Pastel Chardin

Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th-Century Europe is on show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until the 14th of August 2011 and though I will discuss later my own impression of the show there was a moment in particular that I want to discuss now.

One Friday, a few weeks ago, I went to the show with three other people, an artist, an art critic, and an economic writer. For fun over dinner the question was posed which pastel we each favored. I knew the moment that I saw Chardin's "Head of a Man" that it was a picture I would never forget. I spent so much time looking at it while there. The pastel presents a older man, with thick, silvery hair asleep with his bearded chin on his chest, his arms folded across his chest. His beard and hair both need cutting so are plenty enough to offer some beautiful line work and colors. Chardin produced this pastel towards the end of his life, when he was himself going blind. It was one of his first pastels.

Answering the question was thus easy, but when I was asked why I added simply, "Because, I love it." That was not a sufficient answer but the conversation went elsewhere and the answer remained with me uncomfortably. A few weeks later when I was in conversation with the artist again, he asked me to explain more why I liked it so and I gave him a much longer and complicated answer. I did, however, feel as if I were rationalizing an appreciation that was better served by my obscure earlier response.

Some pictures I find that I do appreciate for a particular reason. But there are a very few, and in my mind they are the most special, for which "Because, I love it" is actually the best explanation. Some part of me wants to say, "Look, I will show you what I love." And simply draw the picture exactly as it is. A friend from some years past found it impossible to write a paper on Butler's The Way of All Flesh, explaining that the only thing to say about the book was the book itself. He couldn't simply hand the professor the book. So he never wrote the paper. Certainly for academic purposes such a response will not suffice. And I could never write about a book or a painting by duplicating it, which is why I rarely write about my most favorite things.

But it does seem to me that there ought to be some level of recognition in general conversation for appreciating a work of art so completely that any analysis is a distortion of the picture that is so admired. Certainly being able to discuss the markings, materials, and craft of the work is important to moving beyond infatuation, and sometimes these conversations allow me to develop a long list of what is special about a special work. But at the end of it, given the fact that art is non-linguistic, shouldn't there be some acknowledgment that "just because" is not always a bad answer?