Connections/Hemingway

My name is Seán Hemingway, I'm a curator in the department of Greek and Roman art, and I'm going to be talking about my grandfather, Ernest Hemingway and the Metropolitan Museum.

When most people conjure an image of my grandfather, they think of the iconic picture by Yousuf Karsh. This was even my own experience growing up as a child, since my grandfather died before I was born. He was this iconic figure in our family.

As I grew older and got to know him through his writing

and through my parents, both of whom knew him closely, I've come closer to him.

It is well known that Ernest Hemingway was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

What is not well known is that he loved to come to the Metropolitan Museum when he was in New York and look at paintings. In fact, he had a small but very fine collection

of paintings of his own, by well-known artists such as Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Paul Klee, and others. One of the people from whom Hemingway first learned to appreciate painting

was Gertrude Stein. Some of her advice to him was not to buy clothes, but to save your money and buy art. When I look at that painting, I think of my grandfather as a young man in Paris in the 1920s

sitting in Ms. Stein's salon, listening to her talk, while admiring the paintings, like that one by Picasso, and others by Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Paul Cezanne.

My grandfather wrote that he learned from studying Cezanne's paintings how to describe landscapes. Cezanne looked at landscape and

broke it down into its essential elements and then put it back together using pure swatches of color.

My grandfather's favorite painting in his own collection was the seminal work by Joan Miró, The Farm. The Met has a very fine painting from that same period, a Catalan landscape entitled Vines and Olive Trees in Tarragona. And it's that same region around the farm where Miró grew up and painted in the first part of his life.

Miró was very happy that my grandfather purchased that painting. It was before Miró's career really took off. My grandfather was thrilled to buy it and it hung in his home for the rest of his life.

My grandfather was especially enamored of the great Spanish painters. He greatly admired Goya's paintings and etchings of bullfighting and he even owned a copy of his series of

the Disasters of War. Those images of war are very graphic and strong reminders for him. Hemingway

bore witness to some of the most horrific and important conflicts of the first half of the 20th century.

Hemingway was interested in how great painters achieved their masterpieces. About The Harvesters, he said that the geometry of the wheat created a powerful emotion

Whenever I look at The Harvesters, it grabs me. It gets me every time when I look at that painting. And it's that emotion that my grandfather was talking about.

And I think it's also very true of his writing. His prose style is very simplistic in a way; it's very straightforward.

And yet a tremendous amount of effort and craft went into creating every one of those sentences.

He fashioned that style, in the same way that Bruegel fashioned his painting.

My grandfather's favorite painting at the Met was the View of Toledo by El Greco. El Greco represents the essence of Toledo, it's not a strictly representative image of the city. El Greco

lived in Toledo for so many years and he knew it, and my grandfather always said, "Write about what you know, because you have a much better chance of getting it right."When I think about one of my own favorite paintings at the Met, it's a completely different work,

The Death of the Buddha, a Japanese scroll painting of the 14th century. I think part of what I'm attracted to in that painting is how beautifully preserved it is, how remarkable that we have this work. We don't know the artist's

name, and yet it's such a magnificent painting of the death of the Buddha. He includes everyone who comes to mourn the loss of this great figure. And I think my grandfather could have seen this painting here at the museum. I don't know if he ever did,

but I think he really would have enjoyed it.