Rembrandt, My Mom, and Me

I had been meaning to see the exhibit of Rembrandt's early drawings at the Milwaukee Art Museum ever since it opened. But lately it seems that my days off have been spent catching up with work and so I hadn't mosied to the Brise Soleil to catch my own glimpse. When my parents offered to visit, I suggested the museum among some other choices and to my surprise and delight they opted in. I love killing two birds with one proverbial stone.

I like art museums and I pondered this for the first time during my stroll through the special gallery. As I have mentioned in this blog before, my parents generally supported the arts, but not in terms of specific art. I grew up very simply in a household that budgeted its resources more importantly for food then for fresco. In fact, I realized that the first time I had ever been to an art museum that I can recall was the Museum of Modern Art in NYC during medical school. There, I was giddy and incredulous, standing mere inches from an exhibit of Picasso's Dora Mar paintings. I had studied Picasso's work in high school Spanish class, could name each work and tell you what period it was from. But I had only seen it in 2D on a slide projector screen. This was the real thing, man.

Art galleries became a social preoccupation. Moving to the boho East Side of Milwaukee and befriending "actual artists", I went to openings and gallery nights. I drank cheap wine and cheesy hors d'oeuvres reveling in an evening that took me far away from my world as a scientist. When I would purchase a piece of art from a local artist I would imagine that someday I would claim to have one of their first. Naturally, I would be the only friend who had kept the work in the dusty attic.

An art musuem was the scene of the blind date I scheduled with the stranger who would turn out to be my BF. Much later he would tell me that he wanted to see that Brooks Stevens exhibit anyway and figured if the date turned out to be a bust, at least it wouldn't have been a complete waste of time. It seems that a proclivity for killing two birds with one stone is something we both have in common.

I've been to national standards - MOMA, the Met, The Frick (love the Frick). I've done San Fran, LA, Chicago - all alone. And through them I adopted the quiet etiquette, the slow saunter with hands clasped behind my back, the polite nose wrinkle at something that doesn't turn me. And so, meandering through the 1600's with Rembrandt and my mother was a bit of a change for me. She was incredibly excited. The last time she was in an art museum was when I took her and my sisters to see the Quilts of Gee's Bend for my birthday over four years ago. She commented on little things, asking questions like "why do you think someone would draw a person getting flogged?" to which I had no true response. She would talk to stiff lipped strangers, interrupting their audio tour by lifting up their headphones to tell them that she thinks Rembrandt's Joseph has a quizzical look on his face, as if to ask 'who's child is this?' And as many times as I would admonish her simple country girl ways, she couldn't stop touching all the paintings protected by glass for just such an onlooker. I couldn't be embarrassed by her. I was too busy remembering how, while intensely peering at Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art, I was gently reminded by a security guard to keep my nose at a safe distance.