I jetted off to Washington D.C. this past weekend to rendezvous with my son Sam and tour the museums, most especially to see the One Life: Sylvia Plath exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. For the Plath fan who has not had the privilege already to work in archives, this is undoubtedly a thrilling exhibit, complete with her Girl Scout uniform, letters, drawings, and of course, the ultimate fetish… a long brown lock of her hair, which was not a Victorian-style post-mortem memento, but rather a ponytail cut off in her childhood. How surprising that the exhibit was in just one smallish room! We Plathians know her ephemera could take up the entire museum, or at least a great hall. It did give me a chance to see some of the archival pieces kept at Smith College that I had not yet seen, such as her typewriter, and some of the late letters. I saw the Bell Jar artwork, which has been widely photographed. It brought me joy to see the steady stream of people interested enough to stand and read the type on these pages and gaze at the drawings and annotations of my beloved literary hero and mentor.
Earlier that morning, Sam, who is an amateur art historian, walked me through the Johannes Vermeer exhibit over in the National Gallery of Art: Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting; Inspiration and Rivalry. At 31 years old today, my firstborn son has become a fine tour guide, giving me all the back stories on the 15th century Dutch Vermeer and other great artists. To truly understand the great accomplishments before me, Sam also had me watch the movie Tim’s Vermeer at the hotel.
Sam and Me, Washington DC, November 2017
Tim’s Vermeer is an astounding little documentary about Tim Jenison, a very successful contemporary inventor, who gets a notion of how Vermeer created his work and seeks to prove it: he believes Vermeer used more of a process than of what most might think of as “Art.” Jenison builds the case that Vermeer invented a gadget modifying the camera obscura. There is a ton of research and evidence to support this guy’s theory. To put it to the test, Jenison decided that although he had no art training or ability himself, he would attempt to create his own Vermeer painting, duplicating The Music Lesson, using this process. He had it evaluated by the experts (two of which, agree with him). It took a few painstaking, tedious, expensive years to create this start to finish, but he did it. He wept at the end over its beauty, and we all wept with him.
There’s a scene in this documentary where Jenison says something to the effect of, “The academics don’t like this, and won’t buy in. But the artists get it. Artists don’t have a problem with rules. Why does there have to be such a disconnect between Art and Science?”
That hit home with my Plath work. It took an inventor to see Vermeer’s invention. It has taken a tarot card reader to see Plath’s system. I share this struggle with the disconnect between Art and Spirituality. And actually, that disconnect with Art and Science too (and History, etc.). This Tim Jenison is a kindred spirit. As I watched the film, I recalled at the Sylvia Plath Symposium (on which I’m still writing my review, doing bits of it as I can around an abundance of work, travel, and holidays), when a poet friend leaned over and whispered to me after a full day of academic lectures, “These people, they’re smart. But they don’t understand what poetry can do.”
Exactly. Poetry, like a Vermeer painting, can be analyzed to pieces. Those analyses are valuable and maybe even correct —to a point. But it’s a narrow view. Sometimes systems and formulas and gadgets make magic. Sadly, most people believe a poem or a painting must only happen one way to be called Art. Those people are usually not artists. And those people aren’t really capable of learning, having long ago decided that they know it all.