Blog
Picasso and Pearl
10/13/2009
12:54 pm
I’ve been going to the Van Vechten Gallery as Fisk University for almost as long as I’ve been living in Nashville. And that’s long enough to have attended two different re-openings spaced near to twenty years apart.
Last Thursday I went again. I have two favorite paintings in the gallery. One is a portrait of Alfred Stieglitz; the other is the head of a boy. The portrait of Stieglitz reminds me of something Chagall might have created. It is narrative and fantastical and pretty. And it was created by Florine Stettheimer (1871 -1944) I’ve seen the Stettheimer portrait of Stieglitz a lot of times. But this time when I looked at it, with prodding from the curator, I noticed that hidden in the white background just above Stieglitz, the great American photographer, was a portrait of his wife, Georgia O’Keefe, the great American painter, a definite but almost invisible a portrait.
O’Keefe is a ghost in the painting. She is the kind of ghost that startles because she reminds you that you’re not noticing everything. The almost invisible image reminds that you never know when another look will be rewarded.
Just after I saw the Stieglitz portrait differently I saw a gem of the collection, a Picasso head, in a way I had never seen it before.
I was looking at the blue head when someone said, “Picasso the Prankster,” and all of a sudden I understood the tone of the painting differently. The blue head is an elegant silhouette a side view, but there is an eye in it, and the eye is painted straight on, absolutely, as it would be looking strait at you. The silhouette with the big face fronting eye, is profoundly Egyptian, or so it seems looking at the blue head on the Fisk campus. And all at once it is not only Picasso who is a prankster is O’Keefe giving a Picasso that explicitly pays tribute to the world beyond Europe to a small black liberal arts college in the South.
In the black south Picasso’s blue period takes on new meaning. Blue becomes the color that connects us to a larger world—to everything beneath the sky. The older I get the fewer things I see for the very first time. It is a sweet compensation to discover as I grow older there are each day new things to see in ways that I have not seen before.
Like the doors leading to the Stieglitz collection. Hammered out of metal are gorgeous doors, Greg Ridley doors. On one side in the middle is the famous Georgia O’Keefe. On the other side is Pearl Creswell.
For years Pearl Creswell was the person who took care of the Van Vechten collection, she was the curator. Pearl Creswell was an African-American women who loved beauty and creation; she well understood the importance of art and what it was for something to be treasured. Pearl Creswell is an unsung hero. For decades she protected the paintings and told their stories to who ever would come. She protected the paintings when no one was looking. It’s funny for me to think that Pearl Creswell and Georgia O’Keefe together are the reason there is a dashing blue head of Picasso’s in Nashville. The south is full of ironic alliances and straightforward but silent collaborations.
