The National Gallery of Art stepped up to help me figure out what to do with my first free Thursday afternoon in a long time. A pair of scheduled gallery talks seemed a perfect way to decompress.
A young woman from the museum led a gallery tour of Augustus Saint Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial. I’d already seen the sculpture (pictured above) at the National Gallery during the holidays, but I figured this was a chance to get a better understanding of the exhibit. The bronzed plaster at the National Gallery has a sister version of bronze on Boston Common. National Gallery’s Tell it With Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial features the magnificent bronzed plaster and an extensive collection of photos and documents detailing how the black Union regiment was formed and deployed during the Civil War.
I’ve been fascinated by this sculpture since reading Robert Graves’ For the Union Dead decades ago in undergraduate school. The stark, apocalyptic images Graves paints of Boston, including the image of “Colonel Shaw/ and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry” in a monument that “sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat” was burned in my mind. It’s one of the first poems that truly moved me.
From the gallery tour I drifted over to the West Building Lecture Hall to listen to UCLA professor Sharon E.J. Gerstel’s talk, Witnessing Byzantium: The Greek Perspective. She packed the place, and although the lecture was a tad dry, the subject was fascinating. She focused on two artifacts that followed the theme of an exhibit at the Gallery titled Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections. One was a religious themed weaving; the other a bracelet designed to secure the sleeves of a dress. Gerstel spent considerable time in Thessalonike, a Greek city that was part of the Byzantine empire, and she gave the history of each artifact: How it survived the ages, was discovered, and how scholars pieced together its history.
On my way out of the gallery, I dropped by a room packed with Van Goghs to look again at Green Wheat Fields, a recent acquisition that is simply stunning. But what hooked me was Roulin’s Baby, which had a strange similarity to the latest internet meme that day: Devil Baby. You tell me: separated at birth?
