What is Art?: Nureyev’s Sequins

I spent a lovely afternoon last week at San Francisco’s De Young Museum of Fine Arts.

De Young Museum of Fine ArtsA 125 year old institution (old for California), its current modern building opened in 2005 and is the 4^th most visited museum in the US. It is a treasure.

I especially wanted to see a visiting exhibit of Impressionist art collected by the late William Paley, a CBS founder, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, another favorite museum of mine.  It was a rich display of Matisse and Picasso and Cezanne and Gauguin.  Especially delightful were large photographs of some of the paintings hung in the Paley’s Fifth Avenue apartment.  One can always dream. 

(Once I was looking at some lovely French art at the Morgan Library in NYC and heard some people speaking French and I tried to say, in my bad French, that I felt badly that so much fine French painting is now in New York.  They laughed and said, Oh no, we have taken lots of art from other countries as well; art is international!  Pas de pays!)

The other blockbuster exhibit currently at the De Young is called “Rudolf Nureyev: a Life in Dance.”  There were lots more people going to that exhibit, especially older women, and mothers and daughters in holiday dress.  While the Paley collection was presented is a pretty standard mundane fashion, the Nureyev one was multimedia, fabric festooning in front of huge videos of his performances, interviews with dancers, and room after room of sequined costumes, little jackets for various nobility roles he played, and even more sequined tutus worn by Margot Fonteyn.

I fully intended to boycott this exhibit.  “Costumes and fashion are not art!”  I have told anyone who would listen, about the previous De Young exhibits of Chanel designer dresses and Yves St. Laurent suits.  I am less obnoxious, but still dubious, about the quilt exhibits and the tapestries, all part of an extensive “textile art” collection.   But there is something about sequined tutus and silk dresses for anorexic models that offends me in a fine arts museum.  I am an obnoxious snob on this subject.

So how do I know the shunned Nureyev exhibit had videos and fabric and tutus?  Because I could see them even as I just walked by, on my way to the very fine collection of Hudson River School landscapes.  I could see the movement and the color.  Which just drew me in.  Oh what the hell, I’m waiting til rush hour is over on the Bay Bridge, let’s check it out.  Make fun of the obsessions of the rich and skinny.

Rudolf NureyevI was brought to a standstill by a short black and white video of the young Nureyev doing his ballet warm ups. Not even a rehearsal for a particular performance, just a rough dance studio  with stuff lying around.  Silent, no sound.  It looped over and over. He leapt and did the little wiggle thing with his pointed feet and twirled.  His hands were like flowers.  The few other people in the studio weren’t even watching him, just working on their own steps.  But here in SF there were lots of us, all seized in the dark silence. 

And I said to myself, “That’s art. That belongs here.”

Because of what it evoked in me.  I felt the same wonder as looking at the Matisse.  I had the same deep appreciation for skill and spirit and beauty and questioning as Picasso evokes.  The world and I felt a little better and slower to kill each other because of that dance.  I don’t know – I got my heavy art feeling.

When I went back to my daughter’s apartment that night I said I was having second thoughts about my aversion to costumes in art museums.  I admitted that theater sets could be art, like Maurice Sendak’s sets for The Nutcracker and Magic Flute.  So why not costumes for the same production?  Is there a distinction between paint and fabric?  Is it easier to accept old fabric (tapestries) than new (Dior?)  And from there we talked about art and money, how much Paley paid for Picasssos in 1933, was art just what the rich collect, or is it quilts made in Appalachia?  With her recent history degree she could add in concepts like “vernacularization.” 

Basically we sat on her sofa and asked, what is art anyway? 

* Liz MillerAnd I said, “You know, maybe that’s the role of art museums, not to decide what is and isn’t art, but simply to get this kind of conversation going.  If sequins get folks in the door, maybe they’ll see the Gauguins also.  And then go see the cool Eskimo art and the charred remains of a black church from the south hung in a piece called “Anti-Mass.”

And maybe all those ballet moms and daughters will go home and have a similar conversation.” (Still a little snobby about the ballet moms.)

I tried to tell her about the silent spinning body in the studio.  But I finally said, “You just have to go see it.”

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

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* See: Liz Miller