The Painting in the Tree

On New Year’s Eve, I took my younger sons to a city park near downtown Houston, a deep bowl surrounded by highways and office buildings where the drone of traffic never ceases. The sky was big and blue, the sun brilliant, the wind bracing. After cavorting on the playground we followed the jogging path around the perimeter, past the volleyball courts, until we spied a large, brightly colored object in a post oak, about 15 feet off the ground. It was a painting, canvas tacked across a wooden frame, measuring roughly three feet by two feet. The palette was gaudy and commercial -- magenta, puce and bilious avocado -- and the subjects and treatment were vaguely “psychedelic,” reminiscent of Peter Max’s rubbish -- flowers, clouds, stylized suns. The images were crude but clearly were not the work of a child. My kids wanted to climb the tree and salvage the canvas, and I was content to leave it there, but it prompted questions: Who painted it and why was it in a tree? Was its location an act of theft and vandalism, or conceptual art, which amounts to the same thing? Was some pretentious art student, or his instructor, making a “statement?”

The book I had brought with me to the park was Our Culture, What’s Left of It. In it, Theodore Dalrymple has a lovely essay, “A Lost Art,” in which he contrasts the paintings of Mary Cassatt with the late work of Joan Miró, all to the credit of the former. He writes of Cassatt’s pictures of mothers and children:

“They have that strange elusive quality of a Schubert song or a Vermeer painting, of capturing precisely the bittersweet fleeting moment that makes life, for all its disappointments, travails, and hardships, so worth living. Such moments are melancholy as well as joyful precisely because they are fleeting: transcendently beautiful but so brief as to be immeasurable. When we look at the milkmaid pouring milk in Vermeer's painting in the Rijksmuseum, we see -- as for the first time -- how beautiful is a humble stream of milk that pours from a jug, how supremely elegant is its trajectory, how subtle is the play of light upon it; but we understand simultaneously that the moment cannot last, indeed that part of its beauty is its very transience. Though not for long, perfection is indeed of this world. And this perception reconciles us to our existence, full of ugliness as it might otherwise be. If there are Vermeerian moments in our life—as there will be, if only we pay close enough attention—we shall reach serenity, at least intermittently. And that is enough.”

The notion of art as consolation is today deeply unfashionable, yet what better motive could there be for creation? Consider Geoffrey Hill’s question in The Triumph of Love: “What ought a poem to be?” “Answer, a sad and angry consolation.” Vermeer is an artist who fashioned works of perfect equipoise in a time and place of monstrous events. He was born in Delft during the Thirty Years War, of which its historian, C.V. Wedgwood, writes: “The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous.” A third of the German population was wiped out. In Vermeer’s hometown in 1654, six years after the war, an arsenal exploded, killing hundreds, including another great Dutch painter, Carel Fabritius. Dull critics have accused Vermeer of ignoring the violent geopolitics of his day, of living and painting in a state of blissful denial.

Vermeer’s scenes of domestic serenity eloquently imply, through absence, the very atrocities they never depict, as though the savagery prompted by the Reformation and Counter Reformation pressed against the kitchen wall, out of sight. Seldom does great art wallow in the explicit. It works by suggestion, implication, hints.

The painting in the tree, with its suggestion of self-conscious primitiveness, remains a mystery. We returned to the park on New Year’s Day, and the boys were disappointed to discover the picture was gone, and I was relieved.