Art for a New Place

 I recently attended the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit.  I suggest not going.  It was something like $50 for about 45 min worth of actual content.  The content was well done and quite beautiful, but not $50 worth of beautiful.  Also, all the signs would say things like, "Gogh this way," except the "o" was a sunflower.  Just precious.  All of that said, it was almost worth it for one thing.  

Everyone knows the most popular Van Gogh paintings.  Sunflowers, his self portrait, Starry Night, the one with the Dogwood looking tree ... but I saw one that I'd never seen before.  It may have made the entire exhibit worth it.  It's called "Prisoner's Round."

The way it was displayed, I only saw part of it, but I immediately knew what it was.  It was prisoners walking in a circle.  And, sure enough, it's called "Prisoner's Round."  It's patterned after this image by another one of my favorite artists, Gustav Dore.  Van Gogh painted it while he was incarcerated at an asylum, so you can imagine why he chose this image.  

The painting immediately brought to mind the following stanza from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" by Oscar Wilde (who was himself incarcerated for the crime of being gay).  I cannot recommend this poem enough, although I imagine it would be much more meaningful for someone who had been to gaol (pronounced jail). 

We know not whether laws be right

Or whether laws be wrong

All we know who lie in gaol

Is that the walls are strong

And each day is like a year

A year whose days are long.

This gave me an idea.  I may be moving in the next month or so to a place where I could actually decorate.  I hadn't given much thought to decoration, especially artwork, but as soon as I saw this painting, I knew I wanted it on my wall.  And I thought that maybe I could put a stanza or three from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" beside it, the above and some of these:

This too I know—and wise it were

If each could know the same—

That every prison that men build

Is built with bricks of shame,

And bound with bars lest Christ should see

How men their brothers maim.

With bars they blur the gracious moon,

And blind the goodly sun:

And they do well to hide their Hell,

For in it things are done

That Son of God nor son of Man

Ever should look upon!

The vilest deeds like poison weeds

Bloom well in prison-air:

It is only what is good in Man

That wastes and withers there:

Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,

And the Warder is Despair

For they starve the little frightened child

Till it weeps both night and day:

And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,

And gibe the old and grey,

And some grow mad, and all grow bad,

And none a word may say.

And every human heart that breaks,

In prison-cell or yard,

Is as that broken box that gave

Its treasure to the Lord,

And filled the unclean leper's house

With the scent of costliest nard.

Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb

With crooked arrows starred,

Silently we went round and round

The slippery asphalt yard;

Silently we went round and round,

And no man spoke a word.

Silently we went round and round,

And through each hollow mind

The memory of dreadful things

Rushed like a dreadful wind,

And Horror stalked before each man,

And terror crept behind.

The problem is that the poem is so good that I'd want to put the entire thing on the wall.  Anyway, I thought I might do that with some other of my favorite images.  For example, here is Picasso's "Old Guitarist":

I would, of course, put an excerpt from Wallace Steven's "The Man with the Blue Guitar":

The man bent over his guitar,

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are 

Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,

A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar

Of things exactly as they are."

I'm not sure what excerpt I'd put with them, but I'd like to put these two images up prominently somewhere as well: