I received an email the other day from a good friend with whom I attended the Cleveland Institute of Art in the mid 1990’s. He had been back to Cleveland for a visit, and had met up with another CIA painting alum to walk the galleries at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He wrote about revisiting paintings that had been important to him during school, like Rubens’ Portrait of Isabella Brant and about other paintings that stood out now, at this different moment in his life, including an Inness landscape. I haven’t been back to Cleveland since 1999, and I’m curious about which paintings might stop me now, and how different the list might be for me today than it would have been 10 years ago. To tell the truth, it isn’t necessary to travel to a museum that I haven’t been to for many years to have a similar experience. I’ve been working at the IMA for a little over five years, and I am amazed by how often a work of art that I haven’t paid much attention to suddenly asserts itself.
Isabel Bishop’s Tidying Up
