PHLAC

I met Berenice Szurely (visiting from Paris) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art at 3:30 on this Tuesday in April. She had seen plenty of Courbet’s work in her native country, but this was the first major retrospective here in thirty years.

Any photographer, I think, would appreciate Courbet’s enhanced realism, his use of warm bathing light. His self-portraits got most of my attention but several large-scale works, depictions of interiors of Parisian life landed the most impact and extended viewings. The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up a Seven-Year Phase of My Artistic Life (1855) was too large to transport to New York but was represented in a smaller-scale digital reproduction. This painting for lack of anything better to write, blew me away; I hope to see the original at The Louvre in Paris. Courbet was often controversial. When some of his works were rejected by the established salons—the previously-mentioned work in particular—he mounted his own exhibitions at his Pavilion of Realism.

Outside on the steps of the Met, an Austerian coincidence was in the making. I shot some quick frames to test exposure. Several days later when I began deleting some of the images in Lightroom, I noticed a guy in one shot whose face I recognized. Could I have been standing ten feet in front of this person with my camera and not notice him? I hadn’t been in touch with him in a few years but gave it a shot by sending the image in an email. “Yep, that’s me.” It was in fact Steve from Los Angeles who I had shared a villa with in Tuscany for a photography workshop in the summer of 2003.

Berenice and I eventually trekked down to the East Village for dinner at Lavagna. Along the way, I made her a few souvenirs of her time in New York City.