Orgy Poem by gershon hepner

When he was told: “Identify
the image you see on the screen, ”
Thomas Campbell didn’t lie.
Titian, it was, and obscene,
so he declared: “It is a Titian,
painting of a bacchanal.”
His teacher, sensing inhibition,
said, maybe with a cultured snarl:
“Don’t call it bacchanal, call it
a drunken orgy with a lot
of sex.” More palpable this hit,
because it clearly stated what
was painted, bypassing bullshit.

Carol Vogel writes about the new director of the Metropolitan Museum, Thomas P. Campell, a British expert in medieval tapestries who grew up in Cambridge and, after studying for three years in Oxford, studied with Pietro Raffo while at Christie’s (“Basking In His Met Moment, Before the Hard Work Begins, ” NYT, September 12,2008) :
Mr. Campbell,46, seems ready for the challenge, exuding a kind of English schoolboy enthusiasm and resolve that won over a tough board of trustees. He triumphed over dozens of candidates interviewed for the job over the last eight months. His career trajectory hardly suggests that he has had his eye on the corner office. Growing up outside Cambridge, England, he began drawing and painting at a young age. “I still paint watercolors occasionally, mostly landscapes, ” he said. His father was a businessman, his mother a painter. But when he arrived at Oxford as an undergraduate, it was theater, not painting, that initially consumed him. “At first I thought of directing plays and musicals, bossing people around, ” he said. “I wince now when I think about the touchy-feely exercises we would do. It wouldn’t go down well with the curatorial staff here.” But soon his love of the visual arts trumped his theatrical aspirations, and upon graduating he headed to London, where he took a year’s course in fine and decorative art at Christie’s auction house. It was something of a culture shock. “I came down from Oxford having spent three years soaking up academic worldviews, ” he explained. He recalls landing in a class with Pietro Raffo, a passionate teacher from Italy. “I remember very early on he would throw up images on a screen and ask us what they were, ” Mr. Campbell said. “One was a Titian bacchanal, and when he asked me what it was, I said, ‘It’s a bacchanal by Titian.’ “He took me to task and said: ‘What do you mean? What is it? ’ ” Mr. Campbell said he groped for some scholarly term, until the teacher screamed that it was a “drunken orgy, and they’re all having sex.” It was a basic lesson hammered home over a year, Mr. Campbell said, “how to put aside your preconceptions and look at something with fresh eyes.”


9/12/08