Morgan Meis at Close Reading:
I’ve never actually seen Arnold Böcklin’s famous but now not really all that famous, let’s say once-famous and now fairly obscure painting known as Die Toteninsel, or The Isle of the Dead. I haven’t seen it in person. There is a version of the painting, I guess Böcklin painted a number of versions of the painting since they kept getting destroyed by wars and other annoying events, but there is a version of the painting at the art museum in Leipzig and I kick myself that I was in Leipzig not that long ago, a couple of years ago and completely and utterly failed to go see the painting. I wasn’t just in Leipzig, I was in Leipzig partly to see a big exhibit of Caspar David Friedrich paintings and could easily just have walked over and seen the Böcklin.
In retrospect, I suppose I didn’t even bother to find out what other important paintings and works of visual art were in Leipzig because I didn’t want to know. I only ever have a fairly small amount of looking in my system, I guess you could say, and I wanted, rather zealously and also somewhat self-protectively, I wanted to reserve all my looking-energy for the Friedrich paintings. This was probably a good idea, in retrospect.
More here.
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