Masks II

Yesterday I packed two kids into the car and off we went to get bludgeoned by art at MOMA. We do the weekend family program quite often, my son and me, but today we also have my niece with us. She is visiting from Florida and it’s her first time being in NYC. She is excited and chatty in the front seat beside me, and I watch the dance in her eyes when I’m not dodging traffic. She has seen way too many things, this girl, and it’s a gift that her eyes still know how to dance.

At MOMA, we check in, getting our names printed in bold letters on peel-off nametags outlined in red. We meet our tour guide, Ada, whom I like right away. Ada is my age with wild hair that was once dark—there are still hints of it sprinkled throughout her long gray curls—and I can see in her actions, the way she moves her hands, that she is an artist. Of course I wonder about her life and the many sacrifices she’s made to do what she does. Like being here with us on a lovely Sunday morning in July when there are so many other things an artist can be doing. There’s also something about her that tells me she’s brave.

Today, Ada says, we’re going to look at masks. And she asks the kids about playing dress-up and wearing Halloween costumes. She gets them—and us, the parents who hold back and let the kids do the talking for once because we are terrified to talk about art—thinking about wearing costumes and masks and “playing the part,” and still being "you" underneath it all. Whatever that means, I think: still being “me.”

Upstairs on the 6th floor, we visit a new show featuring James Ensor, a turn-of-the-century painter from the Belgian coast. He seems wholly uninfluenced by the French Post-Impressionists, but what I know about art wouldn’t fill a thimble. I know that it makes me happy inside to see it--although it sometimes makes me sad, too. And that’s all that I know.

We settle on the floor in front of the first Ensor work and study a painting in which two people wear masks. The colors are dark, the room sparse, the masks ominous. One person sits at a small wooden table near the door, and another person is coming in (or backing out, one of the children in our group observes). The children see things in the painting that we adults do not see because they haven’t yet had the round flattened out of them, haven’t yet been molded into neat little boxes. What I see frightens me--two poverty stricken people trying to survive--but the kids see all kinds of magical things.

Yet it's “Skeletons in the Studio” that's the most interesting to me. Ada, our tour guide, tells the children to ask their parents about the phrase “skeletons in the closet.” This painting, she explains, is a lot like that. My son and niece and I huddle together on the floor and talk about what that means. A dark cloud passes quickly in front of my niece’s sunny eyes because she has many skeletons in her closet—many I don’t know about yet, many she will never share. And already, at 13, she is wearing her masks...

I study Ensor's painting and see it all there. The skeletons littered around the room--and there near the center of the painting is a leather portfolio: well thumbed, torn, almost scratched at. All his many creations rejected, haunting him. Mocking him. It’s the way I feel about this... And there are masks on the wall in the painting, like the ones I wear to get through the day, some happy, some sad. And there too on the wall, a tiny disembodied hand, that appears almost blood stained. The tool that labors to create what won’t be created…

And one of the kids points to the painting and says, look, the cloud outside the window has the face of a skeleton. And even Ada stops to look, lifting a solid mass of wild curly hair away from her face. She smiles. Yes, she says, delighted, I never noticed that…
***