Timeless Travelers

Strange Pilgrims is a series of paintings that are inspired by unique works of art from a wide swath of time and space.

Many sculptures and paintings long outlive their creators and original owners and go on to have life and history of their own. One such example is Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) by Gustav Klimt. The portrait of the beloved wife of the wealthy Jewish-Viennese banker and sugar producer, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer was stolen by the Nazis in 1941. After the war, it was displayed in Galerie Belvedere until it was finally returned to its rightful owner in 1998. It is now on display at the Neue Galerie in New York City. The Lady in Gold was the subject of several books and the 2015 film Woman in Gold. For the Strange Pilgrim series, I will try to find other works with equally compelling stories that are less known to the public.

Each painting in the series will encapsulate the work’s journey through history and its place in our time. The voyage of the art objects often reflects mutability of meaning, shaped by evolving context. The hope is to breathe new life into familiar objects and to tell their own story of love and loss.

Seated figure, 10th–9th century BC, Geography: Syria, Tell Halaf.

1. For Mesopotamia, the place from which we have the earliest textual and archaeological evidence about concepts of the image and aesthetics, I make the case that images had a diachronic presence; they were seen as objects that transcend time and that carry or embody traces of time itself. They, therefore, became foci of rituals of history and collective memory, of reinscriptions, burials, and recoveries, in continuous dialogic relationships between past and present and present into the past that are somewhat reminiscent of what Aby Warburg would later describe, in his Mnemosyne project, as an afterlife of images.

   —Zainab Bahrani, The Infinite Image 1

The sculpture that served as a visual anchor for Pilgrim Venus is the famous “Venus” that was found at Tel Halaf in 1912 by a German adventurer Baron Max von Oppenheim. It was blown into thousands of pieces during World War II in Berlin. It took nine years of heroic reconstruction to put the pieces back together. The sculpture is now on loan at The Met from the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin.

Many pieces once they come to the museum seem to be enshrined in a mausoleum-like setting that strips them of their context and purges their original power, but the seated figure strengthened rather than weakened by its scars still commands the space and inspires awe. Venus’s powerful features match her columnar neck and arms, one of which is holding out a round bowl. Sculpture’s head is covered with swirling carved designs, her hair is braided and styled into two architectural braids, her legs are invisible underneath a rectangular base into which they are submerged. Even though a wealth of scholarship exists about the purpose and history of the statue and its Aramean archeological site Tel Halaf, the expression of the seated lady is blank and her ancient past is concealed by the sands of time.

Footnotes

1. Zainab Bahrani, The Infinite Image: Art, Time and the Aesthetic Dimension in Antiquity (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), pp. 9–10.