Connections/Interpretation

I'm Rika Burnham, I'm a museum educator and my work is to teach in the galleries of museums.

I Iove teaching with the same work of art over and over again.

In the spirit of my approach to looking at works of art, I believe that I open the eyes of people I teach, but I

believe equally they open my eyes, as well.

I was looking at this with a group of high school students. We were noticing how the external garden and the interior space were governed by entirely different

perspectival systems. A student said, "You can't have perspective in a painting like this. Perspective is a scientific principle. What this artist did was he made room for the angels."

Pierre Bonnard, an artist very, very close to my heart but often misunderstood because when people look at his work they see these sunny, bucolic scenes. All of Bonnard's work for me changed when I took a class of students

to look at The Green Blouse. The woman sits against a shimmering yellow curtain and outside the window is probably the south of France. Suddenly a student saw

the woman who comes in at the left, holds a knife in such a way that it points to the woman in the green blouse. Everyone stopped. If we hadn't seen the knife, we wouldn't have understood the dark undertow of Bonnard's work that in the end is what makes it so interesting.

If there was ever a figure that manifested the force and severity of the Catholic church, this would be it. As I was looking with some students

at the little cartolino dropped at his feet, wondering why someone of such authority wouldn't notice this crumpled piece of paper. A student said, "His sumptuous robe is caught, and if he tries to get up he'll topple."

And the grandeur and the power of this portrait crumbles in front of us.

Manet courted with a kind of stylish, bad boy attitude, although compared to what we're used to now seemed kind of tame. What I think remains totally radical to this day was a visitor's observation, that Manet took a traditional device of painting to highlight the most important moment and he drenched the loin cloth of Christ in this bright, white light and I can't think of anything more transgressive.

Autumn Rhythm (#30), when you bring people to look at it they're astonished by its grandeur, its energy, its charge, but it has an undercurrent of suspicion at the same time. Is this really a work of art? It took a high school student one day to open my eyes to it by saying, "It's not a painting. It's a proposition."

This painting took a while for me to love, and yet if you look at it, its construction starts to work a kind of magic on you. In particular, Ludovico Carracci's use of color, it seems so restrained at first

but a student noticed the Virgin's hand that touches Christ's hand and said, "It's almost like the mother's trying to put the light of her life into the dead hand of his body.

And with her other hand, it's the opposite, because her hand there assumes the dead color of his face." This person said, "If you've ever lost someone, and held them as they were dying, this is exactly how you feel.

And at the same time you throw your head back from the physical sight, because the pain is so great."

At the heart of this endeavor is the question about interpretation. When does interpretation begin? When does interpretation end? When does interpretation go too far? I think the kind of teaching that I believe in is all about finding meaning

as a deep and affecting experience.