alone. In fact, despite the friendship, and despite Whistler having designed the dress Mrs. L is wearing, and having designed the frame so that it uses the same pattern as the floor depicted in the painting, and despite the fact that (as you were just beginning to suspect) Whistler was a highly detail-oriented kind of guy, apparently it doesn't look much like the real subject. Fine, Mr. Salomon says equably, fine, so maybe it isn't a portrait, exactly, but it's a great painting. And he's right. 

I'm convinced there is a lesson in here about how hard it is to be true to life, for any of us. But that is probably spilling over from the portraits of Portland that are proliferating out there right now. Or maybe they aren't portraits, but they are pretty dramatic paintings.

*Why would you need a Distraction? I didn't say you did, but I do. If you came here looking for wisdom or even just a good rant about right-wing terrorism or police action/inaction, or our national leadership, or gun violence, or if you came for more of my love and/or defense of Portland, today is not your day. But you can find all of that easily on your favorite news or social site, and I wish you godspeed should you go in search of it. It's not that I'm not thinking about those things, because I surely am. But it's time to think about other things for a while.