Connections/Escape

My name is Cora Michael, I'm a curator in the department of drawings and prints. I'm gonna be talking about "Escape."

Escape as an experience, an experience of looking at art

but also as a story that art can tell. When I moved to

New York, the first year was pretty rough, I felt like the city was kind of beating me up on a daily basis. I had a crazy roommate with a crazy pitbull. I got flashed on the subway. I had a horrible first job. And my mother told me about

a book, A Hundred Escapes in New York City. And one of the things

it mentioned was the Chinese moon-viewing garden. I used to come and calm myself down

from the chaos of what my life was at that time. Summers in the city

can be brutally hot. My husband grew up in New York and he remembers as a child sleeping on the fire escape, which is such a romantic notion to me. There's something very sweet the way they're all huddled together, and one of the girls actually is

cradling a kitten, but it's also gritty. I love that combination of sweetness and grittiness. For Redon and the

Symbolists, I think the idea of escape is kind of central. They start to look to dreams, memory, the imagination, kind of the interior world.

There's this severed head floating above the earth towards this higher realm, this higher plane of experience. Paul Gauguin

is more literal, he did escape. He was a banker, a married man with children, and then discovered art. He was searching for an authentic, artistic life. Even though he was actually there under the auspices of the French colonial government.

But he really, truly felt that he had to turn his back on quote unquote civilized society.

An amazing little smiling figure. One of the theories about its meaning, is that it may relate to rituals where intoxication took place, they would drink this fermented liquid. It may have had something to do with shamanism, and the whole idea of transcending everyday life to attain a higher spiritual consciousness.

You Will Not Escape I've interpreted as being about how you can never escape yourself. If your demons are inside you, it's impossible to escape.

The Abstract Expressionists were really about the spiritual experience of art. Mark Rothko thought that the ideal viewing experience was eighteen inches away from the canvas. When you stand that close, it overtakes you, the color pulsates and glows and you really do kind of feel it washing over you.

One of my favorite places to go is the Shaker room, because it's purifying. I feel cleansed.

I admire the Shakers in a lot of ways maybe except for the celibacy, but

I feel like when I go to the Shaker room I'm inspired to be a better person, to clear my life of clutter and to be frugal and

honest and hardworking and god loving and all those good honorable things. One time I was on a plane and an Orthodox Jewish man sat next to me and

I was reading a big, fat issue of Vogue. And he said, "Why do you read that?" And I said, "Escape." And he said

"Marriage is escape." And I thought, "Okay?" But I wasn't married, it didn't really mean anything to me, but now that I'm happily married I can understand what he meant. Because it's like a shelter from the harsh world

so I think that's what he meant.