Letter to Tina

December 4, 2008

Dear Tina,
Again, thank you for inviting us to the art donation event that, in every sense, had the taste, quality, class that I have always associated with you.

I just read the message, Sharing a Legacy, where you describe your life-long love for art. As I mentioned to you, art, specifically painting, was my “first love” and I spent the first three years of college as an art student. I am moved to write what I fear will be a long letter (not as long, I hope, as those maddening memos I sent you and Lee decades ago.)

I am enclosing a Wall Street Journal article, in case you have not seen it, that begins asking a good question: “What is a masterpiece?”

The answer, I think, is implicit in the article. The author tells us that the painting “Portrait of a Woman Holding a Booklet” was “venerated” in the 19th Century as a “Chardin masterpiece” but then “fell out of favor” when it was discovered that it was painted by a lesser-known artist. The article then tells us that the painting “Christ Carrying the Cross” was totally ignored for almost 500 years, until it was cleaned up, the signature and date were seen, and “voila – an instant masterpiece.” And the article ends telling us that what greets Vermeer’s “The Astronomer” is “silence.”

When I read this article, it brought back a lot of memories. I remember vividly when I decided to give up my art “career.” It was 1953 and I could not understand why people throwing paint at a canvas was considered “art”. I had read the 1934 Irving Stone’s novel “Lust for Life” and, like everyone else, I was convinced that if it was a Van Gogh, it was a “masterpiece”. Even more so after seeing the movie with Kirk Douglass.

But, as I am sure others have asked, exactly what makes them masterpieces? If we did not know who painted these twisting cypress trees, crazy stars in the sky, would everyone call these paintings “masterpieces?” If we did not know that Van Gogh had a pathetically tortured life, that many of these paintings are the expression of clinical pathology, if we did not have all those letters to his brother Theo describing his agony and his paintings, would we call them “masterpieces”?

Well, for years, I thought that if the experts said so, if they hung these painting in the greatest museums of the world, they must be. I would go to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and see all those strange things – a solid white canvas with absolutely nothing on it, but, I guess, for white paint. Obviously someone “who knows” sees something I don’t see.

In September 2007, there was a big commotion in London as “Van Gogh’s final masterpiece”, the Fields, was expected to ignite one of the greatest “bidding wars” in Sostheby’s history. Art lovers and museums had been trying for years to buy this “masterpiece”. But in fact almost everything I saw written about this historic event had to do with Van Gogh and not the painting itself. It hung up on his wall while he was bleeding to death after shooting himself. Was this really his “final” painting? Art critics and Sostheby experts were quoted saying why they considered this such a “great” painting. One scholar wrote: “Here is an artist literally on the verge of taking his life and filled with tremendous despondency … We know this is a man barely holding on to his will to live yet he is able to separate his energy and focus on what he sees before him.”

Interesting. But is this what makes it a “masterpiece”?

Picasso was certainly not suicidal. He was, of course, a genius, and I don’t think, as you said, that he was “crazy.” A better word, I think, would be “diabolical.” He was a monumental egomaniac, capable of monumental meanness, especially towards women that made the mistake of loving him, and I think monumentally cynical. As the British historian, Paul Johnson, points out in his excellent book, “Art”, Picasso got very rich at a young age. If it was not cynicism, how else to explain that he used his genius, his enormous vigor and talent, to produce some of the ugliest, most grotesque things created in human history? And seeing “experts” dying to lavish their praise on these “masterpieces.”

Although I think Picasso did great damage to art, and I have no idea what so much of abstract, non-objective art is, of course there have been many great artists in the past two centuries, and there has been artistic talent in Puerto Rico, some of it demonstrated in the works you donated to the museum. (You may recall, or may not want to, a talented and, yes, somewhat “crazy” young artist I brought to El Mundo, Carlos Irizarry.)

But I have found myself irresistibly drown more and more to the paintings of previous centuries in the great European and U.S. museums. I find myself irresistibly going back in time.

Is Velasquez the greatest painter of all time? Has anyone, will anyone, ever again capture space as he did? But there is Caravaggio. Has their ever been a more creatively “revolutionary” painter? Then we go back to Rafael. Will anyone ever capture beauty as in the face of his Madonnas? Vermeer, ignored for over two centuries, today more and more revered. Is he, after all, the greatest painter of all time? Yes, there is magic in how he captured “light”. But he captured something else. He captured silence.

But no, still going back, to be exact, 1433. At the National Gallery of Art in Washington there is the Annunciation. Isn’t Jan Van Eyck the greatest artist of all time?

Wherever they are available, I always use those portable audio tours and want to know as much as I can about the paintings and the artists. But I don’t need anyone “who knows”, or anyone else, to tell me that I am standing before a masterpiece. I don’t need stories of tortured souls cutting off their ear. Except for Caravaggio, who was a violent man, the geniuses that painted these masterpieces, as far as we know, led ordinary, normal lives. We know little about Vermeer but his paintings are masterpieces even if we knew nothing about him. As the WSJ article tells us, our silence tells us.

A word on a different subject. If I heard you right (the noise and you know I am half deaf), you commented that the mistake I made was to become a “political columnist.” I was, of course, in the sense that I wrote about politics, although I was always personally more interested in economic realities. And, of course, I always wrote with a point of view. But always totally independent: beholden to no political party, ideology, no political leader. I and El Mundo were, of course, attacked as the “tool” of a political party. I like to think that if I earned the respect of people like Muñoz, Moscoso, Benítez, even Ferré, it was because they knew I was no one’s “tool.” I know that you and Lee, having gone through together the brutal demagoguery of those tough years, believed it.

Now, I hope you know something else. The art lover hidden in me, irresistibly, irrepressibly going back in time to earlier centuries.

Alex