Truth and the Red Bar

Yesterday several of us drove to Boston to look at art. I sat in the back seat behind Chris, but don’t worry, I had room, and so when he asked us about our emotional state while talking politics, I was comfortable enough to confess that I felt a lot of angst about it. Laurel said how can you know when they are telling the truth, and what does it mean to tell the truth anyway.

When we turned into the main gate to Boston College, I was looking sideways while Chris was looking straight ahead, so I saw the surprised look on the man’s face in the guardhouse as Chris zoomed in without stopping. The man brought his chair down to rest on four legs and looked up from his newspaper and leaned forward and his eyebrows went up. His eyebrows told the truth, and I wondered if you could tell the truth—i.e., look like that—and get elected president.

Steve Schlosser at the McMullen had put together a wonderful exhibit of work by Georges Rouault. Steve walked us through the rooms in chronological order and told us things and then turned us loose to go back and look more closely.

Everything looked sad and dark. Tears were “at the heart of everything”: an old clown whose age couldn’t be hidden by paint any more, a washed-up prostitute who still had to pretend she was a joy-girl,  judges in tight collars too stupid to hand down just decisions. The face of Christ was everywhere, immeasurably sad, with eyes almost always closed, like the image pressed into Veronica’s handkerchief.

Then Steve took us into the next room and showed us that in 1930 a new element started showing up in Rouault’s pictures. It was a horizontal red line, like the balance-bar in a ballet school. Rouault put it behind clowns, acrobats, dancers—people who were liable to lose their balance and fall.

It was Rouault’s way of saying that even in a world racked by instability—and Steve showed us that Rouault’s was: born in 1871 in the cellar of a house that was being shot up by artillery, lived in France during World War I, fled south during World War II when the Nazis occupied Paris, knew all about the extermination camps and the Bomb and the cold war (he died in 1958)—even in a world racked by instability and miseries and tears, there is a red line of redemption, and this, as much as the tears, is a part of the truth of our experience.

It is hard to tell the truth.

Artists in the twentieth century sought like anything to tell the truth. That is why so many of their images are distorted and ugly. It was a distorted and ugly century. Most artists didn’t see any redemption in it, which is okay, because it can be hard to see. But what isn’t okay is the reflexive rejection of someone else’s vision of redemption just because I can’t see it. Artists do this as much as anyone else. Maybe that is partly why—as Sandra Bowden pointed out to us—Rouault was dropped from the sixth edition of Janson. It is sometimes hard for even artists to tell the truth and get elected.

On the drive back from Boston I thought about this some, and slept some, and Chris bought me ice cream. It is so hard to tell the truth and get elected to anything. We only want to hear about tears at the heart of everything, or else we only want to hear about redemption.

Thank the dear Lord that Rouault got it right. The misery and instability and danger of falling. The red balance bar at our hips.