Renew
Out of the National Gallery of Art's hundred thousand-plus items, I was searching for one: "Pont Neuf, Paris" by Auguste Renoir. In reproductions the painting reminded me of the midday, summer light and clouds of Guanajuato that I remembered from trips there as a kid. Renoir's shadows of midday traffic on an 1872 bridge over the Seine River were also midday Los Angeles shadows in July.
I left my leather jacket, a ski-jacket liner, a scarf, and a hat at the museum's coat check in the east building on 4th Street in Washington D.C. It was after four o'clock in the afternoon and the temperature was dropping from 30 degrees.
I warmed up by walking up a flight of stairs and one escalator and walking past some Lichtenstein pop art, some minimalist works, a Warhol soup can on my way to the museum's gallery 406B. Manet's "The Dead Toreador" was the big offramp sign that told me I was headed in the right direction. Manet's painting forces the standing viewer into a sort of horizontal crouch. I didn't spend more than ten seconds there before I turned left into the next room.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw "Pont Neuf, Paris" but looked away instantly, like the groom who passes by an open door and accidentally glimpses his bride an hour before saying "I do." If now is not the time, I asked myself, then when?
This poor little painting is in the same room as the painter's more stately, classically beautiful "The Dancer," Pissarro's "Charing Cross Bridge, London," five Monets, including the visually aromatic, "The Artist's Garden at Vetheuil."
"Pont Neuf, Paris" is the underdog of the bunch. Renoir paints a busy crossroads, a scene with several cops, a worker carrying some kind of load on his back, some horse-pulled public transportation (this reminds me of poet Marisela Norte's observations of riding the bus over the Lorena Street bridge in Boyle Heights), a dandy crossing the street with a cane, reading a book. Today he'd be the driver on the 405 talking on his cell phone. Put the book down and look where you're going, buddy.
But is it a view from Paris's old-school Left Bank to the more uptight Right Bank or vice versa? Even though I've only been to Paris once, Renoir's bridge is a very familiar intersection to me. This is a painting about a popular corner, a familiar crossroads for the painter and the viewer. It's Cesar Chavez and Soto, it's San Vicente and Wilshire, or maybe Ventura and Coldwater Canyon.
The painting captures late 19th Century speed: double decked horse drawn carriages carry passengers. Women walk only as fast as their layered, long dresses will allow. It's summer, the straw hats and the parasols are out. And toward the bottom right of the painting a lonely figure, shoulder on one of the bridge's stone balusters. Female hips outline a long, narrow dress, maybe a tunic. A black vest contrasts with the figure's long-sleeved, white shirt, and a black beret. She's looking directly at Renoir's on his perch and the viewer, as if asking. "What are you doing?" Maybe she has a warning.
"Pont Neuf, Paris" is on its surface a painting about a bridge over a river but by consequence it's also a depiction of a border and boundaries both physical and psychological. This is a painting, to me, about crossing that pedestrian bridge from Tijuana to San Diego - the one that arcs like a rainbow over U.S.-bound traffic - wide at the entrance, narrow at the apex, wide again at the exit on the way to the U.S. border crossing. It's a painting about crossing, and as my friend Angel used to say, not double crossing.
This painting's also about the new path in front of you and the dilemma - like in the Hindu scripture - of the inevitable duty to go forward, possibly at great peril, maybe to life, maybe to identity.
Several days into this new year I propose "Pont Neuf, Paris" as the painting for the new decade, a view of a new path, painted 138 years ago.
