on beauty [+ paris + art]
work in process//13.
Last week I had a spiritual experience—a brief flashing in the phenomenal world.
I’m not talking about walking the Camino de Santiago, though that was one in its own right.
I mean looking at art.
We were in Paris after the Camino. It was raining, but who were we to complain? It hadn’t rained once on us on the Camino. The Camino in the rain would have been soggy. Paris in the rain is romantic.
We only had 36 hours, so naturally, we walked everywhere. We walked from our perfectly Parisian apartment in the 2nd arrondissement to the Seine, then up through the Latin Quarter, to Notre Dame. We walked to the Eiffel Tower after dark and almost took the stairs to the top but opted for the tram instead (we did walk down). We walked to Montmartre and Sacré-Coeur and to the little museum down the hill, where we went crazy for the painter Maurice Utrillo’s dreamily-recreated garret studio. We walked to Shakespeare & Company Books twice because the line was out the door the first time, and of course, I had to go in. We walked the quay along the Seine, and to the cheerful Ostra Paris for briny delicious oysters, where the friendliest maitre’d in Paris told us that the actual Paris start of the Camino de Santiago was literally—he pointed—across the street. So we walked there to take a picture.
We were prepared to be astounded by all things Parisian, but of all the places we walked, it was the Musée d’Orsay that completely undid me.
It was raining, as I mentioned, and we only had 90 minutes before the museum closed, Steve took one look at the ticket line snaking this way and that and bailed, claiming he’d seen the art he wanted to see in the Prado in Madrid and would rather walk along the river in the rain. Fair enough. We are all walking our own path. Even when we’re together and moving mostly in the same direction, we’re each following our way. This is good, just as it should be. Steve was on his own Camino.
Inside the girls and I made straight for the fifth floor, where the Impressionists are. “Everyone’s in there,” I told the girls, fake-knowingly (it had been 12 years since I was last there and I coudn’t quite remember). Everyone was in there, and by everyone, I mean every last visitor in the Orsay that afternoon. We followed the throngs into the first gallery, where a Van Gogh landscape of verdant fields and hills stopped us in our tracks.
The brush strokes. You could feel them. They were so green, pulsing with texture and energy, as though Van Gogh had just gotten up to get a cafe au lait in the next room. They were alive. His brush strokes simultaneously expanded time and compressed it. Every moment existed within his painting: Van Gogh’s 19th-century France and our’s now, in 2024. It was a time capsule and travel all at once, a Zen koan of the ephemerality of life and also, its infinitude.
I stood there having a small silent freakout, trying not to totally lose it. I looked over at Pippa and saw she was just as floored. “I didn’t know,” she said, groping for words. “I didn’t know that paintings could be beautiful.”
It had been so long since I’d felt the same about art. But now it was all I could see: beauty everywhere. Yes, in Pissaro’s lovely Provencal landscapes, Manet’s luncheon on the grass, and Monet’s rowboats sailboats. But also in the downcast expression Dega’s woman in the cafe L’Absinthe. It wasn’t the subject that made the beauty, it was how the artist rendered it: with light and texture and total presence. It was seeing. I felt as I do when I study my father’s black-and-white photographs of my sister and me from the 1970s—looking into my eyes, I can see the younger me looking at my father, and him looking at me. I can see what he must have seen, and his seeing makes both subject and artist more alive again.
The Prado had been full of heavy, dark religious art whose stories and myths didn’t move me. I was looking, not seeing. Impressionism, by comparison, was so transparent: Van Gogh’s simple, crooked bedroom in Arles, London’s Parliament aglow in the fog. Is this why Impressionism gets a bad rap? In my Art History 101 class at college, it seemed like the least sophisticated thing we studied, endlessly copied until it became cliche. I’d flipped right past those pages in my Modern Art book in favor of the edgier Picassos and Pollacks.
What I’d foolishly failed to understand was that the Impressionists were not following a style, they were inventing it—an entirely new way of seeing and painting that did not exist before they brought their brushes to the canvas. Excluded from the prestigious annual Salon exhibition, they started their own. They were breaking the mold, breaking away from the old masters to paint the everyday world around them. In Zen, this is called ordinary, and it’s considered a sign of an awakened mind to approach something plainly, to see and express its essence clearly, for what it is.
I stumbled through the galleries in a daze, staring for a long time at certain paintings, passing others as though in a dream. I felt like crying. This was all I wanted to do in the world, make beauty, which is not always strictly speaking, beautiful, but awake and real and true. I stood for a long time in front of Van Gogh’s self-portrait. At the Prado, I loved paintings like Valesquez’s Las Meninas, where artists had painted himself into the scene. I love the steely, sly look Velasquez is giving the painter—himself—as they’re both painting, a kind of double exposure that seems to be the very definition of self-consciousness. In Paris, the immediacy of Van Gogh’s stare, not just at himself painting himself, but at me, studying him, nearly knocked me over.
The girls, wiped out by the drama of Starry Night its adoring crowds, had gone to sit on the floor in the hallway and decompress on their screens. For once I got it: so much wild and ordinary beauty all around gets overwhelming. I looked again at Van Gogh giving me the side-eye, and I saw in his slightly unhinged expression what he was trying to tell me. Yes, me; it was that intimate. Make art on your terms, not by following but by creating. Don’t worry if no one gets it. Make it anyway. This is your path in the world.
In a strange serendipity, the next day, on our way home from Paris, my friend Natalie sent me a link to artist Richard Serra’s obituary in The New York Times. He began his career as a painter but switched to sculpture for good when he saw Las Méninas, because, as he later said, “I thought there was no possibility of me getting close to that. Cézanne hadn’t stopped me, de Kooning and Pollock hadn’t stopped me, but Velazquez seemed like a bigger thing to deal with.” The massive steel sculpture he went on to create was unlike anything the art world had ever seen.
After my brush with awe in the d’Orsay, I jotted down some writing prompts in the back page of notebook, where I keep a running list of ideas in case I run out of things to write about. You might try 10 minutes on 1 or all of the following. Tell me how it goes!
—A time you’ve broken the mold
—what would you do and how would you do it if you could make something without worrying about success, sales, or approval?
—go for a walk and come back and write down ten ordinary extraordinary things you saw. Beauty is everywhere.
keep your eyes open for the flashings—even in the rain.
x katie
I haven't visited Museum Orsay since I was 17 years old (I am now 43). I don't have any vivid memories of it. But I remember it being my favourite museum in Paris.