Don't Know Much about [Art] History

Sis is a member of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich and she took me as
a guest to this talk tonight.

I loved going to the Bruce Museum with Sis. The lecture was so cool. I felt like I was back on a college campus again, taking notes. 

I never took art history and though both of my parents were chemists and my Sis a research scientist, science is not my strength. I have been to fine and famous art museums, but don't know nearly enough about artists and their works.

I'm here to visit Sis--going back tomorrow midday, so don't want to spend too long blogging. We've had a chance to talk a lot about Don, who has left a big gap in the world as we know it. We have also walked with the dog by the cove and by the marina. It is a gift to be with my Sis and I am grateful that Dan is holding down the fort at home in Montclair.

But I did want to share some notes I scrawled in the dark:

1. It's estimated that when you walk through an art museum, about 80 percent of what you see is the work of the artist and 20 percent is the work of the restorer, said Dr. Jennifer Mass, college professor and president, Scientific Analysis of Fine Art.
2. Paintings can change over time due to the inherent quality of the materials used or the way the paintings are stored and handled.
3. Dr. Mass showed us how the colors in Henri Matisse's 1905-06 Bonheur de Vivre [The Joy of Life] have faded from their original hues. The yellow in some parts is not what it was.The once vibrant lemons on the tree have gone brownish, due to light-induced oxidation.
4. She showed us that some of the colors in The Scream by Edvard Munch--the brush strokes on the man's neck--faded from vibrant to white. The dr. and her team did molecular analysis as part of their investigation.
5. I thought of past and present art students I know: My cousin Lin; my daughter Figgy; my friend Kim's father and daughter; Dan's brother Dave--who immersed themselves in the study of art for at least some time. I was grateful to get a little crash course tonight. I'm not proud of it, but I didn't know about Picasso's Blue Period until tonight. As a young woman and eager writer, I was passionate about punctuation and synonyms and words like Ida Tarbell [a muckraking journalist] leapt out at me from my history book at Saint Mary's. Picasso did not excite me. 
6. Light and humidity must be carefully controlled [for oil paintings].
7. Can the damage be reversed? Dr. Mass said it is more likely that the team would use digital reproduction--Photoshop a new version of the painting showing its original colors and display that next to the original, so you can see both.
8. Sis is smart and she knew about hidden portraits already--it's hard to surprise her. But I didn't know about them, so I loved when Dr. Mass revealed the hidden portrait under Picasso's The Blue Room, done in 1901. The under portrait is of a man and Dr. M. called it "decadent," since he had rings on every finger. One in five to one in 10 paintings have another painting underneath, she said. Canvas was extremely expensive at the turn of the twentieth century. So artists recycled their canvases.
9. She talked about pigment colors: Prussian Blue, Emerald Green. Such pretty names. She knew their chemical formulas and said the green, which was widely used through the Victorian era, contained arsenic. So there it went. 

All fascinating. I soaked it up. 

I want to go back to school--pull up a desk in Art History 101 and Chemistry 101. Do they still have desks in college classrooms? Figgy has told me about a lot of things on campus that seem different now.

Good night to you.