The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 34. Dallas and a Day of Art, No. 3. The Dallas Museum of Art

Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black
Yellow and Gray by Piet Mondrian, 1921

The fist time I ever visited the Dallas Museum of Art, it was still housed over in Fair Park.  It wasn't much of a museum then, but it was more than I had ever seen.  I was astounded when I walked in and saw a huge Franz Kline painting, Slate Cross, where big black strokes of paint interrupted the white plain of canvas in the most shocking way.  It was as bold as a silhouetted elm against a field of blue-gray snow on an evening cold enough to stop the heart.  I was in ninth grade; I'd ventured down to the museum alone, and at least internally, my life would never be the same.

It's not as if I'd never seen a piece of abstract art before.  My brother was an artist, and while in college moved from realism to abstract expressionism.  I saw abstract art all of the time.  But, Lloyd had seemed like an oddity.  I liked how his small room at Dad's house in Reno was crowded with books and paintings, but upon seeing that Kline painting at the DMA, I realized, There's a whole world out there dedicated to this stuff.  Life was not limited to The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island after all.  There was more to life than E.T.  There were big, bold beautiful acts out there, people flinging their soul towards the open space of a canvas in the same way Elton John pounded his soul into the keyboard of a grand piano.

After the shock of Kline, what impacted me even more was Mondrian's painting,  Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black, Yellow, and Gray (above).  That was only natural, I guess, as drawn to architecture as I was.  There was something just so right about the red rectangle down towards the lower left, and the way it was balanced by the yellow one on the right.  Color and placement were everything.  Where this attraction came from, I have no idea.  I grew up without any connection to the world of art whatsoever beyond watching my brother paint.  He always demonstrated talent, but he grew up in the same household as me, and for most of that time, he had no more education in art than I did.  But whatever it was, as soon as I saw modernism, I knew it was something to be reckoned with.  Something simple, pure and profound.  A new way of seeing, of really seeing and experiencing the world around you.  Of course, it wasn't new to most of the world.  Just me.  But I when I saw it, I felt alive.

And so it was to remain that way through my high school and college years.  Once the new DMA building downtown opened in 1984, while I was a junior in high school, it became a second home.  I went with Lloyd.  I went with friends.  I went by myself.  Back then it was free, and it was great place to be, no matter how little money you had in your pocket.  However, much of the collection I simply ignored.  I was focused on Modernism, and I definitely had my favorites, and supreme among them was a marvelous little painting by Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau, Burggrabenstrasse 1, an incredibly loose rendition of a town in the alps, that although done in oil, looks as if it were created with saltwater taffy and then set upright in a bright window on a hot, sunny day.  The colors are vibrant.  The world is oozing and unstable.  The perspective draws you into the picture while the sloping, unstable oozing of the street causes you to lose your balance and stagger drunkenly towards the lower right hand corner where you run into what appears to be a tree, which holds you visually in the picture plane until you are rested enough to climb back up that caramelized road towards the bright sunlit shops.  Viewing that painting is truly an amazing experience. 

Murnau, Burggrabenstrasse 1 by Wassily Kandinsky, 1908

However, this time through the museum, I was drawn to many of the pre-modernist works that I'd previously largely ignored, especially examples of romanticism.  There are these dark curls of paint, little gloomy globs of detail that combine to make up these grand, expansive scenes.

Mountain Landscape with an Approaching Storm by Claude-Joseph Vernet, 1774-1775

A great example of this is Mountain Landscape with an Approaching Storm by 18th Century French Artist, Claude-Joseph Vernet, which admittedly had always caught my eye even back when my heart belonged solely to modernism, mainly because of it's scale.  At 64 1/2 inches by 103 1/4 inches, it doesn't go unnoticed.  At a distance, though dramatic, the painting is too removed from reality by romantic exaggeration to fully grab my senses.  However, up close, and with this painting's scale the viewer doesn't have to take too many steps forward, the painting comes alive with movement that is so real you can almost hear the thundering of the waterfall, and feel the mist as a significant wind carries a cold spray towards you.  The swirling, exquisitely detailed landscape captures the power of the divine.

Detail of Mountain Landscape with an Approaching Storm 

As much as I was captivated by Vernet's imaginative encounter with the sublime, I was even more taken with the quieter, yet still dark and moody, Frederiksborg Castle by the Norwegian artist Johan Christian Dahl.  The painting claims the same dark pallet and romantic preoccupation with stone structures and the small scale of the individual human in the broader landscape as does the Vernet painting, but does so more naturally.  Plus Dahl got the evening light--both in the sky and the mote-- so right it simply transports us there.  Whereas Vernet forces the sublime on the viewer through exaggeration, Dahl simply invites the viewer into the sublime through realistic representation of an actual place on an actual evening.  The painting is profoundly beautiful in its simple adherence to reality.

Frederiksborg Castle by Johan Christian Dahl, 1817 

And so we spent the day winding our way through the collections of the DMA until we were quite tired.  I thought I had no more to give until I rounded a corner and was confronted with Edward Hopper's Lighthouse Hill blazing in afternoon glory on its own separate wall.  I had always liked the picture.  In fact I have a poster of it hanging in my classroom, but this time I found it to be the single most powerful piece in the collection.  To be honest my favorite little Kandinsky didn't have a chance.  Nor did the Mondrian.  Placement, I guess, is important, because simply moving this painting upgraded it from notable to breathtaking.  After seeing it, I was filled.  I needed nothing more.  We could leave.

Lighthouse Hill by Edward Hopper, 1927

And we soon did.  Hungry and exhausted we exited one of the finest museums in the country, my old second home, the Dallas Museum of Art, where I spent many hours as a teenager wandering around, sitting, contemplating, just idly being.  What could be better?