The Shchukin Gallery

"As one climbs the stairs [of the Shchukin Gallery], frozen through and through, one glimpses at the top of the stairwell the famous Matisse murals, naked figures rhythmically arranged against a background of concentrated red as warm and as luminous as as that of Russian icons. Matisse, Gauguin, and Picasso were the major passions of this collector. One room has twenty-nine Gauguins crammed on its walls . . . There is probably no other place in the world that provides one with such an overview of Picasso's development, from the early paintings of his twenties through 1914."

~~ from Moscow Diary by Walter Benjamin

3/29/1985: on Yom Kippur with Isaac Rosenfeld and Marc Chagall

"Thinking about [Marc] Chagall in [New York] during the [second world] war, when he once met up with Isaac Rosenfeld and me on Yom Kippur, 57th Street. I feel a comradely twinge toward a fellow Jew when I remember his speaking Yiddish to us and admitting that though he could not get himself to work on the High High Holy Day, he was sauntering on to Pierre Matisse's gallery for a look (no doubt at his own work). Chagall and Vitebsk did summon up that feeling about Jewishness being a kind of sealed treasure, so deep within oneself. . . And what is it? In my case, the sense of all those others who have gone the long, long road. Solidarity. . . especially with those who so silently died at the hands of one power mad group or another."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook

McMurtry on Hemingway

"Hemingway's reputation is now so encrusted with a seventy-five-year accumulation of biographical lore--most of it unfavorable to him--that it is easy to forget how well he wrote at the beginning of his career. Picasso said somewhere that no one had looked at Matisse as hard as he had. Hemingway, as a young man, had the same ability to look hard, as hard as a painter, at a place and at the often destructive human emotions operating within a place that was seemingly as lovely as northern Michigan."

~~ from Roads by Larry McMurtry