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The Human Impulse to Beautify
When I used to live in Georgetown, I took early morning walks. Occasionally, I would pass through the stately Kalorama neighborhood and marvel at the mansions and gardens there. Kalorama is the home of many embassies, the Woodrow Wilson House, and several museums. Almost adjacent to the Embassy of Ireland is the Textile Museum which is now housed in the John Russell Pope-designed mansion of George Hewitt Myers, who founded the museum in 1925.
On Tuesday, I finally made it through the doors and experienced some of the exhibits inside. Washington is the home of a stunning array of museums and galleries. Their presence is part of what makes this one of the world’s great cities. Having been in most of them, it is perhaps too easy to take their presence for granted. Well, anyone who’s looking to be yanked from apathy to awe in a heartbeat should visit the Textile Museum.
I never know how an experience with art will enrich me – what I’ll take away from the experience. As I looked at an exhibit of work from the Greek isles that included a tent-like bed canopy, embroidered with what must be millions of stitches, I felt the most surprising emotional dimension suffused through the work: optimism.
I pretend absolutely no expertise when it comes to these things, but I cannot imagine that anyone would create something requiring so much patience and effort, with their own hands, if they did not expect to live with it for many years. I thought about how those skills and sensibilities blessed this most intimate of spaces. How personal beauty can be.
My job in life blesses me and I ought to be more grateful than I am for the opportunities it affords me. During my visit there, I had a conversation with the Museum’s Director, Dan Walker.
In our conversation, Mr. Walker spoke to the human impulse to beautify something created for functional purposes. I’ve been pondering his insights since. They continue to intrigue me.
When I think about appetites and needs – food, sleep, affection, and sunshine spring immediately to mind, but human beings also express a need for beauty. As I observed in the Textile Museum, we may hoe the fields to satisfy our hunger but we spend no less time or effort satisfying our spirit’s appetite for beauty.
If you want to learn more about the Textile Museum, visit its WEB site here. Among the wonderful parts of the site is a section devoted to “textiles of the month.� Aside from being able to get some sense of what they look like, the curators provide educational information about the objects. For the neophytes like me who want to learn about these things, this is just terrific. An example follows below:
Cloud Collar
Posted on May 18, 2006 09:19 AM | Permalink
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Your comments about infusing beauty into functional things recalled a fabulous quote on the subject by Ralph Waldo Emerson (from Essay XII of Essays: First Series, 1841):
''Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if life were nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or possible to distinguish the one from the other. In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men. It is in vain that we look for genius to reiterate its miracles in the old arts; it is its instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and road-side, in the shop and mill.''