Brian’s Reflection: Tuesday, Dec 23, 2008


“where I was still told to my face that modern art can only be loved...by Jews.”

- Peggy Guggenheim, connoisseur, who died on this day, 1979


I really, really don’t “get it”. I just don’t. I think it has something to do with having been born in Canada. But, I guess that is what I would like to think - because I can remember snide comments about the “Jews in Rosemount” when I lived in Montreal. Not surprising; they were the “aristocracy!

Oh, I remember so well the Guggenheim in Venezia!! I spent two days there, about 5 hours each day. What a lovely place! Exquisite pieces of art of all sorts. In a simple, clean space really, which I loved because it reminds me of the best Benedictine abbeys. I took with me a flask of red wine and a Panini of wonderful summer salami and artichoke. I couldn’t eat it in the museum, but I was allowed (God bless the Venetians!) in the gardens outside, where I sat for over an hour in the summer sun, in sheer bliss!

Theologically, I would hope that we could all be like Peggy Guggenheim, or like the “Jews” so maligned by the people who denigrated Peggy’s taste in art to her face. She could see the new truths. She could “see” that every era brought new understandings about Life.

The Bible is not a stagnant “museum piece”. It relies on the foundations of its Time - but it leaves Itself open to every generation to appreciate the “something old” and marry it to the “something new”. There will always be something “new” (though there is nothing really “new” under the Sun”) – that’s the way Life IS! Life is never the same – and Life gains its vitality and Mystery from that reality.

May there be countless Peggy Guggenheims in every aspect of human Life! People who can “see” the potentiality in Humanity to change and grow and learn. I guess I believe that every generation that has “failed” has done so simply because it could not break down the walls of its own cultural prison and deepen in Wisdom.

Hail Peggy Guggenheim! Thanks for those lovely spaces in awash Venice and in “trendy” Manhattan , where the “old” and the “new” bear witness to the eternal possibilities of human Life.

Brian+