Seeing The Art Again

An arts editor returns to the Yale University Art Gallery for the first time since the museum reopened after its long pandemic shutdown.

YUAG has reopened with limited occupancy and limited hours on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, which means tickets must be acquired in advance. Admission is — as it was before the shutdown — free; the only crucial difference, at least from my perspective, is that going there required a plan, rather than the kind of spur-of-the-moment decision to go there that I made before the pandemic, often just while walking down Chapel Street and realizing I had 20 minutes to spare. The museum officially opened in late spring, but tickets for the first few weekends vanished almost instantly. Now, during the summer, it’s easier to get in, allowing New Haveners the chance to return to one of the best art museums in the world that happens to be in our midst.

I snagged two tickets for last Friday afternoon for myself and my wife, Steph. More than 20 years ago, before we were married and before we moved to New Haven, we used to go on museum dates all the time; our favorite spot was the American Museum of Natural History, which at the time had unusual Friday evening hours — a deeply unpopular time to go to a museum, which for us was perfect. We had nearly the entire place, and its labyrinth of cavernous galleries, to ourselves.

Friday afternoon we found the museum more populated than that, though certainly not crowded. Our e‑tickets, sent by email, were checked twice outside and inside the door. Inside the museum, health protocols in the museum are in full effect. Visitors must wear masks in the building, and hand sanitizer dispensers appear near elevators and stairwells (the only places in the museum one is likely to touch anything).

YUAG’s special exhibition galleries were closed, but its vast permanent collection very much open. This was more than enough. Perhaps because of its accessibility, it’s easy to forget that the museum has one of the best collections of Western art anywhere. On busy weekends, visitors tend to flock to Van Gogh, to Monet. With repeated visits, Steph and I have gravitated more toward the museum’s collections of modern and contemporary art, Asian art, and African art. Because my brain can take about an hour and a half in a museum before it’s full, I can never see everything, and between visits I forget what’s there — making repeat visits a pleasure.

I used to visit several times a year. On Friday, having not visited for well over a year, seeing some of my favorite pieces again felt like a reunion.

The museum’s collection of modern and contemporary art (essentially meaning art from the past 100 years; perhaps the label in the art world is due for an overhaul) has a greatest-hits version that’s well worth the ride. There’s Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, René Magritte, Roy Lichtenstein, Edward Hopper — as with the museum’s collection overall, dozens of opportunities for ​“that’s here?” moments as you find, in person, a work of art hanging on the wall in front of you that you thought maybe lived in a vault somewhere.

I was reminded that Mark Rothko’s paintings, on a certain level nothing more than juxtaposed blocks of vivid color, are for some reason deeply emotional in person in ways that are somehow lost when you see them reproduced in books or on posters. I had a similar reaction to Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures of standing — favorites of mine that I had forgotten were in YUAG — and lingered for a while at their feet, marveling at how Giacometti even thought to render the human form in such an interesting way, let along make it as powerful as it is (again, pictures don’t do them justice). Steph and I were both mesmerized by Society Woman’s Cloth (Gold), a monumental 2006 work by Ghanian artist El Anatsui, made from aluminum bottle caps and copper wire, that turns one enormous wall of a gallery into a shimmering display of talent and wealth and a walk through textile history (see above re: impossibility of photographing such a thing; just go see it already).

Going to a museum also lets you indulge your inner contrarian. Now is a good time to say that while I understand Hopper’s importance to art history, and have often even found myself in situations reminiscent of the scenes he depicts, and yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah, none of that changes the fact that I can’t bring myself to care about most of his paintings. Fortunately for me — and perhaps as a case in point — there’s American Interior, a 1934 painting I love by Charles Sheeler, an artist I would likely never have heard of except for his appearance in the museum. It hangs right next to a series of Hoppers and, in my humble opinion, outshines them all.

In time, Steph and I spiraled down to the galleries where we have spent the most time. Yale’s collection of Asian art — running from Turkey to Japan — is in many ways a symbol of its real tilt toward European and American art, in the sense that Western art takes up so much more real estate in the museum, and is more segmented and parsed, than the rest of the world, where the great majority of the global population lives (a bias well-replicated in art museums across Europe and the United States, of course). Along similar lines — which YUAG, to its credit, is beginning to address — artifacts and art pieces outside of Europe and the United States have too often been brought to Europe and the United States under dubious circumstances.

But all that said, it remains that what YUAG does have in its collection is exquisite, from statues of the Buddha to ceramics to scrolls. Steph and I both have an affinity for Chinese and Japanese drawings and prints, which the museum has in glorious abundance — and, sometime in the past few years, has revamped the display to make it easier to see them and appreciate what’s going on. The note on the three crabs, for example, explains that they ​“are a hallmark of the poet Bunbunsha Kanikomaru, whose pen name contains the word for ​‘crab’ (kani). Bunbunsha, who wrote the second poem on this print, studied poetry under the samurai poet Ōta Nanpo, who headed one of the so-called Three Great Houses of kyōka poetry, the Yamanote-ren (Uptown Club). The first poem is by Ichikawa Danjūrō VII. Prints with poems by these two men were often issued as keepsakes of the boisterous gatherings known as kyōkai, which featured poetic improvisation and competition and offered an opportunity for artists and poets, patrons and friends, to mix across the boundaries of class and occupation.”

Steph, a weaver, was also drawn to several textiles, especially a late-18th-century Indian shawl made from goat wool, the colors and design of which were as scintillating as ever. ​“In the early years of Mughal rule, India turned to Persia for artistic guidance, encouraging the emigration of Persian artisans who brought with them the sensibilities of the Safavid court. Nevertheless, Indian weaving evolved separate styles and techniques that came to rival those of Persia,” the accompanying note explained. ​“The textile arts were given great impetus under the Mughal rulers Akbar (ruled 1556 – 1605), Jahangir (ruled 1605 – 27), and Shah Jahan (ruled 1627 – 58), whose imperial ateliers produced shawls and sashes prized both in India and abroad. This shawl, a masterwork of design and technique, features a dense network of flowers compacted within narrow bands of red, white, and black. The geometricized blossoms, flattened and made angular by the twill tapestry weave, brilliantly tile the cloth’s surface, successfully integrating the fabric’s structure with its ornament.”

I can’t say why exactly African art in all its abundant forms speaks to me so strongly, from music and dance to fashion and other visual arts. I know I’m not alone as a White person drawn to it; Picasso’s own debt to African visual art is widely documented to the point that it might be fun to argue that Cubism and other abstractions European and American artists explored were just watered-down versions of African forms (sound familiar?). As a musician, I’m constantly inspired by African musicians. As a person who likes vivid colors and bold patterns in clothing, I’m always floored by African textile patterns.

YUAG’s gallery of African art isn’t quite like that, but its collection of masks, robes, and other ceremonial implements is enough to see what fired Picasso’s imagination, and continues to exert influence now. I spent a long time looking at the head of an asen from Benin. ​“Asen are portable altars with elaborate figural tableaux honoring the ancestors of a family,” the accompanying note explained. ​“They serve as a conduit for interactions between the visible world of the living and the invisible realm of the spirits. Groups of asen are placed in a prayer room, where they are offered sacrifices and consulted for advice on important questions. The scenes shown on the platforms could relate to proverbs or praise poems. The figural group in this asen probably shows the head of a lineage, indicated by an elaborate chair, a top hat, and an umbrella – all attributes of authority. On the table are bottles of imported alcohol, further evidence of his high status.”

I was completely taken in with the asen’s figures (once again, just go see it in person). It conjured in my mind the memories of parties past, of trips to other parts of the world, driving drums, voices raised together in song — the kinds of experiences that the pandemic has made very difficult if not impossible to have right now. Someday we’ll be able to move easily again; until then we have art to help us remember what it’s like.

Tickets for entry to the Yale Universirty Art Gallery can be found on the museum’s website.