Gotham Diary:
Transcendent
20 January 2012
Today at the DBR: A first visit to the new American Wing painting galleries knocks me out in many ways, but mostly, and principally, by the focus on Emanuel Leutze’s Wastington Crossing the Delaware. I expected this to be deplorable, but it was anything but.
The likening of the galleries, especially the room containing “Washington Crossing the Delaware” to a cathedral is spot on, certainly in feel if not quite proportion. For once, the painting’s siting pays homage the the citizenry who originally (and continually whether they admit it or no) laud the image, or rather, the stirring emotion engendered by that image.
If the Gothic cathedral reference makes one uneasy, perhaps a closer and more apt likening, in a similar vein, would be the Baroque Catholic confections of the Counter-Reformation; those pieces of absolute and unabashed theatre that still represented deeply held and revered belief, albeit grandly tarted up and sugared for ease of delectation, if not always digestion…