Mom’s Dreams, Recalling Trips and a Lifetime of Art History
Knowing, we’d be away for the year, I spent a lot of time with mom this summer.
In between dinners, Mom and I often talked about art.
Tell me your favorite pieces, I asked her last week.
I can’t remember, she said at first.
I can look in Janson, she said, referring to Janson’s History of Art.
The next night, I asked again.
Did you think of anything?
Yes, Mom replied.
I had fun looking through Janson.
She pulled out a paper with a few answers, referring to pieces and placed she's seen in her eight decades of exploring:
1)The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, also called the Ghent Altarpiece, Ghent
2) The Pantheon, Rome.
3) The Monreale Cathedral, Byzantine, Sicily.
3) The Pyramids.
4) The Pergamon, Berlin.
5)The Hagia Sophia, Istanbul.
6) The Grunewald Alter,
7) St Peter’s.
8) Rembrandt’s The Night Watcher.
9)The Sistine Ceiling.
Each piece has a different story, a distinct significance for her.
For some, the challenge was just finding them.
Driving through Belgium with Dad, she saw signs to Ghent and Gent, but she wasn’t sure which was the right exit, until finally they just pulled over and found it, just outside Flander’s Fields.
That was years ago.
"I had that dream even in high school to see the world. My mom showed me that,” she told me.
On her Lady's Trip through Europe in 1957, she first saw St Peter's.
Yet, it was Hagia Sophia during the Trip to the Middle East in 1965 that changed things.
“It was a size I really had not seen. I had seen the wonderful French cathedrals. But this was glorious. Everywhere you looked, there was something beautiful.”
“The Grunwald Alter - it was the style, realistic but idealistic… an idea of what Jesus could be."
Each year mom saw more art.
"I had the dream and I had done some trips. In Princeton, it all clicked. I knew studying art was my future."
Over the next five decades Mom would travel the world, history guides alongside, telling her where to find the lost treasures, the abbeys and small churches in the outskirts of France and Italy. She always took photos she used in her art history classes.
There are other places and there’s the place she’s from, Columbus, Georgia.
These days we look at her photos from her eight decades on the planet, the travel photos, childhood pics, news clippings from her 5th birthday party on Armistice Day, 1942 at the Cherokee Lodge, her mom's wedding in 1936, that was the talk of the South, her grandmother at a party at the university of Georgia in 1900, her grandfather with her beloved camellias. More than anyone, she talks about him. Today, her garden is very much an homage to his idea of beauty.
Her story is a narrative of an American who loved art and took the time to see it, wherever it took her, be it Reims, France or Tehran, Iran or Charleston, South Carolina or Sicily.
"All I did was look at books and find out what's there. In Persia, they said we could not see something we all wanted to see. We asked again. They took us to a locked door to show us. Who knows when it'll be open again, they told us.”
Who knows? You've gotta encounter these doors along the way.
Still, sharing what you’ve seen is important. Dad always said he'd write a book about his travels with her in the 1960’s. But he never did. Mom was there for the best trips, with her camera and journals, of the trips through India and Afghanistan, across Europe, through China.
The idea of going to see them was important. The Journey to the East was the most memorable, she tells me. It was the company, the four of them, all adding. “Tad was following Dr Grurgeff, who wrote a book of the same title. There were four of us who could solve problems. Fred was along because he was excited about the idea. He loved maps and different people, places. He went to Tehran for a few days, we thought for sex. He came back. By that time, Dad was sick. He drank some milk a farmer gave him. And got dysentery; he had to go to the Tropical Disease Hospital in Tallahassee when we got back. We flew from Delhi. Tad and Fred drove on to Calcutta, put the land rover on a ship back and Tad bought it from us. I have one pick of a fulaka, a boat, on the Nile at sunset from my 1961 trip by myself. When I taught the survey about ancient Egyption art, I showed that slide of the boat sailing away. The trip to the Middle East was still her favorite. It still had that essence.”
She would have studied Iranian art, but history intervened with a revolution in 1979. She turned elsewhere, setting her eyes on The Lambeth Bible, a 12th-century illuminated manuscript (from 1150–1170), a large Romanesque bible from the UK.
We dig through her boxes of slides, books, memories, her dissertation, shelved by mine, our books, dedicated to each other and the family. And get ready for our journey. She will join us on Armistice day this fall, in Germany, eighty years after that majestic 5th birthday she celebrated in the fall of 1942.
Before we left, mom took a snapshot of us, and waved us off on our own way. Off she walked, back into her garden, with beauties her grandfather would have loved.
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