Two Paintings

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
...live in the question.” 

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Earlier this summer I spent a lovely afternoon at the Norton Simon Museum with my friends Terri and Janis. After we'd looked at Japanese wood block prints, renaissance paintings, 18th and 19th century European art, and contemporary art for a couple of hours, Janis gave us an assignment. She said, if you could take just one painting home and hang it in your living room, which one would you choose? What a fun way to wander through a museum. I took the game to heart and revisited some of the galleries. 

I was pretty sure I wouldn't want a painting from the renaissance hanging in my living room, beautiful though they are. On the whole, they're too high church for a room that is home to a variety of books on Buddhism, Japanese manga, and Calvin and Hobbes collections. And I don't really want to be looked down upon by a portrait of the Madonna and Child or a martyred saint whenever my language gets a bit too colorful or my thoughts a bit too sinful.

Much of the 17th and 18th century art was a tad too dramatic for my taste. We don't go on a lot of fox hunts in my family. Nor do we lounge on our sofa in the nude. David With the Head of Goliath or Suicide of Cleopatra seemed a bit over the top for a room where some family members sit around in their pajamas eating cereal and reading Garfield comic books in the morning. The Impressionists are lovely, of course, but Monet and Degas remind me of my college dorm room where my roommate Laura and I also had a beer bottle display and a tacky postcard collection. 

In the end I chose two paintings. I explained to Janis that I really needed them both, because they spoke to me as a pair. She said that was OK. She's generous that way. Painted nearly 200 years apart, they both depict women lost in thought. The woman in Young Girl Writing A Love Letter, by Pietro Antonio Rotari c. 1755, wears a dreamy smile as she writes to the object of her affection. She is hopeful, full of passion and dreams. Whereas the subject in Woman With A Book, by Pablo Picasso, 1932 strikes me as more serious, perhaps wondering about the direction her life is taking, questioning her heart. I get the feeling that she isn't thinking about the book in her lap.

I bought note cards with each of these paintings at the gift shop so I could hang them together, side by side, in my house. (I thought the security guards might not approve of me moving paintings around the museum.) When I look at them, I feel a connection to these two women as they contemplate their lives, the choices they've made, the dreams they've had, the people they've loved, the direction their lives are taking. They remind me how important it is to pause, to wonder, to reflect, to ask the deepest questions of my heart, and wait patiently for the answers to unfold.

Two of my favorite women deep in thought at the Norton Simon Museum