Getting Hammered

But for once I wasn’t thinking in words; I was hammered by the image. I couldn’t explain what the picture expressed, what I intuited from it. But that it spoke, I had no doubt.

Patricia Hampl, from Blue Arabesque

Patricia Hampl’s book delves into her life changing experience of encountering a painting by Matisse at the Chicago Art Institute.

Getting “hammered” by an image. How often does that happen anyway? There is the infamous “Uffizi Syndrome,” where visitors at the museum start to hyperventilate and feel faint. So medical personnel are kept on hand for just such occurrences.

As for me, I am on a perpetual mission to be hammered by something I see.

In James Elkins’ Pictures and Tears, he asks a large group of his art history and critic colleagues if they have ever cried in front of a painting. He was amazed by the responses. Some said yes, they had cried when they were younger, but not now. Most believed that it would be viewed as extremely unprofessional for them to exhibit that degree of emotionalism toward a work of art.

Perhaps. But maybe you just have to be of a certain stature to own up. In the Sydney Pollack documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, Gehry talks about seeing a painting in a museum and how the floor fell out from underneath his feet. He was swept away by it and ended up using the same compositional structure of the painting as the foundation for one of his buildings.