When I was in college, I spent years in a very college quandary: What was my true calling, letters or art? On the one hand, letters: I had felt the call to write from the youngest age, literally—I was the editor of the P.S. 94 kindergarten haiku magazine. (The kindergarten haiku editor morphed into the junior-high essayist, high-school culture-magazine editor, college newspaper reporter and Spin-knockoff magazine editor—get the idea?) And yet, on the other hand, Art. Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Hokusai! To consider them was to know awe.
The full view of Abraham Mignon’s ‘Still Life with Fruits, Foliage and Insects,” from 1669, on view in Gallery G311.
A combination of dithering, pursuing my greatest interests, and loathing of critical theory eventually led me to major in Art History and one of the greatest experiences of my life, a term abroad studying Dutch Golden Age Art with Alison Kettering at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Which turned into a chance to assist the then-director of the Rembrandt Research Project. Where I got to touch a Dürer wood-cut. For real. (Wearing gloves. But still.)
It led to months in misty Amsterdam, spending countless hours staring at Dutch still lifes, marveling at the crags in the cheese, the sheen on the pewter, the glint on the wing of a crawling fly or bee. The bugs meant something, they meant memento mori, they meant that life was fleeting, that death comes for us all, that even in the ripest peach, decay.
I don’t think that anymore. Now I think great paintings are like the proverbial rushing river: you can never step in the same one twice, they “mean” very much who you are at the time.
The bees on the roof of the MIA, which installed several hives this past spring to draw attention to the decline of pollinators.
I look at something like Abraham Mignon’s Still Life With Fruits, Foliage, and Insects, from 1669, and I think: wow. Life before the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a difficult concept, something I explored for my big work of this year, “Panic in Bloom,” a story about how we modern people are on the precipice of killing all the pollinators, all the bees and moths and butterflies and the rest of them, too, and that when we do, poof, there goes nature. There’s a lot we can do to stop this, but we’re in a DDT-wiping-out-the-raptors moment, a Cuyahoga-is-burning moment, a real fulcrum in time. On the one side, fruit. On the other, death.
So I guess I’m still in a quandary, but the content of the quandary could never have been foreseeable in a world without such exquisitely efficient anti-bug and anti-wildflower (or as the vendors put it, anti-weed) agents as we have today. When I look back on it, my arts versus letters dilemma seems childish. But choosing fruit or annihilation is a much starker choice. If we had put it to Abraham Mignon or anyone else in 1669 they would have thought it too stupid for words: Life, even still, is better than poison.
Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is senior editor of Mpls-St. Paul magazine, a five-time winner of the James Beard Award for her food writing, and a proud member of the MIA. Her 5-year-old’s favorite work is currently Judith with the Head of Holofernes; her 7-year-old likes the swords.
Art Inspires is a new series of essays by artists, writers, and other cultural leaders on inspiring art at the MIA. Read more here.