The People In The Picture

I might have missed this wonderful little art exhibit if I hadn’t been mad at the moment.

Okay, back in spring break I was going to meet Christy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Now if you know Christy, you know that among her many gifts, punctuality is not in that line-up. I called. I texted. She was on her way. I waited. Finally, we met up. What was most egregious to me is that when she had arrived she didn’t even look for me! She just figured no one would wait for her since she was so late. So she went about looking around in the Met while I had continued to wait. Then when we finally met up, and I heard the tale of how she didn’t wait anticipating I wouldn’t wait…well, I was steamed.

To blow off some steam I decided to duck into this small exhibit in the Met and let myself cool down.

The exhibit was something about this Cezanne painting called The Card Players. I figured I would admire the Cezanne and then resume the afternoon plans.

But in this little exhibit on this seemingly mundane painting, as usual at the Met, I was greeted with a world of knowledge, and realized yet again how easy it is to overlook something. Or certainly to forget that there is probably more depth from what first meets the eye.

Look at the painting at the top. It is very typical Cezanne. He paints with a rough texture, reminding the viewer of the painterly qualities of composition and how he loves to explore the “volumetrics” of people and subjects in his paintings.

But there was more. Cezanne had picked a topic in art history (card playing) that had a long history—I kind of knew this, but not to the extent I would learn in the next half hour! For about 500 years painters had taken up the subject of card playing so as to moralize and weigh in on the dangers of bad choices in one’s life. Durer and Caravaggio are two of the famous artists who had added to the debate about how card playing could ruin your life.

But the curator of the show wrote that Cezanne had no desire to sermonize about the evils or sins of card playing. He simply wanted to pick up a thread of art history, the oft-told tale of card playing, and ask the viewer to look at the people playing. Cezanne had no interest in trying to shape the moral life of a young viewer. He wanted us to look at the people playing cards, not the demon instruments in their hands. Cezanne asked the gardeners at his estate to pose for the painting. Of course they must have been surprised—it was common knowledge that there are certain people who make for subjects of art works, and certain people who definitely do not have the status to be the subject of an art work.

As I walked around the room—the Met had put other examples of the moralizing card player paintings and etchings around—I saw what Cezanne was going for. Cezanne was doing what really great teachers try and do. He wanted us to look more deeply, beyond the surface or concrete subject of what was going on. He wrote, and the Met quoted him, that he wanted his hardscrabble gardeners to look important, to have the same kind of volume and value as a pharaoh from Egypt, or a king from Europe, or a banker.

I quickly got over my frustration with the Late One (I have had to do that many times in the nearly 17 years I have known Christy!) and went and got her to show her around the room. As we walked around the room, we realized how easy it is to overlook something, or someone, seemingly mundane. There is always a story there, for us to explore. Cezanne was urging us to get past silly moralizing (I won’t even begin to make jokes about politicians who spout Family Values and then end up resigning amidst tears and shame) and focus on people. Who are these men? What are their stories? What do we learn about them? What more do we need to know to better understand them?

What a lovely lesson and reminder in that quick little art exhibit on Cezanne.

Later that week Christy and I went to see a Broadway show about which we knew next to nothing. We knew it starred the spectacular performer Donna Murphy and we knew the title, The People In The Picture, and we knew we got to go for $4 each. What else does one need to know???

As we entered the theater (the rehabbed old disco palace Studio 54) we saw all these black and white photos up on the walls of families we didn’t know. The stage had been created as one giant picture frame angled out towards the audience with an enormous crack in it. As the musical began a photograph of unknown people projected above the stage. Who were these people? What was the point? It turns out this was a musical about an episode in the Holocaust.

Other than the creation of the state of Israel, the greatest and most profound reaction to the Holocaust has been the extraordinary outpouring of art that has attempted to come to terms with this egregious event, from The Diary of Ann Frank to Cabaret to Schindler’s List and on and on. The People In The Picture, this heart stopping musical, would be the most recent attempt. The People In The Picture asks us to take a hard look at the suffering and loss that resulted from this diaspora and tragedy.

The people in this picture of the show is “The Warsaw Gang,” a ragtag troupe of actors barely surviving, but finding solace and entertaining their fellow Jews amidst the pogroms and poverty of 1930s Poland. Their story is told in flashback as troupe leader Raisel, nearing the end of her life, shares her life’s journey with her granddaughter, Jennie.

In her memories, The Warsaw Gang literally comes to life on stage in all its glory and ultimate tragedy. And even though we know from the start that Raisel survived the Holocaust, it is only at the play’s climax that we learn the terrible toll it took on her and her unhappy daughter.

The triumph of The People In The Picture is that the show insists upon—and earns—heroic stature for even small gestures of humanity. A man loses his life over bringing a doll to a little girl. Another man is knifed to death because he cannot ultimately joke his way out the anti-Semitism of bullies. One by one the good and noble people we have come to admire and understand from the picture are murdered. By the end of the show we know so much more, we feel so much more for the people in the picture.

Donna Murphy miraculously morphs back and forth between robust womanhood and old age. I watched how as one number ended, simply by taking her glasses out of her pocket and rolling up her sleeves, it was as if she aged 40 years. She was marvelous.

Christy and I loved the show. But there were many in the audience who thought it was ridiculous and stupid. At intermission we heard two young, 20-somethings harrumphing their way out of the theater uttering, “That’s 75 minutes of my life I won’t ever get back.” They just didn’t get it. Oh well. At the end of the show there was a “talk-back” with some of the actors and creative team of the show. Christy and I love these things—we always learn more and get more juicy context about a show.

The people who stayed for the talk-back, maybe only about 30, glowed with appreciation for the show. Many of them were grand-children of survivors of the Holocaust, and they always struggled how to better understand the enormous sufferings of their grandparents. The writer of the show said that that was why she wrote this piece. She found a few photographs from her parents and just wondered about their lives, she needed to figure out what made these people in these pictures tick. The grateful audience applauded them and thanked them for humanizing this period in a new way. Christy and I walked home, grateful that in that city we experienced so many moments in which we learned and remembered to consider people and incidences we might overlook. As I anticipated coming back to Jordan after spring break to finish, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, I relished that opportunity to think about those sepia pictures and their lives.

So—one art exhibit reminds us that attention must be paid to even the card players in a painting. And another musical urges us to consider what goes on beyond the borders of a photograph. How stunning to have these reminders—almost like the biblical urgency to “consider the lilies of the field.”

As I pack up for the year, think about graduation and all the hundreds of pictures taken at the conclusion of this school year, it is important to think of those pictures and the people. Decades from now will viewers know the struggles, experience the joys that brought those teen-agers to that moment? Will the men and women look back and see beyond the tossing of a hat, or see that the smile is so well-earned because it was hard to get there? How good to remember to look beyond the borders of the photographs we find and try and re-create the epic battles and triumphs that allowed that photograph to come into being.

Oh, I love learning from art and theater! I am reminded of the great quotation from the snarky writer Paul Rudnick: “Most convicted felons are just people who were not taken to museums or Broadway musicals as children.”