Appreciating Art–It’s All in the Hands

 

The summer of my fourteenth year, my family spent ten weeks camping in Europe and looking for art.

My teacher mother (junior high girl’s physical education), saved her income for an entire year.

My parents bought a Volkwagen camper bus in Germany and the day after school was out in June, we flew to Europe to pick it up.

We returned to Los Angeles the weekend before school started in the fall.

My mother was determined her children would be exposed to culture and that meant art. The music we already had from our father.

But she didn’t know a lot about art, so she arranged for us to visit every significant art museum on the trip.

After the second or third museum, I figured I’d better find something to tell me if a painting was good or not, because I was going to be seeing a lot of them.

Because we began in Frankfurt and headed north, the first art museums featured Dutch masters and German painters. I liked the paintings that seemed to tell stories or that portrayed interesting looking people. But how to tell if a work was good or not?

Hey, art for art’s sake meant I could decide for myself. It needed to speak to me, right? Who cares what others thought?

I decided to focus on hands.

After all, if a painter could make hands look natural–like real hands–he or she probably had some skill.

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I was looking at a painting by Hans Holbein, the younger,  at the time. He did a fine job.

Holbein was noted for painting portraits of Henry VIII of England and his wives.

That’s number three, Jane Seymour, on the right and you can see how he didn’t necessarily glamorize the woman. Her hands look real, too.

One of Holbein’s failures, however, was wife number number four, Anne of Cleves. (It’s easy to remember the wives: One divorced, one beheaded, one died. One divorced, one beheaded, one survived. Anne was a divorcee).

As a gawky fourteen-year-old wearing horn rimmed glassed and metal braces in 1970 Europe, I only hoped Hans Christian Anderson was right about the ugly duckling (we visited his house in Denmark, too).

Anne of Cleves gave me hope. Look how real she looks, other than the odd bodice and the narrow waist. Perhaps he focused too much on her clothes?

Or maybe he felt felt sorry for a homely spinster.  Henry VIII took one look at her and arranged the divorce: she was too plain in real life.

Everyone is familiar with Rembrandt but not me until that year.

I took to his paintings with gusto: the moody dark colors, the surprising light–usually on a well-worn face– and the desire to portray an interesting person.

He was not as adept with hands as Hans Holbein, but he made them interesting.

Vincent Van Gogh was another find–even I had heard the story of his missing ear. But in his work I found color, vibrancy, and thick enough paint to recognize technique. As I told my children later in life–“you can always tell a Van Gogh because the sky tends to be a little wild.”

His hands, however, weren’t so good.

That was okay. By the time we got to France, I had learned to admire other aspects of a painting beyond an artists’ skill with detailing hands.

Several years later, I visited Guadalajara, Mexico with my family. My boyfriend joined us on that trek and admitted he didn’t know much about evaluating art.

I introduced him to the concept of hands as an example of an artist’s ability. We paid close attention to hands as we visited galleries and museums, and particularly liked those of Diego Rivera:

Robert fell in love with a lithograph by Jose Orozco, of interesting hands.

Robert observed about this work: “It reminds me of our sin, offering it up to God for his forgiveness.”

In that way, what he read into the painting is more important than what Orozco meant it to be.

Art for me: it’s all about the hands–and what we can truly appreciate.

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