I saw this on a poster at school and it reminded me. It was 1986; I was 13 years old and visiting the Louvre in Paris. I walked into a room and was stopped in my tracks by something. I started to cry. Not because it was sad, but because it was so beautiful. It was the Winged Victory statue of the goddess Nike. I was very familiar with the image from countless pictures I’d seen. I mean, hell it’s one of the most famous statues in the world.
But I was completely unprepared for the impact it had on me seeing it in person. For one thing, it was bigger than I had pictured it (over 10 feet tall). But it just has a presence that I can’t explain at all, that doesn’t even begin to come through in photographs. I still get chills remembering it, all these years later.
So have you ever had a piece of artwork just knock you on your ass, emotionally, and make you cry?
In the Chicago Museum of Art there is a room full of Monet. I’m not sure I cried so much as lost my ability to stand and breathe. I had to brace myself against the door frame. It was crazy. My two favorite artists are Salvador Dali and Claude Monet, but I’ve been in a roomful of Dali and never had that sort of emotional response.
The first time I went to Paris, we visited the Musee d’Orsay–home of many of the most recognizable Impressionist pieces in the world. (I LOVE the Impressionists.) I gasped, I oohed and aahed and even choked up at some of them. We had a splendid visit and I treasure the photo of my family taken on the outdoor deck with Paris splayed out in the background.
But my second trip to Paris, I dragged my husband to L’Orangerie–a smallish museum at the foot of the Tuilleries. I wanted to see the Monet Waterliliies there. I knew they would be beautiful, but I was unprepared for the size and scope and presentation. They fill the space. They surround you. They were painted specifically to be viewed there. I felt embarrassed as I sobbed upon seeing them. Each was more beautiful than the last. I tear up even now as I think back on the sublime perfection of those long minutes I spent soaking in the Waterlilies. Husband took a picture in which I’m framed by the paintings, tears running down my face.
I love Paris, and am not done visiting/loving it yet.
I’ve posted about this before, but the first time I saw Guernica in person, I felt sick and had to leave the gallery and find someplace to sit down for a few minutes. Easily the most profound reaction I’ve ever had to a work of art.
I’ve told this story on the board before. My wife had to flee the Rothko Chapel in Houston it affected her so strongly. “It’s all about death,” she said.
My favourite painting in the world is The Return of the Hunters by Bruegel (I have also seen it referred to as The Hunters In The Snow). Last year I booked a trip to Vienna without knowing this painting is on display there. In fact, by extraorindary coincidence, I ended up staying at a hotel just ten minutes from the Kunsthistoriches Museum, where the painting is on display.
As soon as possible after checking in at the hotel, I raced to the Museum and found the painting on the third floor. It was a wonderful moment. I have loved this work for about 20 years, and at last I could see it ‘in the flesh’ so to speak. A painting dated to around 1565, and still looking magnificent, still managing to evoke so many moods and complex emotions. It didn’t make me cry, exactly, but it did create a sort of whirlwind of feelings inside, and overwhelmed me. There was a bench just in front of it, and I sat there for a long time just admiting the painting and falling in love with it all over again, trying to come to terms with all the emotions it coaxes out of me.
When I unexpectedly ran into Goya’s Saturn at the Prado, eye level, close up, I felt very queasy. Almost got sick. Great painting. Otherwise I usually just feel awe when I experience something really. . . awesome, like the Ghent altarpiece.
ianzin-- I love that painting too. Breugel’s great. Those peaks in the background of Hunters-- you wonder what this boy from flat-as-a-pannekoek Breda, Netherlands, must have thought while headed to Italy and hitting the alps for the first time. Also I’m terribly jealous (that’s an emotion!) of the fellow who’d commissioned that series of seasons in the first place for his dining room outside Antwerp. . . lucky bastard. The “Fall” one is splendid-- just as atmospheric as the winter scene.
I especially like the version of Babel that’s in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, too–terribly detailed and clever.
Also, I was once wandering through the Met in New York and I walked into a room that took my breath away. Before I even had time to register what was in it, I was instantly aware that I was in the presence of a collection of the extraordinary. It was full of Rembrandt portraits.
So not his final work, but, his painting of the place where he would end his life.
I can see him in that painting, standing on that middle road, the crack of the pistol shot, the crows suddenly rising from the field, darkening the sky… .
As with Guernica, knowing the back story changes the emotion evoked by the work for me.
I’d never heard of that painting before I saw it at the Van Gogh Museum, but it really struck me.
I don’t think a painting has ever moved me to tears, but when I was in college, an exhibition of art by concentration camp prisoners came to campus and my magazine writing professor took the class to the museum so we could each write about it. I was particularly moved by two drawings - here’s a link to the exhibit.
A number of years ago, the Cleveland Museum of Art hosted the “Treasures of the Vatican” exhibition. I was raised Catholic but had long since ditched Catholicism, and I approached the exhibition with a fair amount of disdain and eye-rolling as I looked at elaborately embroidered vestments and the like.
One of the showpieces was Caravaggio’s “Deposition from the Cross.” Growing up, we had lots of art books in the house, so this was a piece I was familiar with – as a 3 x 4 inch black-and-white reproduction.
So I wound my way through all the altar cloths and jewel-encrusted what-nots, turned a corner into a very dark gallery, and was walloped by the Caravaggio piece. The painting was HUGE – the figures are life size. I think I literally gasped when I saw it. It was overwhelming. As other posters have described, I was in no way prepared to have that kind of reaction to a piece of artwork.
Yes, which takes more steps than just right clicking and choosing “copy link location” so why would you do that…? (In IE it’s something stupid like “copy bookmark”)
Simon Schama’s excellent “Power of Art” series ran on PBS–& will probably run again. His Rothko episode focused on paintings in London. But he also came to Houston:
