My Hobby

People collect things. Wally collected Scandinavian postage stamps. My brother Don collects Ford Mustang cars. I collect museums.

I don’t know why I developed a passion for fine art. My parents never showed the slightest interest. My mother did not know the difference between a Rembrandt and a Picasso.

In art class in high school I scratched charcoal on paper, drawing portraits of other students. I soon realized I had no talent. My joy in art became limited to admiring the work of others.

That was “before the museums came” to Fort Worth. Most of what I knew about art I learned from looking at cheap reproductions. Not very good in those days before printers could give us inexpensive color photographs.

My only experience with fine paintings came each week when I rode the bus downtown to have the sadistic Dr. Terrell adjust the braces on my teeth. Afterwards I’d stop by the Fort Worth Public Library, check out five books, and go upstairs to visit the paintings loaned by Mr. Kimball on the second floor landing, mostly 18th Century portraits of elegant ladies.

Once there was a special exhibit. I was thrilled to see an actual Cezanne still life with oranges. How did I recognize that it was a Cezanne? I don’t know. All I remember is that I hungered to see more “real” paintings.

In my senior year in college, I took 21-hours each semester so that I could audit a two-semester course in the History of Art. I absorbed the slide shows as if they were cake and ice cream. Afterwards I’d sit in the little art department library staring at a large (4x6 foot) Van Gogh reproduction, admiring the variety of colors in the different fields of wheat.

On my first vacation after I went to work for the Press, Emmy and I took a wild trip east. I’d bought a used ‘46 Chevy, and we drove off, not like Thelma and Louise, but more like two Brownie Scouts who had somehow obtained drivers’ licenses. I expected great things at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan in New York – and saw them – but was amazed by the wonderful collection at the National Gallery in Washington, everything from a Fra Angelico nativity to a bust of Lorenzo the Magnificent to Monet’s ladies with parasols on a sunlit beach. .

As a bride in Chicago, I took courses in interior design at the Art Institute. Going through the main museum to reach the basement classroom, I fell in love with the collection of Monets: seascapes, rows of poplars, fields of poppies. It was a heady experience, going to a great museum every week for two years.

I was hooked. I wanted see more museums. Like a heroin addict, the more I saw, the more I wanted. It did not matter that I could never own a fine painting. I spent an hour absorbing Monet’s waterlilies in the Orangery in Paris. In my memory I owned them forever.

Wherever we lived, I joined the museums and went to gallery talks and programs. In Detroit my children obediently looked at the Diego Rivera murals, as afterwards we ate chocolate almond ice cream in the courtyard. In Philadelphia I sat for hours in the Tyson Collection wondering how anyone could give away that Cezanne landscape with the view of Mont St. Victoire. When we returned to Chicago, I went back to the Art Institute on my lunch hour.

Looking at art became my hobby, just as others go to movies or play video games. In my travels I visited most of the great museums of the World. The Louvre held few surprises; I’d seen colored slides of most of the paintings in my History of Art class at TSCW. But Vienna – Ah! That’s a great museum with comfortable couches to sit in while admiring the paintings.

Now I am back in Texas. This week David comes for Thanksgiving. We will go to Fort Worth to see the Caravaggio exhibit at the Kimball, the fine museum of European art endowed by the man who loaned the paintings I saw at the library when I was in high school. I wonder if in storage is that big portrait I admired of a lady in a long white “empire” style dress by Sir Thomas Lawrence. It is never on display.