When Maira Kalman told me her next book and exhibition (at the Mary Ryan Gallery) were devoted to the fleeting emotion of “joy,” I was skeptical. But soon it was logical that if any artist were to capture joy in a bottle (or between covers), it had to be Maira. Her words and pictures routinely make me smile, and where there are smiles, isn’t that the proverbial smoke that somewhere the fires of happiness glow? Or maybe a smile is just a mask hiding the pain of sadness? I vote for the former.
After the title page of Kalman’s new book Joy is a page that reads “Joy?” (with a question mark). This is followed on the next page with the caveat:
“Do you think I am an idiot?”
“Don’t I know, that you know, that suffering and sorrow envelop our planet and our little lives.”
She continues with the proscriptions that define her circumspect ode to joy—Alfred Dreyfus’ unjust imprisonment on Devils Island; Beethoven’s complete deafness; Kalfka’s premature death in a sanatorium; Virginia Wolf’s suicide. Kalman illustrates these tragedies with fluid watercolors of their respective portraits and homes. Regarding Wolf, she writes: “Didn’t she have her work. Wasn’t her sitting room cozy and surprisingly colorful?” And about taking her life by drowning in the river Ouse, Kalman writes “Isn’t it all incomprehensible.”
She continues with a few additional tragic tales of lives lost and taken that reveal overt and hidden misery. So where is the joy?
‘Where might you go?” Kalman muses. “What solace might you find if you turned your gaze to a thing of beauty?”
Therein lies Kalman’s honest sense of joy.
The joy inherent herein are the comforting words and soothing pictures, each conceived with a tincture of joyful solemnity. Like the spread that shows a woman walking among leafless trees that reads:
“And didn’t I see this woman in blue pants walking determinedly, very determinedly even, in Central Park, not far from my favorite tree. And isn’t my favorite tree a tree that I kiss every time I see it.”
Each spread bears witness to Maira’s interconnection with everything she observes and experiences that brings her personal joy on many levels for many reasons. Joy is part journal, part memoir, part confessional. An honest depiction of what it means to be touched by life’s stimuli. Every connection raises a question—such as a woman in a Paris bistro who mesmerized her for a brief moment.
“Didn’t she look utterly terrific and soignée?”
“Didn’t she look like she could not care a fig.”
“And don’t you want to say bravo.”
There are scores of these micro-musings, tied together with the strings of memory that convince the reader to accept that joy is all around—inside and outside, in and out of eye and mind—if only you think of and see the interdependence that exists.
Maira invites the reader into her personal space to freely go from room to room with or without purpose. Joy is the absence of stress, the release of calm. I felt it when she shows a familiar verdant garden and writes:
“And didn’t Atget take this picture of the trees the Palais-Royal.”
“Isn’t this the photo in my living room.”
“And don’t I live it and smile at it every time I walk into the room.”
During this unsettling year of life lost and found when I am collecting the wonderful and less-than-pleasant memories of experiences past, I’ve embraced Joy—not an escape into an artist who has found ways to find joy, but as an extraordinary means to lessen pressures that consume my (our) latent joy.
