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September 23, 2007
gestures of love and devotion
It is said that in 1911 Edgar Degas paid the most extraordinary tribute to his nineteenth-century hero Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres when as an old man he went every day to visit an Ingres exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. Degas was blind. He went simply to run his hands over the pictures. I imagine Degas hoped to touch Ingres’s works in the way that adults caress their children, not just out of affection but to make some physical contact through which to transcend the moment. Time briefly dissolves in these gestures of love and devotion-through these points of contact with what we cherish and deem longer-lasting than ourselves.
Michael Kimmelman - The Accidental Masterpiece
Posted by amin at September 23, 2007 1:02 AM