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Xenophobia in the search for cabinetry
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Oct. 13, 1999 |
Ingres. Now that bastard could paint. It's a wonderful show; what swanlike, powdery forearms! What speed-freak persistence of graphite detail! What toothsome taco-folds of organza! Ingres, according to the legend on the museum wall, painted the "Who's Who of the ruling elite in France" – those over-privileged monsters of the upper 1 percent who possessed "birth, beauty, politics, wealth and intellect" in great measure. About five minutes into the show you realize that Ingres' best subjects were winsome, horny young comtesses with husbands six times their age and the bored, walleyed trophy wives of civil servants in French occupied Rome, all of whose refined and dutiful gazes implored their portrait painter to knock over the easel and shred their foundation garments with his bare teeth; these, one can see, were the works that earned him real love. Not so his lurid Gothic Napoleons; Ingres should have known these would bomb at the Salon of 1806. After all, why turn a macho blue-faced dwarf of an emperor into the Infant of Prague; a fat, angry little head exploding from a regal white pyramid of bunny fur, replete with tiny golden toe-shoes and various holy playthings? Cintra Wilson Cintra Wilson's column appears every other Wednesday in People + Archives
What I came away with was a sense of how gilded a terrarium Ingres lived in; a racially segregated, class-isolated, religiously aloof, white, rich world of opulent comforts, overcivilized enough to be discreetly smarmy. I was musing about this on the subway when the car was besieged by a born-again ex-crackhead, a body-built African-American fellow in razor-pleated slacks and tight nylon T-shirt who dropped his enormous duffel bag full of bilingual anti-Satan pamphlets and began screaming an impromptu sermon on the vengefully xenophobic inclinations of Lord Jesus for a full half hour. His dogma was ruining my afternoon and hurting my ears, but I wanted to let him do his show. I sat through it because his peculiar mania needed us to sit through it; he thought he was doing us a great, spiritual, humanitarian favor; actually, we were doing him one, by not getting up in a huff and changing cars. "You all gonna die!" He screamed, with an ex-addict' s smug zealotry. "Maybe you'll die today! Ain't no getting into heaven unless you saved and born again! That's the only way in! Everybody else going to hell!" Oh, shut up, I thought, silently, unable to read my fantastic Dawn Powell book. It makes me enraged that all organized religions arrogantly assume that they are the Only True Faith and that everybody else is dangerously, infectiously evil and going to hell and it's their obnoxious mission in life to tell everyone else how tragically wrong they're living. Patience and tolerance is the only recourse; one must find something positive about the tormentor to concentrate on. When he finally left the car, I clapped. He thanked me. I was clapping for his impressive volume; he would have been audible from a manhole three blocks away.
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