The Many Sided Cube

I chanced upon this painting once as my son and I slowly meandered our way through the American wing of our incredible Art Museum - St. Louis really does itself proud when it comes to the arts, I must say.

I love this museum because even though you assume you have seen everything over the years, you are suddenly gifted with a gem. It's a wonderful feeling! Art does that to a person. It stops you short in your ready assumptions.

The artist is one William Zorach, a Lithuanian born artist who eventually immigrated into the United States. William came from the artistic movement known as 'cubism'. It is a modern art form and, truthfully, not always to my taste where I have seen it before. But here, in this painting, I found it arresting and fascinating.

In a nutshell (a very simplistic, pedestrian nutshell, mind you, on my part) cubism strives to express multi- facets of the subject all at once. They can do this with fragmenting the painting or the people in the painting - to show all the intricacies of their personality. Or they can take a simple scene and show it from every angle at once. It is really an odd but wonderful phenomenon that when you are looking at a painting of this kind, sections come into focus while others recede, and you really DO see past, present, and perhaps future all at once in the subject. It is like looking for hidden paintings within paintings. It takes concentration and effort, and through these it slows you down to think about the true beauty found in perhaps the most ordinary thing you would probably have passed by in the street as something dull or one dimensional in meaning - with the assumption "oh, I know this. No mystery there". Cubists make you stop in your tracks and say, "perhaps I DON'T know".

This painting is called ‘Interior and Exterior’. I love it because in the foreground is this solid anchor of a woman and child around which the other meanings of her life circle. Like the painter opened up the buildings on their hinges to reveal to you the wonder that is inside their plain and solid walls; a wonder you might shrug off as ordinary, unaware of the drama and beauty of humanity they contain within.

This mother and her child are completely in focus and the faces are arresting and beautiful in their gentleness and unity. The love between the mother and child is evident. And from that love flow all the other aspects and activities of motherhood, both in the home and outside the home. In all the seemingly mundane, daily doings. It is the solid anchor of her love that gives meaning to it all.

I think it also shows how faceted motherhood is. It is heavy and pregnant with life. People might assume they know all about family life or pass a mother and child at the park or on the street and think they have them all figured out - as though they of course know what a mother is - and they walk on. Artists make us stop and question that certainty we have come too quickly to assert. And hopefully we are shocked into joy at the beauty of it all.

This painting, as the cubist artist strived to do, makes us ruminate over the intricacies of love and giving and busyness in being a true mother to a child.

Now I want to know more about this movement of artists. Pierre Reverdy, whom I was introduced to by a friend first as a poet, so that is how I know him, was inspired by the cubist artists. So, that makes me more intrigued. For the movement began in art, but was also tied to poetry and music. I am not sure how that works, but I would like to find out. That a technique in a visual art can be used in poetry and also in music. A juxtaposition of many meanings on top of one another all at the same time. Hopkins comes to mind with all the 'new words' he created in his poetry. Where many aspects of a thing come together in a new expression of that thing. He wasn't a cubist, of course, but I think he makes me understand how that can be reflected in words instead of paint.

I guarantee I will not like all cubist art, but I DO love this one painting chanced upon at my art museum and which made me stop to gaze awhile. And isn't that what art should do?

It made me wonder more deeply at the gift of being a Mother.