I love looking out the upper level of a parking garage at rooftops and chimneys. It makes me think of Dickens novels. And I’ve always been interested in art that shows a view from a window or someone looking out a window.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art must like windows, too, given that it mounted a whole show called Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century. I’m told that the exhibit’s focus was on how a window can frame a subject, but I’m more interested in what the person at the window is feeling.
There is a lovely painting at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts showing a young woman working at a sewing machine and gazing out a window through which a soft, dreamy light is falling. What is she thinking? “The Open Window,” painted by Elizabeth Okie Paxton in 1922, gives me the feeling that the woman is thinking about what other people are doing out in the world or what she might want to do someday.
I got a new insight into gazing-out-windows art from a review of the movie Hugo in the NY Times.
Manohla Dargis writes, “Mr. Scorsese caps this busy introductory section with Hugo looking wistfully at the world from a window high in the station. The image mirrors a stunning shot in his film Kundun, in which the young, isolated Dalai Lama looks out across the city, and it also evokes Mr. Scorsese’s well-known recollections about being an asthmatic child who watched life from windows — windows that of course put a frame around the world. This is a story shared by all children, who begin as observers and turn (if all goes well) into participants. But ‘Hugo’ is specifically about those observers of life who, perhaps out of loneliness and with desire, explore reality through its moving images, which is why it’s also about the creation of a cinematic imagination — Hugo’s, … Mr. Scorsese’s, ours.”
I had not thought about that before — that we all start out as observers.
Thanks for highlighting the show at the Met of the role of windows in art, I’ll make sure to go and see it!
I’ve always been fascinated by how windows provide a natural frame for whatever can be observed on the other side: I recall from when I was growing up seeing during winter time walks on the cold, snow covered streets of Stockholm, seeing beautifully decorated windows with lights and christmas ornaments that framed cosy, warm apartments inside. Or, in the case when I was looking out, the framing of a window would give the contrast between light and warmth inside and the snow covered trees and streets lit up by the occasional street lamps. I continue to enjoy how windows capture the change in seasons and light.
One of the first posters I had was by Raoul Dufy of a window in Nice (I could not find the exact painting online, but this one is painted from the same window and gives the general idea): http://www.1artclub.com/interior-with-open-windows-by-raoul-dufy/
Thank you for the lovely Dufy painting and for this glimpse of your early years. The image of cold and dark outdoors and warmth and light indoors is evocative to me too — mostly because of Dickens (again).
I like how the trapezoidal windows at the Whitney Museum frame the activity on Madison Ave below…sometimes just as interesting as the art inside.
Yes, the design of a building that houses art really matters. The new MFA wing for Art of the Americas has windows in stairwells, and they give a view of the Japanese garden while you move between floors; so even climbing the stairs continues the aesthetic experience, instead of breaking it up
–and still are when we come to new places and cultures.
Margareta
Thanks so much for continuing to read, Margareta.