Thoughtloups And Squiggles Poem by gershon hepner

Thoughts with sense not recognizable,
horses running behind cart,
like squiggles that appear derisible
till they’ve been turned to works of art,
can be transformative provided they
are organized, but when they’re not,
we get no pleasure when they run away,
demanding, like a Rorschach blot,
to be interpreted, thoughtloups and squiggles
we cannot comprehend. If we’re
polite we’ll try suppressing any giggles
until the thinker is not near
enough to hear them, though it may be hard
to do so, since unlike the Rohr-
schach blot which doesn’t cause us to be tarred,
they may cause harm, as well as bore.

Inspired by Holland Cotter’s review of “Raphael to Renoir: Drawings From the Collection of Jean Bonna” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“Where Lines Become a Kind of Language, ” NYT, January 23,2009) :
Candy box displays like “Raphael to Renoir: Drawings From the Collection of Jean Bonna” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are natural crowd pleasers, and for obvious reasons. They’re very much about comparison shopping and personal taste. Relax-and-browse is their operative mode. If they are confections, their flavor still has range and intensities, from soft-center sugary to dense bittersweet. History is here if you want to find it, but if you don’t, that’s O.K. Enjoy. The 120 European drawings in the Met exhibition make such a package. Their owner, Jean Bonna, a Swiss banker, began his collecting career as a bibliophile half a century ago and bought his first drawing only in the late 1980s. Since then, with the help of seasoned experts, he has assembled an outstanding inventory. One of those experts, George Goldner, chairman of the Met’s drawings and prints department, organized the show. He has installed works roughly by date through three galleries and starts with something quite small: an ink-wash image of a praying man, his face seen in shadowed silhouette, by the 15th-century Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio. Physically, the piece is slight: an odd-shaped, four-inch-across scrap of blue paper marked with unfancy parallel ink strokes and white highlights. Expressively, with its pooled darkness and springy lines, it is substantial, bold without being a tour de force. In it three fundamental properties of drawing meet: material fragility, calligraphic propulsion and painterly, even sculptural weight. The show has other memorable examples of drawing-as-writing. A faint, scratchy ink landscape by the Florentine painter Baccio della Porta, better known as Fra Bartolommeo, suggests a letter quickly written as a pen was running dry. Cézanne’s graphite-and-watercolor “Wooded Landscape” seems to be composed largely of punctuation marks indicating starts, stops, pauses and so on. And what is Parmigianino’s “Holy Family With Shepherds and Angels” if not a devotional poem jotted down in a shorthand script made up entirely of abstract flourishes — squiggles and loops — that by some miracle cohere into recognizable shapes? In a catalog interview Mr. Bonna tells Mr. Goldner that this Parmigianino is one of his collection favorites, though on the whole he appears to favor more a resolved, paintinglike solidity of form. A red chalk study by Raphael of three running, shouting soldiers straddles the line between drawing


© 2009 Gershon Hepner 1/23/09