Snow Day - MFA, Day Three

Woke to cottony skies and promises of a blizzard. Deciding that fortune favors the bold, I called Uber and set off. Streets were still clear, and by 10 am I was trotting up the swept and salted steps of the MFA.
I usually avoid large museums on the weekend when they’re the most crowded but today I had the MFA nearly all to myself. I began in the Asian rooms. My interest in all things oriental has broadened and deepened with the engagement of my son to Julia Liu, and I found myself paying close attention to the distinction between objects from China, Japan, Tibet and Laos. The calm and dignity of the Buddha, especially the bodhisattvas, has appealed to me since my hippie youth. I want mercy more than justice, Give me compassion, every time.
And there was this casually seated fellow with that glint of amusement in his expression. A moment seated before him calmed my mind.

This stone tomb gave me some ideas for another box.

If only my skill set allowed my production to keep up with my ideas. Alas, t’was ever thus, even my paintings.
I got lost looking for coffee and found myself in the ‘modern’ rooms. Okay, I appreciate the cleverness of this screen, even more so the play of shadows through the piercings. And this entrance door to the France Stark UH-OH exhibit attracts and repels.
Sure, it tickles me – pure, gleeful naughtiness- but it dismays me too, Is this what women have to do to have an exhibition in a museum and attract the attention of patrons?
Whatever.
I skipped breakfast and went the atrium for brunch. Ended up with a disappointingly stingy bowl of mussels that tasted weirdly astringent.  Like the old Woody Allen joke; “Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.””
Snow was falling now. Not fat swirling flakes, but tiny particles, steady and dense, like confectioner’s sugar shaken from a sieve. Hypnotic to my southern eyes.
Afterwards I took another pass through the exhibition that lured me here, William Merritt Chase. The breadth of his collection of textiles and exotic props speaks to my own love of tactile elements. His paintings and pastels of his family life recall the painter Carl Larsen, a favorite of mine, and warms me up to him. I’m fascinated by his paintings of his studio. His position as an educator of painters, particularly female students, inclines me toward him. There’s an undercurrent of worry as I examine the parade of idyllic innocence and beauty – did he abuse the vulnerability of his students, his wife and her sisters, his daughters? My trust in surface respectability has been shaved down to near transparency. I’ll do a little Googling. It doesn’t count as stalking if he’s dead, right? And I want to know what became of the pretty girl he married and painted ever after.*
By 2:30 the snow was still relentlessly falling and the streets mimicked Childe Hassam’s famous work. Only bluer. With cars.

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Called Uber and behold a driver was dropping off passenger outside the door. Bam! My Somalian driver got me back to the hotel going five miles an hour, without incident. The sidewalk was like a bowl of slushy snow soup. Proof:

*Sad to say, there are details about his private life they fail to mention in the hagiographic audio tour. I did a bit of scouting on the internet for more biographical information. My source is not TMZ, it’s from an article published by the Smithsonian.

“During their courtship, Alice, by then 20, became pregnant, and she and Chase, who was 37, were married in February of 1887. Their first child, a girl, was born the next day. It was obvious that Chase had put off marrying his love until the last moment.”

“Gallati, the curator of the current Chase exhibition, believes that he was caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, a wife and child “conflicted with the public image of cosmopolitan sophistication that he was so industriously constructing for himself.” Yet, a refusal to marry the mother of his child would cause a scandal and harm “his reputation and therefore his prospects for professional success.” Alice, a beguiling beauty, would become his most important model.”

Chase was 37, Alice was 20. Well, that explains why his wife looks like a child in her portraits. She was barely adult.  How very Rubensesque of him.** He knew her family since she was 13. He married her the day before their first child was born. The day before. Let that sink in.  I searched for what became of her, that pretty girl he painted and knocked up so very often. Not much on the internet – she survived eight births, don’t know how many pregnancies. He summered in Europe. I need to find an unbiased biography. But, you know, it’s what’s missing from his work, that stream of domestic bliss and erotic beauty. The dark side, the struggle.  His desire for fame, his profligate spending, his struggle for money and social position, his fall from favor as patrons’ tastes changed, none of that is visible.

He died of cirrhosis of the liver at 66. She vanishes from the record.

**Hélène Fourment married Rubens when she was 16 years old and he was aged 53.