Comfort in Art

Two days ago I went to the New York Museum of Art (The MOMA) for the first time. I was able to see in person for the first time many of the famous works I have seen in books since the time I was young. But it wasn’t Van Gogh’s Starry Night or Picasso’s Three Musicians that most caught my attention.

Instead, it was a work I hadn’t seen before by a painter I hadn’t heard of. It was Ben Shahn’s Father and Child that caused me to pause for a longer period of reflection. I took a photo of the painting because I didn’t want to leave it completely.  I learned the title, Father and Child, only later. When I stopped to stare at it, I didn’t see a father embracing a child, but rather a lover comforting his grieving beloved. And to me art is what is created inside of me, not what the artist intends to portray to me.

I think I paused before this painting because it spoke to some part deep inside me. And I felt like I had been there. I have held a grieving lover. It will take a very long time for this more recent journal entries to be posted on this site, but eventually I will post of a time when my girlfriend (now former gf), witnessed a volunteer at a malnourished infant center fall (accidentally) from the roof of the building to her death. My girlfriend was the volunteer coordinator of this center and had just trained her in. This was such an enormously difficult time for both of us, but mostly for her.

There was so much sadness then. It was the first time I had cried in front of anyone in a very long time, and the first time she had known me to have tears. Reality is an inflexible parent and there was nothing to do but to hold her as tight as I could.

As art often does, this painting became real. And not just as a reflection on the past, but in something I saw later that night. When I was returning on the New York subway I saw again what I had both experienced first hand and felt in Shahn’s painting Father and Child.as I saw a boyfriend holding his sobbing girlfriend on the subway steps. I took a picture, because I never wanted to forget that look in his eyes.

Though I can’t pretend to know really what either of them were feeling, to me it is a look of strength, but only because he knows she needs him to be strong for her. It is a look of determination, because he is determined to fix whatever is broken inside of her. It is also a look of intense pain, the kind of pain that happens when something breaks inside of us. And somewhere in his eyes I see gratitude, he’s grateful that of all the arms in the world this girl that he loves more than anything is letting go of herself in his arms.

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