Dad and Art

I was in Vienna two days after dad's funeral, and my last day there I went to the Lower Belvedere Palace, which was Prince Eugene's home, now turned into an art museum.  The Upper Palace includes the famous Klimt "Kiss", but the Lower Palace contains rotating exhibits.  In this particular exhibit there were, among other things, a lot of seascapes, and a lot of 19th century Viennese art.  Unfortunately, the museum doesn't have any photos of the exhibit.

The seascapes reminded me so much of dad's big seascape, a painting that he changed numerous times before finally adding the rocks that really transformed its look.  Originally, it was entirely waves and water, with no real focal point to it, and he altered it again and again, changing the size and period of the waves, struggling to get a look I assume he had in his head.  Dad, after all, had sailed in large, empty spaces of the ocean while in the Navy, and he knew what he was looking for.  But he was never satisfied with the painting until he added the rocks.  I remember it going up on the wall, then being taken down and being put back on the easel, time after time.

But what the exhibit really reminded me is that I'd neglected an important part of the story in dad's eulogy:  his love of art itself.  When we were kids, I remember being dragged (that is not too harsh a word, in part because before I got my glasses I could hardly see anything) to the Detroit Institute of Arts, as well as the Toledo museum on occasion (possibly including the time I famously asked if they spoke Ohioan in Toledo), to see traveling exhibits.  In particular there were spectacular (in retrospect) exhibits of Van Gogh and Rembrandt at the DIA.  I remember going to the former at least a couple of times.  By the end, I started to get a little of what dad's (and mom's) love of art was about, but I must admit to a lot of resistance and a lot of misunderstanding.

As I walked through the exhibit at the Belvedere, I thought of which pieces dad would love, which he would not care for much and which he would likely hate (the video of a penis turning on a light switch, I think I can safely safe he would not have wanted to take home).

There was one sculpture, a nineteenth century white marble of a sleeping baby (I think entitled "Sleeping Infant") by Eugene Robert, per my memory part of the Belvedere's own collection, that I know he would have adored, as would, I hope, we all.  It is very much in the style of the plaster bas-reliefs on the wall in the breakfast nook in Delray Beach. And the face, I swear, is basically my own.  I couldn't find a postcard of it, and there was no open copy of the catalogue of the exhibit (which was not cheap; it's a hardback, full-color book) that would allow me to see if it was included in the catalogue.  Of course, photos were not allowed.  I haven't been able to find it online, in part because the name Eugene Robert is rather hard to search, since there are a lot of people who had both those names.  If someone can find it, I'd be most grateful.