Art played like a small town cat, but now he's right in there!

SID CAESAR, AN ARTIST SITTING IN MY LIVING ROOM, ASKS THIS QUESTION, "DO YOU HAVE TO BE EDUCATED TO ENJOY ART?"

Marilyn says of course not. I nod my head to that. Hell, I used art to pick up beautiful women. Just stood behind them in galleries while they were gazing and muttered, ‘ It’s amazing how much his concepts of color and composition have changed, isn’t it?’ I didn’t have a clue what the hell is was talking about! Didn’t need t. It didn’t matter. Here was a bear of a man both sensitive and literate! Hoary. So it goes.

On a more serious agreement, an event in a little church in Creglingen, Germany with a altarpiece by Tilman Riemenschneider, the master wood carver, proves Marilyn’s point. We’re overcome by the 18 feet high carving in Linden wood. We stare. We gawk. We cry. The doors open and in come about forty 14 year old German boys, yakking, chewing, pushing. Then the first wave looks up and salience! It sweeps back through the line of pairs like a serpent’s tongue. Amazed, no dumbfounded, I watch them fall into the pews, apples neglected, mouths open but no sounds, and I know, really know for the first time, magic makes the world go forward!

We became addicts, and traced Riemenschneider across Europe for weeks on end, checked off each and every one of his works. Our tears flowed. Truly magical healing took place. So it goes..

Then David, that carving by Mickey de Angelo. The de Angeles lived next door to me in Baltimore. Fredrico was the shining star, no one figured on Mickey. So it goes. You enter the university’s hall, in Florance, turn to your right and fifty, seventy feet away, David leaps off his perch right into your bloody soul! Every thing else blurs. You lurch forward, stop below his feet. and how long you stare depends on how great the magic spell it casts on you . For most it’s much longer than they later like to admit. Hardly anyone, from casual tourist, to devoted art lover realizes that on either side of that hall are five or six more Micky's! Some of the best things he has ever done. And it’s the same in the Sistine Chapel. His final judgment rips all the Raphaels and Botticellis on the other walls right out of your vision. So it goes. The magic of those works just overpower everything in your path. You catch the other stuff on the way out. And if you’re really cool, you laugh, to yourself, of course, and shake your head. So it goes.

But since the world is my circus, my favorite is a Texas dude in the Picasso musso in Paris, a five or six story mansion. You start at the top, with his collection of other artists. The next floor down is his very early periods, then you drop a floor to the Blue, and Rose periods. From here the other floors become more and more Picasso; really abstractions, the familiar wonders of a guy who really revolted. I was at the bottom, staring at the statues, especially the bronze goat, when a female voice asked, ‘ So this wasn’t so bad was it, honey?” I turned and there is Tex, boots and ten gallon hat. He shakes his very handsome middle aged face and declares, ‘ Babe, the guys on the top three floors were good. Really good. But the ones down here, especially this one can’t draw a straight line or keep colors from over lapping. Let’s get something to eat.’ I smiled. It wasn’t a snide one. Actually that’s exactly how you should look at the growth of an artist. Once they prove they’re skilled craftsmen, then if they feel like it they can tell the world to go to where ever and do anything they damn well please. And when someone says, ‘ Hey, even I can do that,’ I reply, ‘ Well fine. So why haven’t you thought of doing it?’ That usually saves the day for the abstractionists. So it goes.