From the editor

freedom

Earlier this summer, I got on a plane. Not a big deal. Well, actually a big deal, because it was my first trip since the pandemic had made us all shut-ins, more or less. At last, I was breaking free.

The trip was to New York, which was offering no theater scene, no concert activity. That was okay, because there was lots of art. Over this long stretch, a year and a half and (sadly) counting, I had missed the freedom of heading out and seeing art. Seeing art through the filter of a computer screen is one thing; seeing art through close looking in physical space is the real thing.

With its sprawling show of Cézanne’s work in pencil, ink, and watercolor, the Museum of Modern Art was the main attraction. Cézanne, as the great pioneer of modernism, has always struck me as an exemplar of artistic freedom—the freedom to interpret the world and not simply to record it. The exhibition was overflowing with drawings that drew, so to speak, on the works of other artists; domestic portraits of the artist’s wife and young son; solo bathers and clusters of bathers; views of nature, from stacked-up boulders and forest paths to the relentlessly rendered Mont Sainte-Victoire; and still-lifes, all those apples, pears, oranges, jugs, bottles, and bowls that seem ready to topple right out of the canvas into the viewer’s space.

In my slow walk through the galleries, I thought about how Cézanne’s free expression—what he referred to as his quest to represent his “sensations”—speaks to our tremulous times. His work is filled with jagged strokes, broken lines, fuzzy borders; forms are incomplete (Madame Cézanne sewing without any visible needles), shapes are ambiguous (a coat thrown on a chair and resembling nothing so much as a landscape of contours and voids). Everything is provisional, nothing is defined. We’re free to make what we will of the world. And the world is free to pull some surprises on us.

I later headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—right up to its roof. There I found Alex Da Corte’s As Long as the Sun Lasts, commissioned during the pandemic. It’s a delightful meshing of the gently turning “mobiles” of Alexander Calder and Big Bird, an impressive avian at eight-and-a half feet tall, who is perched on a crescent moon and clutching a ladder. Scaling that ladder might make it free as a (not so big) bird. In an interview recorded for the Met, Da Corte talks about his Muppets inspiration, but also about another art-historical reference: the series of unicorn tapestries from the museum’s medieval branch. The unicorn, as he described it, is in an enclosed space, but the fencing is low and has openings. So there’s the sense of being anchored, along with the freedom to move on. What he’s representing here is a kind of “soft power” (accented by Big Bird’s 7,000 individually placed, laser-cut aluminum “feathers”)—the freedom we all have to make a world, even a whimsical one.

At a time of pandemic-induced lockdowns, assaults on democracy, and battles over free speech, we’ve all been led to think about the preciousness of freedom, the fragility of freedom, the multiple ways of defining freedom. It’s a timely theme link-

ing these pages.—Robert J. Bliwise, editor