Museums are incredible places to fall in love. Or maybe just to realize you already have.
Lindsey and I are at the Legion of Honor, standing in front of Klimt and Rodin, two guys who understood that the body is both temple and ruin, that desire is inseparable from decay, that gold leaf can’t hide the fact that we’re all just meat and longing. Vienna meets Paris. Ornament meets rawness. It’s perfect.
Our first date? Turner at the de Young. Turner. That mad English bastard who painted light like it was trying to murder the canvas, who made the sublime look like a shipwreck in progress. I mean, what kind of lunatic takes someone to look at maritime disasters and atmospheric chaos for a first date?
Turns out, exactly the right kind.
Because here’s what happens in museums that doesn’t happen at bars or restaurants or any of the other performance spaces we call “dates”: you stand next to someone, looking at the same thing, and you find out how they see. Not what they say they see, not what they think they’re supposed to see, but what actually moves them. What makes them lean in. What makes them go quiet.
So we’re looking at Rodin’s sculptures, those tortured figures clawing their way out of marble like they’re being born and dying simultaneously, and then we turn a corner and it’s Klimt. All that Viennese decadence, those society women wrapped in patterns like they’re trying to camouflage themselves as wallpaper, as wealth, as anything but vulnerable human beings.
The contrast is obscene. It’s everything. Rodin strips away; Klimt piles on. One says, “Here’s the brutal truth of the body.” The other says, “Here’s the beautiful lie we tell to make it bearable.”
Lindsey gets it. She sees the conversation happening between these two dead guys across centuries and mediums. She sees that museums aren’t mausoleums. They’re arguments that never end, questions that keep getting asked in different languages.
I have the gift of neither the spoken nor the written word, especially if I have to say something about myself or my work. Whoever wants to know something about me -as an artist, the only notable thing- ought to look carefully at my pictures and try and see in them what I am and what I want to do.
Gustav Klimt
That’s the thing about falling in love in museums: you’re not just falling for the person. You’re falling into a shared way of looking at the world. You’re finding someone who understands that Klimt’s quote, about how his pictures should speak for him, is both true and completely beside the point. Because pictures never speak for themselves. They need us. They need two people standing there, in October light at the Legion of Honor, trying to translate what moves them.
And that translation? That’s the beginning of everything.