the art of poetry

Through The Barn was painted by Lee Gatch, an important Lambertville-based artist in 1939. Over the next two decades, he built a national reputation as one of America’s most respected painters, exhibiting in 1950 and 1956 at the Venice Biennales, given a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1956, and awarded first prize at the Corcoran Biennial in 1961. His art is part of the permanent collections of many of America’s leading museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Detroit Institute of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.

Inspired by the work of the French modernists he met when he traveled to Paris, Gatch developed his own unique style, a mix that included representational art, cubism and total abstraction. Through the Barn incorporates elements of all three styles—the empty barn, skeletal frame (with no back wall, apparently), planes of color along the top, strange cubist-style shrubs in the foreground, and the orange moon (or sun?) viewable “through” the barn. It seems desolate to me, suggesting loss of some sort, and, from a poet’s point of view, what’s better than lost love, which I’ve imagined in my poem Looking Through The Barn . I wrote the poem in the style of a rondeau—with a very specific structure, meter and rhyme scheme that I find very melodic, and well-suited to elegies, lamentations, and, as here, flights of melancholy. n

David Stoller has had a career spanning law, private equity, and entrepreneurial leadership. He was a partner and co-head of Milbank Tweed and led various companies in law, insurance, live entertainment, and the visual arts. David is an active art collector and founder of River Arts Press, which published a collection of his poetry, Finding My Feet