You've raised such a fascinating question, Jeffrey, and brought to bear on it the thoughts of some fine art writers. I experienced something of the same feeling after attending years ago a huge retrospective of the work of Georgia O'Keeffe, and I've wondered since if my sense that not all her work has stood the test of time was because the exhibition included too much. I've come to the conclusion that I much prefer spending time with a small number of very good works than taking in so much that my emotional and mental witnessing of the art is left tested and equivocal.
I think, too, that the question applies to much else we experience that remains through memory or is forgotten. For example, there is a very interesting and brilliantly written book by Viet Thanh Nguyen titled "Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War." Nguyen exposes North and South Vietnam's differences, and they are many, including their ways of memorializing the dead. He devotes a section to aesthetics. He writes about the "contradictory facts of the losers and bystanders, stating, "These facts are not memory but are interpreted, revivified, and placed into stories by memory's mechanisms, stories that change from time to time to suit the interests of the living." He also quotes Joan Didion, who has stated, "Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember." It's mutable an malleable.
Thank you for that rich reflection, Maureen, and for the Nguyen quotes. As for the huge retrospectives like the one of O’Keeffe, I suppose the curators (and perhaps in a different way the museum’s accountants) can feel the need to give us everything, to be comprehensive, so that we can take an artist's work in at one go. I understand that urge on their part. But as you suggest, it can be self-defeating and as Rona says, truly exhausting. Few of us have the stamina to keep up rapt attention to a hundred artworks or more in one viewing. And yet few of us have the time, money, or opportunity to visit that exhibition multiple times. Perhaps the major retrospectives will always be with us, but I'm more drawn to smaller, thematic art shows these days.
If you’re going to a comprehensive show, you have to go in knowing you will not see it all or need to. Let yourself be drawn by the works that call to you. Return if you enjoyed the show and have the time. The same principle applies to museums. In Vienna I visited the art palace (won’t attempt to spell its name) three times.
Here’s to the small number of very good works. Unless you’re a scholar of the artist, lesser works just wear your eyes out. Most of us can take in a limited number of works before fatigue sets in.
I agree. Faced with the immense permanent collection of the National Gallery in London, I used to try to be very selective, rushing to see particular works while my mind was still fresh. However, sometimes, I'd be distracted by some new beauty that would seem to refill my cup of appreciation, so serendipity had a role to play.
So true. Isn’t it a wonder how our memory—and mind—works? Then I thought of the movie Inception. Now I have to watch the movie again; I last saw it some 15 years ago and I wonder what watching it again would make me feel. Maybe I should watch Nolan’s Odyssey afterwards… Oh gosh, see how the mind works? 😄
Agree completely. Memories of anything beloved always inflate the experience so that revisiting is almost bound to be a disappointment. It's why we rarely if ever repeat when we travel.
I guess for me that would depend on the nature of the place. Ceretain cities like London, Paris, Hong Kong or Istanbul always seem to have new surprises ready for the next visit.
Perhaps because I have seen the works at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, in San Francisco, which, until very recently, lived within easy driving distance, they seem more like old friends, who have not aged, but continue to provide splendor to this viewer. Since 2021, have been within easy driving distance of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, in Kansas City. Like the Frick, somethings, at least for me, never grow old. Their lustre, holds for me, not unlike seeing a flower garden in bloom.
Yes the garden changed from year to year, but the beauty of it rarely does.
For me too, some paintings get better with repeated viewing. But it's the large gap between mere glimpses of certain works that can create a sense of rupture, perhaps. I can remember the feeling of rapture that I felt on seeing the Botticellis in the Uffizi (after a four-hour wait to get in). That was twenty years ago, I wonder what I would feel now?
I wonder if seeing a work if art in a different setting is responsible for much of the effect. There is a Brueghel in the Met and I never seem to tire of it. Also, if you have a piece of art you see almost every day, it may lose its newness but I find that the idea and attraction of it persists.
I think you're right about the setting, David. Even a move within the same museum can have an impact. I used to cherish a certain corner of the National Gallery in London, where I could quietly enjoy works by Ingres and David, while the crowds tended to get drawn to the Impressionists in a nearby room. Then the gallery changed the location of my favourites, and that blissful nook vanished forever. Hung in larger rooms with unfamiliar wall-mates, the paintings have never quite looked the same.
How interesting. I remember seeing The Raft of The Medusa and being irritated that it was so large I couldn't 'grasp' what was happening, or find any feeling for those huge figures. I had longed to see it too and had postcards of it and prints at home. In reality it lost me.
Your essay took me somewhere slightly different to literature, and to the experience of meeting old friends again.
For me, that book is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I have returned to it many times over many years, and something remarkable has happened. The characters have become increasingly vivid in my mind. With every reading, and perhaps with every stage of my own life, I seem to add another line to their portraits, something I could not have seen or understood in my first encounter with them.
So when I return to the book, I don't experience the characters simply as something remembered. I experience the strange pleasure of meeting old friends.
Your reference to Barnes's idea of an “ongoing, organic relationship” between ourselves and a work of art particularly resonated with me. Perhaps some works don't merely remain in memory. They continue to live there, developing alongside us.
I like how this post probes the exactness and perfection of the mind coupled with the immense diverse amount of detail and emotion it has to store over time. Also as you mention, time changes everything. I don't think it is anything to worry about. The memory in dreams is stranger still. I have been retired for three years yet sometimes I dream I am still working and my body wakes me up early as though my mind is telling it I still need to get to work. So getting back to the painting, the impressions are still there. It's interesting that if it were AI, the perception would be so different and not everything could be included. Life connection to objects, reality or pictures changes and changes perception over time. The fact that anything significant remains in memory of pictures or anything else is cause for celebration. Life connection of memory actually provides so much no matter how different it all may become over time.
I like your point about needing to celebrate the survival of memory of works of art, Larry. Such memories perhaps lie on the bedrock of our imagination, constantly nourishing us.
Thank you Jeffrey. I found your post so interesting.
In my recent experience,when I rediscovered music or films that I haven't heard nor seen for decades, the reality of that reunion is often better than the memory I had conjured up in my imagination. So I was delighted this led to a fresh take on my memories.
It seems to me this experience of art reexperienced is a subset of the experience of memory we've all had, maybe many times. We return to a site of early childhood especially, though not exclusively, or of a significant event in our lives, and we find it, especially again, smaller than we recall, though different in other ways, too. The original experience magnified the space or object along with the importance of event or time. What a disappointment to find it lesser! But we learn from this new kind of experience the way Barnes and Hazlitt try to.
Regarding art particularly, I've experienced this disappointment a great deal in recent years, when I've been revisiting many films I first viewed as a young man or even younger. A particular, not recent example, is Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger." Seeing it when it first premiered, I felt the existential alienation from identity of its protagonist very profoundly. I held the film among the collection of Antonioni's greatest. A few decades later, the film fell flat for me and I felt none of that. Clearly, something in me had changed, but how do I evaluate the film with any distance given that disparity of response? Maybe I should view it a third time now, perhaps, two decades further on again.
More generally, I've been revisiting the great film noir classics, and I find very few of them to hold up. The expressionist black and white cinematography of so many seems truly timeless, but from stylized dialog to abrupt plotting to dated acting, what had lived in my memory with such vigor often reduces to unbelievable curio. I know there are many cineastes who would disagree with me, but I think film lovers particularly prone to unbreakable nostalgic attachment.
Re film noir classics, I guess film has a technology problem which painting only has to a much lesser degree, especially when that technology has moved on a great deal between viewings. But some films certainly hold up well - I recently rewatched Dr Zhivago and the stonger parts were as strong as ever. Paris, Texas was less successful when I saw it on the small screen years after seeing it and adoring it in the cinema. But much of the effect still remains. Seeing Space Odyssey 2001 on the big screen for the first time (and enjoying it) suggested to me that seeing film in its natural medium is an important factor.
I agree. Zhivago and Space Odyssey hold up very well, both well written and filmed in ways -- despite the technological inherency in Odyssey, not likely to date.
As always, an incredibly textured view of how art changes between viewings - well done, Jeffrey. I was immediately put in mind of Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Viewing a Blackbird" for some reason, but also, I think, novelty - the first time seeing anything - always carries a special significance.
Thank you, Troy. Yes, novelty is important. I guess, though, that effects that last beyond novelty are what suggest that a particular work has something to say to us.
There's definitely the novelty factor, and even lack of expectations, that can affect how we see art for the first time. It's hard to relive that wonder or awe. I felt that way after returning to Angkor Wat when a friend visited. I felt kind of bad, too, like to our friend we must seem indifferent and we didn't want to influence how his experience was.
On the other hand, art, like music, can be and should be appreciated multiple times. Yes, you change, time and place matters, but I love the idea of returning to art (books!) through the years again and again. Thanks, Jeffrey, for your thought-provoking piece.
I think there are many factors at play in our experience and appreciation of art. When you see something for the first time, for example, it leaves an impression that can be hardly duplicated the second or third time, for the simple reason that you already know what you are going to see.
In "Afoot in England" (1909), W. H. Hudson describes the same thing about discovering a new landscape.
There are exceptions, of course, like certain movie scenes that never cease to move and make me cry no matter how many times I see them.
An anime feature film called うしろの正面だあれ — “Who’s Behind You" and the "Tokyo Magnitude 8.0" anime series I mentioned in my post about earthquakes have endings that always make me cry like a baby.
My beloved paintings never lose anything with repeated viewings. I’ve had the opposite experience: a piece I never noticed revealing itself and holding my attention.
When art was only what you could physically see (or perhaps see an engraved copy or miniature cast of), it would be easy to think a mediocre painting to be the greatest work one had ever seen. In this day, when great works of art may be viewed as highly detailed digital photos on the internet, even those who cannot travel to the scattered art galleries and museums containing that art, can add those images to the art gallery of their mind.
Growing up, we were given a set of children's books published in the 1950s that were meant to be informative. One of them was about great art and music. The pictures of the art alternated between black and white photos and colour lithographs, with a page of description and explanation for each. I read and reread that book. It started with ancient Greek art, so many years later, when I visited the National Archeological and Acropolis museums of Athens, I recognized the originals from the pictures in that book. Some were much larger than I expected, while others were much smaller. But I was surprised by another emotion, sadness. The book had made it sound as if these works were immortal, but I could see where the works had been carefully repaired from their shattered or corroded state in which they had been first recovered to be placed in the museum. In a few, which were originally outside, decay had advanced beyond the photos taken 70s years previously, particularly the Caryatids, only recently housed in the Acropolis museum to stop their decay from exposure on the top of the Acropolis.
That's a fascinating point about the changes in the works themselves, Holly. Time is not a neutral observer but a silent ravisher, especially for sculptures exposed to the air of our polluted cities. It makes me think: the works can be (sometimes) restored. But not time, nor the moment of our first experience of work.
You've raised such a fascinating question, Jeffrey, and brought to bear on it the thoughts of some fine art writers. I experienced something of the same feeling after attending years ago a huge retrospective of the work of Georgia O'Keeffe, and I've wondered since if my sense that not all her work has stood the test of time was because the exhibition included too much. I've come to the conclusion that I much prefer spending time with a small number of very good works than taking in so much that my emotional and mental witnessing of the art is left tested and equivocal.
I think, too, that the question applies to much else we experience that remains through memory or is forgotten. For example, there is a very interesting and brilliantly written book by Viet Thanh Nguyen titled "Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War." Nguyen exposes North and South Vietnam's differences, and they are many, including their ways of memorializing the dead. He devotes a section to aesthetics. He writes about the "contradictory facts of the losers and bystanders, stating, "These facts are not memory but are interpreted, revivified, and placed into stories by memory's mechanisms, stories that change from time to time to suit the interests of the living." He also quotes Joan Didion, who has stated, "Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember." It's mutable an malleable.
I'm a fan of Gormley, by the way.
Thank you for that rich reflection, Maureen, and for the Nguyen quotes. As for the huge retrospectives like the one of O’Keeffe, I suppose the curators (and perhaps in a different way the museum’s accountants) can feel the need to give us everything, to be comprehensive, so that we can take an artist's work in at one go. I understand that urge on their part. But as you suggest, it can be self-defeating and as Rona says, truly exhausting. Few of us have the stamina to keep up rapt attention to a hundred artworks or more in one viewing. And yet few of us have the time, money, or opportunity to visit that exhibition multiple times. Perhaps the major retrospectives will always be with us, but I'm more drawn to smaller, thematic art shows these days.
If you’re going to a comprehensive show, you have to go in knowing you will not see it all or need to. Let yourself be drawn by the works that call to you. Return if you enjoyed the show and have the time. The same principle applies to museums. In Vienna I visited the art palace (won’t attempt to spell its name) three times.
Here’s to the small number of very good works. Unless you’re a scholar of the artist, lesser works just wear your eyes out. Most of us can take in a limited number of works before fatigue sets in.
I agree. Faced with the immense permanent collection of the National Gallery in London, I used to try to be very selective, rushing to see particular works while my mind was still fresh. However, sometimes, I'd be distracted by some new beauty that would seem to refill my cup of appreciation, so serendipity had a role to play.
So true. Isn’t it a wonder how our memory—and mind—works? Then I thought of the movie Inception. Now I have to watch the movie again; I last saw it some 15 years ago and I wonder what watching it again would make me feel. Maybe I should watch Nolan’s Odyssey afterwards… Oh gosh, see how the mind works? 😄
Agree completely. Memories of anything beloved always inflate the experience so that revisiting is almost bound to be a disappointment. It's why we rarely if ever repeat when we travel.
I guess for me that would depend on the nature of the place. Ceretain cities like London, Paris, Hong Kong or Istanbul always seem to have new surprises ready for the next visit.
Perhaps because I have seen the works at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, in San Francisco, which, until very recently, lived within easy driving distance, they seem more like old friends, who have not aged, but continue to provide splendor to this viewer. Since 2021, have been within easy driving distance of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, in Kansas City. Like the Frick, somethings, at least for me, never grow old. Their lustre, holds for me, not unlike seeing a flower garden in bloom.
Yes the garden changed from year to year, but the beauty of it rarely does.
For me too, some paintings get better with repeated viewing. But it's the large gap between mere glimpses of certain works that can create a sense of rupture, perhaps. I can remember the feeling of rapture that I felt on seeing the Botticellis in the Uffizi (after a four-hour wait to get in). That was twenty years ago, I wonder what I would feel now?
Each moment of life is unique, so who can say.
I wonder if seeing a work if art in a different setting is responsible for much of the effect. There is a Brueghel in the Met and I never seem to tire of it. Also, if you have a piece of art you see almost every day, it may lose its newness but I find that the idea and attraction of it persists.
I think you're right about the setting, David. Even a move within the same museum can have an impact. I used to cherish a certain corner of the National Gallery in London, where I could quietly enjoy works by Ingres and David, while the crowds tended to get drawn to the Impressionists in a nearby room. Then the gallery changed the location of my favourites, and that blissful nook vanished forever. Hung in larger rooms with unfamiliar wall-mates, the paintings have never quite looked the same.
How interesting. I remember seeing The Raft of The Medusa and being irritated that it was so large I couldn't 'grasp' what was happening, or find any feeling for those huge figures. I had longed to see it too and had postcards of it and prints at home. In reality it lost me.
Your essay took me somewhere slightly different to literature, and to the experience of meeting old friends again.
For me, that book is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I have returned to it many times over many years, and something remarkable has happened. The characters have become increasingly vivid in my mind. With every reading, and perhaps with every stage of my own life, I seem to add another line to their portraits, something I could not have seen or understood in my first encounter with them.
So when I return to the book, I don't experience the characters simply as something remembered. I experience the strange pleasure of meeting old friends.
Your reference to Barnes's idea of an “ongoing, organic relationship” between ourselves and a work of art particularly resonated with me. Perhaps some works don't merely remain in memory. They continue to live there, developing alongside us.
I like how this post probes the exactness and perfection of the mind coupled with the immense diverse amount of detail and emotion it has to store over time. Also as you mention, time changes everything. I don't think it is anything to worry about. The memory in dreams is stranger still. I have been retired for three years yet sometimes I dream I am still working and my body wakes me up early as though my mind is telling it I still need to get to work. So getting back to the painting, the impressions are still there. It's interesting that if it were AI, the perception would be so different and not everything could be included. Life connection to objects, reality or pictures changes and changes perception over time. The fact that anything significant remains in memory of pictures or anything else is cause for celebration. Life connection of memory actually provides so much no matter how different it all may become over time.
I like your point about needing to celebrate the survival of memory of works of art, Larry. Such memories perhaps lie on the bedrock of our imagination, constantly nourishing us.
Thank you Jeffrey. I found your post so interesting.
In my recent experience,when I rediscovered music or films that I haven't heard nor seen for decades, the reality of that reunion is often better than the memory I had conjured up in my imagination. So I was delighted this led to a fresh take on my memories.
I'm glad to hear it works the other way for you, Iwata-san. It's great to discover new ways to enjoy an old favourite.
It seems to me this experience of art reexperienced is a subset of the experience of memory we've all had, maybe many times. We return to a site of early childhood especially, though not exclusively, or of a significant event in our lives, and we find it, especially again, smaller than we recall, though different in other ways, too. The original experience magnified the space or object along with the importance of event or time. What a disappointment to find it lesser! But we learn from this new kind of experience the way Barnes and Hazlitt try to.
Regarding art particularly, I've experienced this disappointment a great deal in recent years, when I've been revisiting many films I first viewed as a young man or even younger. A particular, not recent example, is Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger." Seeing it when it first premiered, I felt the existential alienation from identity of its protagonist very profoundly. I held the film among the collection of Antonioni's greatest. A few decades later, the film fell flat for me and I felt none of that. Clearly, something in me had changed, but how do I evaluate the film with any distance given that disparity of response? Maybe I should view it a third time now, perhaps, two decades further on again.
More generally, I've been revisiting the great film noir classics, and I find very few of them to hold up. The expressionist black and white cinematography of so many seems truly timeless, but from stylized dialog to abrupt plotting to dated acting, what had lived in my memory with such vigor often reduces to unbelievable curio. I know there are many cineastes who would disagree with me, but I think film lovers particularly prone to unbreakable nostalgic attachment.
Re film noir classics, I guess film has a technology problem which painting only has to a much lesser degree, especially when that technology has moved on a great deal between viewings. But some films certainly hold up well - I recently rewatched Dr Zhivago and the stonger parts were as strong as ever. Paris, Texas was less successful when I saw it on the small screen years after seeing it and adoring it in the cinema. But much of the effect still remains. Seeing Space Odyssey 2001 on the big screen for the first time (and enjoying it) suggested to me that seeing film in its natural medium is an important factor.
I agree. Zhivago and Space Odyssey hold up very well, both well written and filmed in ways -- despite the technological inherency in Odyssey, not likely to date.
As always, an incredibly textured view of how art changes between viewings - well done, Jeffrey. I was immediately put in mind of Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Viewing a Blackbird" for some reason, but also, I think, novelty - the first time seeing anything - always carries a special significance.
Thank you, Troy. Yes, novelty is important. I guess, though, that effects that last beyond novelty are what suggest that a particular work has something to say to us.
There's definitely the novelty factor, and even lack of expectations, that can affect how we see art for the first time. It's hard to relive that wonder or awe. I felt that way after returning to Angkor Wat when a friend visited. I felt kind of bad, too, like to our friend we must seem indifferent and we didn't want to influence how his experience was.
On the other hand, art, like music, can be and should be appreciated multiple times. Yes, you change, time and place matters, but I love the idea of returning to art (books!) through the years again and again. Thanks, Jeffrey, for your thought-provoking piece.
I think there are many factors at play in our experience and appreciation of art. When you see something for the first time, for example, it leaves an impression that can be hardly duplicated the second or third time, for the simple reason that you already know what you are going to see.
In "Afoot in England" (1909), W. H. Hudson describes the same thing about discovering a new landscape.
There are exceptions, of course, like certain movie scenes that never cease to move and make me cry no matter how many times I see them.
Some effects are timeless, I agree. Some views too. I wonder which film scenes move you most. Perhaps a theme for a future post?
An anime feature film called うしろの正面だあれ — “Who’s Behind You" and the "Tokyo Magnitude 8.0" anime series I mentioned in my post about earthquakes have endings that always make me cry like a baby.
My beloved paintings never lose anything with repeated viewings. I’ve had the opposite experience: a piece I never noticed revealing itself and holding my attention.
When art was only what you could physically see (or perhaps see an engraved copy or miniature cast of), it would be easy to think a mediocre painting to be the greatest work one had ever seen. In this day, when great works of art may be viewed as highly detailed digital photos on the internet, even those who cannot travel to the scattered art galleries and museums containing that art, can add those images to the art gallery of their mind.
Growing up, we were given a set of children's books published in the 1950s that were meant to be informative. One of them was about great art and music. The pictures of the art alternated between black and white photos and colour lithographs, with a page of description and explanation for each. I read and reread that book. It started with ancient Greek art, so many years later, when I visited the National Archeological and Acropolis museums of Athens, I recognized the originals from the pictures in that book. Some were much larger than I expected, while others were much smaller. But I was surprised by another emotion, sadness. The book had made it sound as if these works were immortal, but I could see where the works had been carefully repaired from their shattered or corroded state in which they had been first recovered to be placed in the museum. In a few, which were originally outside, decay had advanced beyond the photos taken 70s years previously, particularly the Caryatids, only recently housed in the Acropolis museum to stop their decay from exposure on the top of the Acropolis.
That's a fascinating point about the changes in the works themselves, Holly. Time is not a neutral observer but a silent ravisher, especially for sculptures exposed to the air of our polluted cities. It makes me think: the works can be (sometimes) restored. But not time, nor the moment of our first experience of work.