When a security guard approaches someone in a museum, this action suggests that the person is doing something wrong. Something very wrong in fact, like running with their boat shoes untied or touching paintings more valuable than the entire Disney franchise, something tangible and destructive. But I am not doing any of those things. Instead, I stand in this space and do exactly what any tourist would do in a gallery dedicated to cubism; I look at the Picassos, contemplate his condemnable behavior, get upset; I make myself trace the lines in my mind, make note of the scared eyes, the hands, the legs and torsos, the lost faces, the open mouths. I keep going. I am at the National Gallery of Art in Copenhagen, Denmark. Wandering.
“Do you speak English?” a security guard asks me.
I do. I tell him yes.
He gestures towards a large, dreary canvas behind him. “Do you see the horse?” It is Jean Metzinger’s “Woman With Horse” (1912, oil on canvas). The painting is gray and cream with blotches of blue in the lower right corner, fruit in the foreground, a vase on the left, a pearl necklace, and a woman. A woman with a horse. But I do not see the horse.
I feel as though I do not have the authority to dissect a piece like this—to attempt to describe the canvas would be a travesty, maybe an injustice to the painting itself. But if I had to, I would describe the canvas as being full of lines.
I suppose this is what most paintings are made up of—lines—yet here, I see the marriage of organic shapes and jarring edges. It is not abstract, but rooted in a realm I am surprisingly unfamiliar with.
I tell him no, “no, I don’t think I see the horse.”
“Can you try?”
For him, I do. I try to see something I am convinced may not be there at all. I lean in. I squint. I let my eyes meander across the canvas, try my rule of thirds tricks, look for triangles, spirals, recall everything I know about analyzing composition, I even consult the gilded frame. But I still can’t see the horse. I find only the faint suggestion of a mane and hoof.
“You can point,” he tells me. “Can you try to point to the horse?” And so I do, I point to the mane. But I still do not see the horse.
“Good job,” he says. He asks me if I see the eye. I don’t.
He points to a black almond shape near the right side of the canvas, about a third of the way down, underneath a bright spot connected to a triangular point resting in the woman’s hand.
The painting has power because of its size, because of the way it is designed for the viewer to lose track of themselves and invest in the horse, despite them being drawn to the woman figure that spans the length of the canvas.
We talk about this, the guard and I, about why it is that we only want to see the woman. We talk about the light. We talk about a troll some people see in the fruit and he laughs, tells me he doesn’t know how much he himself sees the troll. We talk about composition. We point out two other encrypted horses. We talk about how the painting makes us feel. “The bottom is a whole other world,” he tells me.
After several minutes of staring and pointing and analyzing, the guard tells me he is sad that more people do not stop to look at this painting, that most tourists just look at the Picassos and keep walking.
That makes me sad, too. There are many things that make me sad about going to museums. But maybe that is how I am supposed to feel. Maybe I am supposed to feel lost, because of all that I cannot control. The human condition inhibits us from ever really being able to experience all that there is to experience. Though I recognize that I have little philosophical authority in the grand scheme of all there is, to be able to be in the world, to experience the world, this is what makes us human.
Maybe you will see the horse. Maybe not. If not, that is quite alright. There is such limited time to see all the horses there are to see, to talk to all the museum security guards—most security guards might not want to talk anyhow. I do not know.
There are many things I do not know. But what I do know is that, now, when I am lost, I will return to the places where I have lost myself before—like the museum. I will return to the places where we may detach from ourselves and trace the lines back to a form we could only wish to know better.
