RETURNING TO MFAH
Our art critic was one of the first visitors back inside the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston since it reopened. Here’s what she saw.
Ronn Canon arrived about 10 minutes before the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston reopened to members Wednesday morning.
That made him the first nonstaffer, aside from Houston Chronicle photographer Elizabeth Conley and me, to visit Houston’s largest art institution in more than two months.
Canon didn’t have to navigate much of the small maze of stanchions and two remote-sensor devices that look like iPhones on tripods just inside the main Beck Building doors, where visitors have their temperatures checked before entering the vaunted halls, wearing face masks.
Eager and purposeful, he wasn’t fazed by the process, which took a few seconds. A museum member for more than 50 years, he normally visits at least once a week and had last been there March 11, a few days before the MFAH closed.
Canon was headed downstairs, through the Turrell tunnel and up to the mezzanine of the Law Building, anxious to pick up where he had left off with the “Glory of
Spain” show. “I only did about two galleries on previous trips,” Canon said. “It’s just a little overwhelming. It’s a big, big exhibition.”
More than a dozen museum staffers stood around in the entry hall, nearly outnumbering the first wave of visitors. “Good morning! Welcome back!” they said cheerfully from behind their face masks. “You’re free to explore as you will!”
Architect Peiwen Yu, like Canon, said she also normally visits weekly, partly to watch the construction progress on the Kinder Building. “Sometimes I just want to be part of this environment,” Yu said. “I like to visit a real gallery space. In the past month, I’ve been doing a lot of streaming to see different galleries and videos, but it’s not the same as coming here and being part of this beauty. It’s just a place that makes you feel like part of the city.”
Yu also ambled off toward “Glory of Spain,” as did most of the visitors during that first hour. The museum logged 160 member visits that day and 486 on Thursday, with slightly longer hours. It opened to the public Saturday.
Beyond the big attractions
Happy to be back but still feeling cautious, I headed to the permanent galleries on the Beck Building’s second floor, knowing they would be near-empty. They were quiet even before the shutdown, except during school tours or patrons’ dinners, when a room could be stuffed wall to wall with party tables of well-heeled, shoulder-to-shoulder guests and a phalanx of waiters.
I wondered what would speak to me now in the galleries that hold the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Collection and works in the MFAH’s permanent collections of European art, with their color-coded walls of paintings spanning centuries.
Temporary exhibitions such as “Glory of Spain” and “Francis Bacon: Late Paintings,” both up through the summer, educate and entertain more dynamically. They keep visitors coming but also make it easy to forget that the soul of the museum is its own encyclopedic foundation.
The MFAH, and by extension all of Houston, owns more than 70,000 works of art covering the arc of history from antiquity to the present. Maybe we have not appreciated them enough.
Amid the many dramatic saint and sinner narratives from the Renaissance, when artists painted for churches and the aristocracy, Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Veil of
Veronica” caught my eye. It’s based on an early medieval legend about a pious woman who wiped sweat from Christ’s face on the way to Calvary, miraculously capturing his image on the cloth. The subject was a big seller for Zurbarán; his studio produced more than a dozen versions of it.
His minimal composition was unusual for the 1630s. The face is realistic yet doesn’t aim for a realistic perspective. It’s rendered expressively in fine, reddish-brown lines and tilted sideways, as if Christ is looking slightly back, over his shoulder.
I’ve seen other versions that are more refined, but the tour-de-force is still the shadowy, draping cloth, suspended ever so vulnerably from a couple of threads in a way that creates a voluptuous shape Georgia O’Keeffe would have appreciated.
I breezed by Sebastiano Ricci’s “Last Supper” except to notice that the apostles were not social distancing at the table. The graphically strong “Geneological Tree of the Mercedarian Order,” by an unidentified Bolivian artist, struck me for the opposite reason: Its figures are isolated like the tapers of a candelabra on little leafy saucers atop each branch of a large tree. The way I see things has changed.
On this day, gold leaf became a magnet, like shimmering hope as I wove aimlessly through the galleries, ignoring their chronological order. The ornate Colonial frame of the 18th-century Peruvian “The Child Mary Spinning,” a painting depicting the mother of Christ as a young aristocrat, would be stunning with nothing in it. But the golden lace details, the jewelry and the fine rays of the little girl’s halo looked as miraculous as anything across the street in “Glory of Spain.”
That sent me back to a room of Italian paintings from Florence and Siena that date to the late Byzantine era, awash in gold-leaf backgrounds that offset the pallid skin of figures rendered in tempera with fine eyes and blushing cheeks.
Bernardino Fungai’s deeply satisfying narrative panel, “The Beloved of Enalus Sacrificed to Poseidon and Spared,” from about 1512, is a richer masterpiece that deserves a deeper dive. There is so much classical history to be learned in these galleries, along with lessons in art. Knowing my ride would be arriving soon, I focused on the left corner of that painting, where thin gold strokes create the rays of a sun low in the sky and cast a glow on the leaves of trees.
Back into the world
I couldn’t leave without devoting time to Fra Angelico’s “Saint Anthony Shunning the Mass of Gold,” one of the smallest and best paintings in these galleries. Probably part of an alterpiece, it depicts a hallucinogenic episode from the life of a hermit who is regarded as the founder of monasticism.
The devil was tempting Anthony with luxuries: Fra Angelico places the saint on open ground, flanked by barren, jagged rocks and looking down at a chunk of gold slightly larger than his ornate halo. His right hand is raised: Is he shielding himself from daylight, thinking about giving in and picking up the treasure, or resisting it?
Exiting the museum, I pushed the door handles with my backside, removed my face mask and took a deep breath in the bright sunlight. I knew chunks of gold would be beckoning everywhere, in other forms — the desire to hug friends, to eat a nice meal in a restaurant, to shop without fear.
For now, a return trip to the museum will suffice.