Even Picasso got the blues

Saturday Sally and I used our membership to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts to see From Monet To Picasso, a show on display from the Cleveland Museum of Art.

What I can say is you folks in Cleveland rock, as the TV-show themesong said. You've got excellent taste in art.

I've seen a lot of shows in a lot of museums, and this one was right up there with the best of them. It started with the realistic paintings of the 19th Century, then went into Impressionism, Picasso's blue period, cubism, German expressionism, right up to Salvador Dali and surrealism. Whew. That's a lot of isms!

Sally had decided to buy a membership because there are always things to see at UMFA, and had we just bought tickets for this show they would have been only $20 less than a membership for a year, where we can see any shows for free. When we got to the museum just after it opened the line to get in was already snake-danced out to the street. We showed our membership cards and got taken right in. Not having to stand in line has to be worth something.

What I found in this show is what I found at a showing of John Singer Sargent's paintings a couple of years ago in Portland, Oregon, that to stand in the presence of great art makes my body become light, even as the images pile up in my brain. To be close to Life, Picasso's blue period tribute to his friend who died a suicide for love, or to be able to stand inches away from Van Gogh's Poplars at St. Remy, looking at his brush strokes, gives me feelings of well-being and satisfaction.

There were several rooms for the exhibitions and in each room stood a guard, watching the crowd. They allowed visitors to get close to the paintings, just don't touch. But I got to breathe on them and I wonder if that sort of thing doesn't affect them, too. To have several thousand people over a period of years exhaling garlic, onions and other assorted breathy particles on Modigliani or Mondrian would have to do something. Luckily most were in frames behind glass, which gave at least that layer of protection from us of the great unwashed masses straining to get close enough to see.

UMFA isn't the only art museum that I'm impressed by. An hour's drive south of Salt Lake City, in the small town of Springville, we have a wonderful museum with great art. Sally and I try to get there at least once every couple of years. I should really go every year because they have a Spring Salon with original art from local artists. It's always a great show because whoever the judges are, they have a great eye for art. But the permanent collections are terrific, also. I'm especially happy about the collection of Russian art of the past century. It's pretty strange when you think of it, but here you have a 1930's building in the middle of an All-American town like Springville, Utah--and doesn't that name sound All-American?--with a major collection of Russian art.


Unfortunately, I don't have the artists' names, but here are a couple of the paintings, and you can view some more at their website, Springville Museum of Art.