Beauty And Doubt Poem by gershon hepner

Beauty should be cause of doubt,
remaining as a paradox
within a fog that, with lights-out,
become its combination locks
which only should be opened for
the people that it may deceive
and all its images adore,
since they’re unable to believe
that lying very far beyond
the beauty that they worship lie
not icons of which they are fond
but feelings hidden from the eye,
felt only by the loving heart
that longs for union of the mind
with images that works of art
cannot portray till eyes are blind.
The image is to history
what certainty must be to doubt,
solution of a mystery
that true love can do well without.

Michael Kimmelman (“Unravelling a 15th-Century Whodunit, ” NYT, December 11,2008) writes about three images attributed to the Master of Flémaille, St. Veronica, Madonna and Child and Gnadenstuhl:
Here at the Städel Museum “The Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden” is an old-fashioned whodunit. Almost exhaustingly erudite, it mixes up very great Netherlandish paintings of the 15th century with a few not so great ones to unravel perennial questions from galaxy academe about which artist painted what. Why should we care? For the same reason film buffs debate if Howard Hawks was the real director behind “The Thing From Another World, ” the sci-fi classic from 1951 he produced, rather than Christian Nyby, the credited director, or whether the 1943 thriller “Journey Into Fear, ” for which Norman Foster is listed as director, was taken over by Orson Welles, who played a Turkish police detective in it and whose other movies it partly resembles.We should care because, commerce and the usual scholarly nitpicking aside, the debate is itself an excuse for looking closer, and because piecing together any great artist’s legacy is a bit like composing a novel, every chapter part of the artist’s grand narrative, without all of which the story is incomplete. And, well, also because good mysteries beg to be solved…. And yet. Some things are clear. The weary, aged face of Veronica looks deeply, memorably human. The young woman from Berlin is heartbreakingly beautiful. Elsewhere, a painting of a stout man who at first looks identical to a second portrait is built up from layers of paint that subtly absorb light and give weight and density to the face. Max J. Friedländer, the eminent historian, many years ago attributed the portrait to the Master of Flémalle, then later wondered if it wasn’t by Rogier. The curators here think maybe it was. But maybe not. Dendrochronological tests, to measure the dates of trees, have estimated the age of the wood panels on which it and other pictures were painted; spectrographs and X-rays have provided proof of under-drawings, pentimenti and erasures. The famous Mérode Altarpiece from the Cloisters in New York, long attributed to the Master of Flémalle, turns out to be partly copied, it seems, from a picture in Brussels, long thought to have been a copy of the altarpiece. That’s nice to know. But in the end the story of this exhibition is that beauty resides not just in the pictures (of course) but in doubt itself. That art of such profound and unprecedented verisimilitude, which took such pains to record the minutest details of the world, should remain shrouded in such a fog is both a paradox and healthy reminder of a basic truth. Great art is always a mystery.


12/11/08