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“Four corners and a void” is how one critic described “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit”—the 1882 portrait of sisters by the 26 year old American expatriate, John Singer Sargent; influenced by Velazquez, this shadowy painting depicts the four Boit sisters (Julia, Mary Louisa, Jane, and Florence), none of whom seem to find much pleasure in posing—or in life; in “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit,” Sargent—the “accentless mongrel”—seems as fascinated by the massive, twin Chinese vases as he does by the young females; grimly psychic, the painting forecasted the girls’ future; none of the sisters would marry, and the eldest two—who cower in the rear, hiding from Sargent’s gaze—suffered from mental illness later in life; Stanley Kubrick must have studied this penetrative painting when he was in pre-production for “The Shining”; I saw “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” in 2002 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; that summer, my ex-girlfriend was working at “The Atlantic Monthly,” and I was staying with her, blocks from Harvard Square; I grew up in a college town, and July in Cambridge—with summer students, hackey sacks, and bad street performers—makes me nostalgic for childhood; one Saturday, we went to the MFA with our friend, Eve; when we turned the corner in the museum to find the Boit sisters staring back at us, I felt my breath stutter; the girls appear profoundly afraid of their depictor, their eyes begging (“Take us with you!”) and their awkward posture revealing: “You’re just a painter. You have no idea how bad it gets sometimes”; my ex-girlfriend had her own demons, and though she denied them, they owned real estate on her face; I once took a photograph of her getting dressed behind a lamp in a Boston Hilton, and when I showed the photo to Thomas Roma—a talented, honest New York photographer—he said it was the best work of mine he had seen; Roma also said the image appeared to be from the point of view of a predator; he suggested I read a Don DeLillo story called “Baader-Meinhof” that had just appeared in “The New Yorker”; it was a creepy, stalker story set in an art gallery, and while I enjoyed the writing, I found the suggestion a tad bit unflattering; in The Modern Lovers song, “Girlfriend,” Jonathan Richman sings: “If I were to walk to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston/Well, first I’d go to the room where they keep the Cezanne/But if I had by my side a girlfriend/Then I could look through the paintings/I could look right through them/Because I’d have found something that I understand/I understand a girlfriend”; I once saw Vic Chesnutt—no stranger to pain—open for Jonathan Richman at the Bowery Ballroom; in his nasally drawl, Vic said, “I’m a nihilist. And Jonathan is a smile-ist”; some people like to have somebody to talk with while looking at art in a museum; they enjoy debating meaning, naming cities and dates; not me; I prefer just to hold hands and stare; if it comes down to a blinking contest, I always win; but those Boit girls have got me licked; they can stare forever.

~ by tinyfacts on August 30, 2008.

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Tags: 1882, art, Atlantic Monthly, Baader-Meinhof, Boston, Cambridge, Cezanne, Chinese, DeLillo, Don DeLillo, four corners and a void, girlfriend, hackey sacks, Harvard, Harvard Square, Hilton, John Singer Sargent, Jonathan Richman, July, MFA, Museum of Fine Arts, New York, Paris, photograph, photographer, Sargent, Stanley Kubrick, The Atlantic Monthly, THE DAUGHTERS OF EDWARD DARLEY BOIT, The Modern Lovers, The New Yorker, The Shining, Thomas Roma, Velazquez, Vic Chesnutt