ART

Today so much art went into my eyes. It is raining and so everything in Venice is even more wet than everything would be in any other city. Wet and chilly, and so a perfect day to hunt down the art, and there is so much of it, it all barely fit into my eyes and my mind.

The Peggy Guggenheim collection of abstract impressionist art, an incredible collection and an incredible story, all the Picasso and Ernst and Kandinsky and Klee and Dali and everyone else too, all clustered around the dining room table or the living room of her palazzo on the grand canal. Joseph Cornell too. Jackson Pollack, about whom I learned a lot looking at the 6 paintings she collected. She’s buried in the little sculpture garden, near a Giacometti Standing Woman, and next to 12 or 13 of her little dogs.

Then I kept going in the rain to the Scuola De San Rocco, not sure I am saying that right, which is called “Tintotetto’s Sistine Chapel,” and it has 60 Tintoretto paintings on biblical and allegorical themes. So that was a whole lesson on him—crazy amounts of twisted bodies and movement and vivid but muted color and dramatic light. Vast paintings on the walls and floor.

Then peeked into the Frari Church to see the beautiful little Bellini Madonna and all the other splendors, including one of my favorite things, a weird, crude little Jesus in a stone arch, with a large gold sunflower taking up all the negative space in the little carving. Walked home though the rain over many small bridges, getting cold because so much art had entered my body in one day that there was barely room for enough body heat.

Thinking often of our friends Moey, Ari, Dasha, Phil and Niquie at home.