Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

Vincent van Gogh and Other European Memories

One last indulgent post on European travels long ago. From Switzerland we travel to Spain and then on to France. We toured the Prado and the Louvre, but then Bobbi flew home to teach junior high art, and I traveled on alone. I headed north seeking to put distance between me and the unsettling forwardness of Mediterranean men. First to Copenhagen, and then a ferry ride to Sweden so I could make the claim that I had stepped foot in my maternal ancestral lands.

I took a side trip to the tip of Denmark, staying in a nearly empty hostel because the days were already a crisp reminder that summer was over. I walked the empty beach to its most northern tip, wanting to find the place where the North Sea and the Baltic Sea came together. My college education up to that point had been about how to make art, but my senior year would be the beginning of learning what art I was meant to make.  There, where two seas came together, seemed a good place to begin sketching ideas and laying plans for my last year of college. At the time I thought it so odd that a girl from the Colorado Rockies felt so at peace there walking by the sea. Little did I know that as an adult I would find a similarly isolated place on the edge of a continent to root.

On the train back to civilization (Amsterdam) I teamed up with four other Americans, two studying for the priesthood at the Vatican and two telephone operators exploring the world. We all had ideas on what we wanted to see and do, and one by one we checked off the list. We strolled through Amsterdam’s red light district, boated its canals, toured the Heineken factory, walked on a dike, bought cheese from a farm and took our picture in front of the World Court in The Hague. Spending time in a country below sea level, with its 180 degree expanse of sky and long daylight hours was such a contrast from the mountains of my youth. I finally understood how place influences art.

Then we went to the newly opened Van Gogh Museum. The slides of my art history lectures and the pictures in books did not prepare me. I had grown accustomed over the summer to seeing rooms dedicated to the work of one artist, but never a whole museum. Van Gogh’s work was hung chronologically, with the earliest work on the lowest floor. It was incredible to see its progression from the sepias of his early drawings to the vibrant hues and madness of his later years. It is so rare to be able to see that much work by one person spanning an entire artistic career. Though in reality Van Gogh's career only lasted ten short years, from 1880 to 1890. I think he was able to make that incredible transition because he had previously worked for his uncle, an art dealer, and studied to be a minister. He had thought deeply about art and life before he began and then his sheer prolific production of work propelled it forward at warp speed. 

When I flew home a couple of days later, I had a small reproduction of the first picture in this post, The Fishing Boats on the Beach of Saintes-Maries tucked safely between my pocket guide to the Prado and a small book on Michelangelo.  I probably would have chosen one of Van Gogh's self portraits, but I also wanted to hold on to my memory of a beach where two seas came together as one.

There are many books out on Van Gogh. But my new favorite is My Brother Vincent van Gogh, by Ceciel de Bie. It is a children’s book, but it captures his life and work in such a refreshing way.  A very comprehensive website on his work can be found at http://www.vggallery.com/.

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Lately I have been thinking a lot of my travels in Europe at 21.  How different it was in 1973, before cell phones and internet.  How truly on our own we were, especially during the final month of our travels.  Phone calls were prohibitively expensive and nearly impossible to execute.   My only communication home for 3 months was a sporatic postcard crumb trail.  I tried to send a card at the train station every time we changed cities.  But, with our night train crisscross journey through Europe, had something gone amiss, it would have be weeks before anyone would have known to start looking and hopefully the right city to look in.  My son's girlfriend is spending inter-term in London.  I have no doubt they are exchanging email and pictures regularly, if not phone calls.

My travels were during the summer of the Watergate hearings and all across Europe people would shake their heads at us with wry smiles, commenting on how naive Americans were to be surprised and outraged that a politician would lie and our simplistic optimism about life in general.  I am sure I traveled with a permanent wide-eyed look, amazed at how history and art were infused in the daily lives of average people, not just the wealthy.

In Lausanne, Switzerland we stumbled upon an International Fiber Arts Biennial.  Colorado State University had a strong fibers department, so I already new the discipline was expanding in exciting ways, but I was not prepared for the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz, and others.  It is her name that I remembered and her career that I followed from afar.  My slides from the show are long gone, but I suspect that what I saw exhibited were pieces from her Abakans series.  Their allusion to a human presence seem to foretell her later explorations of the figure and search for the individual within the masses.  The Abakans would have appealed to my desire to define humanness, and my search for the common denominators of the masses expressed within the individual.  As I watch my son's generation, with its new technology and connections, I wonder how our new connectivity will influence our sense of individuality vs. being an anonymous piece of humanity.

This fall Abakanowicz installed Agora in Grant Park in Chicago.  More pictures and information can be found at http://www.abakanowicz.art.pl.  It is a beautiful, comprehensive new site featuring her work and well worth the time spent exploring it.

Michelangelo's Rondanini Pieta

I grew up in the mountains of Colorado. I don't remember ever going to an art museum before setting off at 21 to study art history in Vienna for the summer.  For two months, I attended lectures in the morning and spent my afternoons in museums, then we all went our separate ways for one month of travel.  I teamed up with a fellow student, crisscrossing Europe according to where the night trains went, exploring whatever city we arrived at in the morning and only finding a hostel if we found a reason to stay.  Our only pre-planned destinations were Spain and Paris for Bobbi, and I was adamant about going to Milan to see Michelangelo's Rondanini Pieta.  The books said the Pieta was at the Castello Sforzesco, but we walked round and round the grounds without finding any mention of it.  Bobbi and I ended up in a heated argument; she was adamant that it wasn't there and I was refusing to give up on my dream of seeing it.  She finally stomped off in disgust to get something to eat, while I tried to figure out a plan B for finding it.

I finally found a gardener and repeated "Rondanini Pieta" over and over, pointing to my map.  Somehow he conveyed that the building housing it was being renovated - "So sorry."  Heartbroken, I crumpled to a nearby bench in defeat.  I had been sitting there for awhile when he returned and motioned for me to follow.  He unlocked an unobtrusive door and guided me down the stairs to a tall cylindrical room where the Rondanini Pieta stood, lit with natural light from the windows circling high above it.  He told me to stay as long I wished and to go out the same way I had come in, and he went back to his gardening.  When I came out Bobbi was waiting but the gardener was gone.

I can't say why I am so drawn to this sculpture.  It is so different than Michelangelo's Pieta at Saint Peter's in Rome, finished in 1499, when he was twenty-four.  Michelangelo had started the Rondanini Pieta in 1556; but had abandoned it for seven or eight years before resuming work on it.  He had carved on the piece an enitre day just six days before he died in 1564, at the age of 89. It must have been important to him because he bequeathed it to his servant, Antonio.  It is clear that the piece was changing; the remnant of an arm going nowhere remains.  Maybe it is the mystery of being left to wonder how the piece would have evolved had Michelangelo had more time. 

I have thought of the Pieta and the gardener many times over the years.  I seem to pull out its picture when there are hard times and grief surrounding me.  The Pieta is as captivating and mysterious as ever.  I will forever be grateful to a gardener who understood my need to see it and for his incredible gift of leaving me alone, to sketch, to photograph, and to simply sit and contemplate Michelangelo's Rondanini Pieta.