The face of the virgin was perfect: calm,
sorrowful, serene, smooth – her heavy eyelids with the sensual curve of a
Tibetan arabesque, an ogive arch of adoration. The rest of the painting … one
needed more time and, perhaps, chutzpah to start criticising Botticelli – perhaps.
It was interesting how many people walked around the gallery with their
arms folded. Were all people so disconcerted in an art gallery? Anthony
unfolded his own arms and stuffed his hands in the pockets of his hoodie.
The room was like a Leonard Cohen concert or a Jane Goodall lecture or
the South Island – disturbingly full of white people. But then the old farts
hanging on the walls were the proverbial old, dead, white men too: crusty
popes, sleazy one-percenters and the long-suffering women they groped, one
saint with a hole in his head …
Anthony walked swiftly round the walls – ‘Old crap. Boring old crap.’
He circled back and sat down on the low,
broad seat before Madonna and Child with Six
Angels by Sandro Botticelli and
Workshop.
True, the composition was cool: around the calm, still point of that one
face the composition rotated beautifully with just that bit of weird, stylised
foliage in the bottom right to stuff it up. But one had to say – the rest of
the folks portrayed had weird, misshapen faces. What was that about? And none
more so than little baby Jesus Himself, intruding His ugly little mug into the
centre of the painting. And why was He wearing Lady Gaga’s dress?
The painting did have a freshness and brightness, an apparent newness,
which all the other paintings in the exhibition lacked. It was hard to believe
that it was 530 years old – it seemed to have just come from the studio (and
suddenly been lumbered with a giant gold frame as ugly and deadly as those on
all the other paintings).
Enough.
Anthony exited past another of the ubiquitous bored guards. How to get
out of this place? Through the International Contemporary Gallery?
The work of John Nixon – conceptual, minimalist abstraction: an orange
square, a blue rectangle.
‘Ridiculous modern crap.’
At last the hallowed and reverent gloom of the gallery was broken by
sunlight – the stairwell, windows and, beyond, a giant, green tree.
Barnaby McBryde
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