What was your most important/formative experience of art/culture?

Books in general and the library specifically was probably the most influential

My musical loves were framed by 3 albums my parents owned, 2 by the Clancy Brothers and 1 by Alan Sherman

I spent a lot of time in our local art gallery as a kid as well

The use of Auden's poem Musée des Beaux Arts in The film The Man Who Fell to Earth brought together 3 of my artistic loves, Auden, Bruegel and Bowie



Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

How I love that painting and that poem!

The story of (and behind) this painting is something I'd followed with great interest.

Here's a good one: Anselm Kiefer"s "Aschenblume" bloom of ashes, at the Museum of Modern Art in Ft. Worth. Multimedia, including clay--notice the cracked clay at the bottom. A deconstruction of a Nazi hall eroding away with a flower bloom arising from the ashes of the 3rd Reich.

" The work depicts the grand Mosaic Room in the Reich Chancellery, Berlin, designed by Albert Speer, receding into deep space, yet the artist has blurred its image by covering the surface of paint and emulsion with ash. The colossal ceremonial space is empty, except for the intrusion of a tall dried sunflower plant. In die Aschenblume, Kiefer uses unconventional materials to suggest processes of transformation. In this case, he suggests a space in a moment of transition, in which new images can grow from the brittle goals of the Third Reich."

https://static-secure.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Columnist/Columnists/2014/9/26/1411755312764/Anselm-Kiefer-retrospecti-014.jpg

one non-musical piece that made a huge impression/had a big impact on me

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

I've never experienced anything like it. I approached it as a tourist, as a sceptical tourist. The impact was emotional and physical and huge.

Oh, yes, I love that too. Maya Lin..

It's simply perfect.

I have to agree.
It overwhelmed me and left me squinting in man-tears.

I'm very lucky.
My parents brought culture and art to our home from their life abroad.

My father was a commercial artist(book covers, posters and architectural renderings.

My mother did child portraits.

The house was filled with music. Argentine, American and Australian folk music. Plus all the classics.

I was forever taking piano , accordion and recorder lessons.

A huge bookshelf was filled with art books, biographies and fiction.

I started playing music professionally at the age of 23. I never stopped.
I never will.
It's my passion

Brilliant!!. Im jealous of your parents.

Losing them was hard as you can imagine

You lucky bastard ! I am very happy for you. Never stop playing !

I think of Panz as an erudite musician; of course many if not most musicians have smarts, but Panzade has the added dollop of sanity.

Ps, I was fairly accomplished on keyboard, I started on accordian and wound up on Organ where I met Jimmy SMith as a kid and kept trying my hand at jazz organ till I had my hands blown up.
Now all I can play is dobro and pedal steel (All ass backwards)>
My folks werent accomplished in the arts but my mom and dad did push the arts. She hadda have an accordion player (Polak national instrument) and my dad was a jazz music fan but all business (and hunting). They did poo poo my skills at drawing until I started winning some shows as a kid and got the scholarship. Then my dad discovered Andrew Wyeth and MArk Rothko and no longer thought painters were "Bums"(just nuts)

Your mom's portraits are like Dorothea Lange style and I love your dad's stuff. His "off center mass of color" is what does it for that phrenetic scene


Seeing these things from others memory buckets makes me recall.
My intersection with " American Culture" was through my uncle Stosh, a Geologist college teacher who was a prospector for uranium and other trategics (like vanadium ore). Id spend many a summer vacation with him on his treks . I would draw the scenery and hed encourage me
"If you wanna be a scientist ya have to be able to envision your subject in 3D."

Overall, I had a pretty good childhood with the kinds of experiences that molded my destiny.

I still paint and draw, and play the dobro (I dont have the pedal steel anymore (It was part of a divorce settlement issue years ago) but I have a "Lap steel" )

My college was a short distance from the Frick museum. Also a short distance from Central Park. On long breaks, I would occasionally head for the park. Then I discovered the Frick. I wandered around. Enjoying not only the art but the thought that people actually lived in such a world. Then I saw Rembrandt's self-portrait. The painting spoke to me. Across centuries, cultures, oceans, etc. I felt connected to the man in the painting. The look in his eyes. The expression on his face. His intelligence and his pain. I went back to see the portrait many times.

I went to Amsterdam and visited his house. Went to the Rijksmuseum (sp?) to see many other paintings. I still feel a connection. How? Why? Who the hell knows?

Carravagio did that for me. This was a guy that was the first Bohemian (IMHO)

The self-portrait:

I love Carravagio via my gut. Have gotten to see many of his paintings, some in churches, always a kind of envelopment, one at the Doria Pamphilij, and some at a show in the whatsit, Palazzo Barberini. Very dark space for a person like me with poor dark vision, but sustainingly strong.

The Frick Collection! Gad, what a treasure. I'd never heard of it until a few
years ago. We toured it on a visit to New York. All gorgeous of course, and
then I walked into a room and beheld More and Cromwell (by Holbein) facing
off across a fireplace. It was like walking in on a pointed, but polite argument.

I too loved the Frick, have only been there once. I go on and on about it in my 2004 Osso in New York thread, a full-of-myself diary, but that just strings it out, Diane and I going there. I'd just met her that week/now we are long time friends. Also met Roberta that week. The Week that was.

The Frick. Two breathtaking Vermeers. And Turners across from each other on a wall. I gotta get myself back there.

PS: My mother, who mentioned at the Metropolitan Museum that she wasn't interested in looking at pictures of people she didn't know, was happy to be at the Frick. Such foinicha.

PPS: At one point in my early adulthood I decided that my parents should see the great art places that Noo Yawk had to offer. Natives who'd never been to the Metropolitan Museum! I schlepped them; they kvetched. The Guggenheim? This is aht? And I'm seasick.