At about age seven, like many children of my generation and earlier, I suddenly became a stamp collector. For several years the hobby absorbed me, helping me to learn about the world. Most of the learning was geographic; but there were little cultural messages in the stamps, and even aesthetic ones. Parents: let your kids grow up to be stamp-collectors.
I was not yet alive to art; yet one memorable incident involving a postage stamp was a turning point of sorts that steered me toward becoming an art-lover. Perhaps it was a seedling of my liberal education. Decades later, I would pretentiously label it “cultural citizenship.”
Along with my older brother, who was also a collector, I would visit friends’ houses and we would trade stamps. If nothing else, it was an important socializing experience. And on one such evening, I acquired a stamp that changed my life. I just liked the way it looked.
It was a 1961 French stamp depicting Paul Cézanne’s “The Card Players.” (As I later learned, there are several versions of the painting, one of which hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.) Something about the tiny postage-stamp reproduction of “The Card Players” reached into my unformed soul and mesmerized me.
There’s the simple scene: two men seated in a café, wearing hats, smoking, drinking, and playing cards. And then there’s Cézanne’s inexplicable artistry; if it were explicable, it wouldn’t be great art.
I was probably dimly aware at the time that my maternal grandfather, with whom I was close, was an art collector. I almost certainly didn’t know that one of the artists whose work he collected was Cézanne. But as I grew into that awareness, and stamp-collecting faded away as such things do, like Puff the Magic Dragon, the “Card Players” stamp left a vital residue in my mind.
Somehow, I don’t think similar works by painters of the Dutch Golden Age would have had the same effect on me. For example, I doubt I would have traded for a stamp depicting “Peasants in a Tavern,” ca. 1635, by the Dutch master Adriaen Brouwer, which hangs in the National Gallery in Washington; or the ones by Adrian Jans van Ostade (1665 and 1674). And not just because they are more debauched. I just knew what spoke to me, and still do.
How these childhood obsessions come and go is something of a mystery; but here’s a possible clue: it was around this time that baseball, another legacy from my grandfather, became a full-fledged obsession, crowding out all others.
The residual mystery, which only deepened as I came of age, was how a picture of two men in a tavern could affect me so profoundly – and how art, in general, can do that. Without any conscious thought of Cézanne or the stamp, I grew up to become a card player, a hat-wearer, a lover of cafés, a moderate drinker, and a pipe-smoker. Art forms and feeds the imagination, and life; and much of its work is done subconsciously. It affords what the novelist Shirley Hazzard called “an endless access to revelatory states of mind.” Talk about a core ingredient of a liberal education.
The proper function of critics – of art, music, literature, or what-have-you – is to advance the conversations that art initiates: to make things semi-explicable, pointing us toward pathways of imagination, not down those paths. Critics should initiate and carry on such conversations, not end them. I wouldn’t have known what to make of the art critic Roger Fry’s comment on the “Card Players” in 1927:
It is hard to think of any design since those of the great Italian Primitives – one or two of Rembrandt’s later pieces might perhaps be cited – which give us so extraordinary a sense of monumental gravity and resistance – of something that has found its center and can never be moved, as this does.
I’m still not sure what to make of Fry’s assessment. But here’s the thing: magic and mystery are things we can enjoy on our own, even without education or critics. We can only do this because we are part of larger communities, in which we can enjoy and talk about things like the mystery of art. Art expands and reinforces those communities.
To a certain extent we can demystify it; but we can never wholly demystify it, and wouldn’t want to, because the mystery and the beauty (or transformative power if you prefer) of art are inseparable. They speak to our unconscious. But they also provide bases for conversations that inevitably interweave with other conversations, not just about art but about community, politics, even economics. There’s mystery in that, too.
We’re not just talking about painting here, but anything we can usefully call “art.” The actor Danny Burstein has cultural citizenship in mind when he writes about returning to Broadway after Covid and the death of his beloved wife:
… theater isn’t just a form of entertainment; at its best, it is a collective, spiritual experience. It is church for the heart and mind. It is shul for the intellect. A mosque celebrating mankind. It reminds us how beautiful life can be and how fragile it is as well. It helps us form opinions and gain insight into the lives of our fellow humans. (The New York Times, Dec. 21, 2021).
Burstein further notes the connection between cultural and economic citizenship, two sides of the civic-cultural-economic triangle that I elucidate in Inside the Liberal Arts:
Of course, I could point out that Broadway attracts more than 14 million people a year who also visit neighboring restaurants and other businesses and it regularly produces a financial windfall for our city by employing thousands of people. But my point is that it’s more than that.
I think Burstein is exactly right. Conversations in one realm trigger and spill over into conversations about others. Art does that, and more: it provides insight into and through the eyes of others. That’s why art in all its forms is one of the nuclei of a liberal education; it invites us to see more, to see differently, through the eyes of others. And it can start with an old postage stamp.