I was charmed when the Getty museum encouraged the quarantined to re-create favorite works of art using objects lying around their homes. I was astonished by what people did in response with duct tape, cutlery, toilet paper, PPE and more in photos posted to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
The Getty spread an idea first proposed by individuals and other museums. The result has been what The New York Times calls a global “living archive of creativity in isolation.” It’s reminiscent of the work of the artist Nina Katchadourian, who long before the coronavirus created a series she called “Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style,” in which she used toilet paper, paper towels and other materials she found in airplane bathrooms – plus her own imperious expressions -- to style herself as Dutch Master paintings. Perhaps Katchadourian was just relieving the boredom of long flights, back when we could take long flights.
For its challenge, the Getty suggested people download inspiration from its online collection. I decided instead to do it with art we own. I even got my husband and daughter to participate. I have to admit I enjoyed the gathering of props and the posing more than my husband or daughter, but my daughter was at least amused by my enthusiasm.
It wasn’t much of a challenge for my husband – he stood next to a portrait that Joni Brenner had painted of him. Our daughter posed in our pantry to recreate a photo by David Goldblatt of a girl in a Soweto shop with an array of canned goods forming a soothingly repetitive pattern in the background. I wore a black suit and draped stockings over my eyes so that I looked like a figure in a photo by Leslie Dill.
Dill captioned her photograph with these Emily Dickinson lines:
We grow accustomed to the Dark —
When Light is put away —
A Moment — We Uncertain step
For newness of the night —
Then — fit our Vision to the Dark —
And meet the Road — erect —
Our friend Briget Grosskopff, an architect in Johannesburg, saw our photographs on Facebook. Briget didn’t just take up the Getty Challenge in response to our amateurish attempts. As Dickinson described in her poem, Briget helped us to see a way ahead in these uncertain times.
Briget has a beautiful art collection of her own. But she took the Getty’s advice and explored on-line archives. She has made – is still making, with a new photo posted nearly every day -- a digital portfolio that is a brilliant, inventive and often hilarious art history lesson.
Trust Briget to notice that wrinkles in a sheet resembled a face in Masaccio’s “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden,” or that the colors of a raw chicken echo the butcher shop palette of a Lucian Freud. Briget perched her chicken on an upended plastic container. The result is exactly a Freud portrait of a man on a low stool with his back to the viewer.
A jumble of hairpins is a Cy Twombly, bed linens folded meticulously a Rothko, an arrangement of stockpiled groceries an Egyptian afterlife pantry painting, a lounging cat a Titian Venus. A loofah sponge squashed just so and held against a striped dish cloth is Munch’s “Scream.” And a scream.
Logging on to Facebook every morning to see the creations from Briget — and her co-quarantine co-conspirators Karen Grosskopf Curry, Chris Curry, Chelsey Curry and Jessica Curry — has been one of the highlights of the last few months for me. I know from the comments on her posts that I am not alone in finding that her work spreads hope.
Briget has helped us see art and possibility in the world around us. Even when that world has been reduced to what’s within the walls of our homes.