82nd & Fifth from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Keith Christiansen

Photography by

Mark Morosse

Madonna and Child
Berlinghiero (Italian)
Tempera on wood, gold ground
Gift of Irma N. Straus, 1960 (60.173)

Consortium, Edward Barbieri, Director, 'I sat down under his shadow' by Edward C Bairstow © Oxford University Press 1925. All rights reserved. Recorded 1998 on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Deux-Elles Limited, DXL827

For many people,
another picture of the Madonna and Child
is not something that particularly entrances them.
But to me, the other paintings don’t have the magic of this one.
Unlike a video, unlike the images that we’ve become so used to seeing all around us,
her expression is forever: these furrowed brows, the way the
cheek tenses up over the nostrils, the pouting lips,
the pleading expression on her eyes. It’s an expression that can be dead,
unless we engage ourselves in it.
Each time it’s slightly different,
because we engage in it
differently.
One week we’re taken by the
pattern on her knuckles; the next week, we’re taken by
the softness of the modeling of her face, the next week
by the patterning of the drapery, the next week the way that she relates to this
gold background. Not a room, not a landscape, a gold background. The artist makes it clear that it’s from another world through the
abstracting
of forms.
We are called upon to give life to this image,
and of course it’s why they’re perfect receptacles for prayers and
supplications on the part of the faithful.
In contemporary art, the abstract and the figural are two divisive forces.
You either are one or the other. Berlinghiero’s picture brings them together.
You get both the abstract and the emotional,
the human and the sacred. And it’s this combination of
modes of expression, abstract and naturalism, that create this
sense of suspension, and of
timelessness. And so you have an image that is on a
threshold between two worlds: the sacred realm, and the daily life that we live in.
And this is to me at the very heart of what art is about. The idea
that something engages us simply because it looks like what
we see around us, this does not interest me at all.
What we actually want from art is
a work that takes us someplace where we aren’t,
someplace where our
imagination is engaged in a new way.
It’s not shouting,
it’s not begging for our attention.
But once we focus on it and engage in it, it takes us someplace.

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82nd & Fifth

ThresholdKeith Christiansen

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