On April 15, 1865, the painter Rubens Peale received “sad news of the murder of President Lincoln.” On April 23, Peale was afforded “a fine opportunity of viewing the corpse and decorations of the hall, which was totally covered with black cloth except the statue & portraits of General Washington & wife.” The corpse, of course, was Abraham Lincoln himself. Peale’s diary and its observations, both grand and personal, are currently on display in this exhibition.
For the connoisseur of American art, it features quite a few gems. Peale, for example, was a notable still-life painter who is perhaps even more famous for having sat for his brother, Rembrandt Peale, the great painter of presidential portraits. At the other end of the spectrum is Joe Hollier, whose attempts to elevate the Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) to an art-form is included as a video diary, commissioned for this show.
The more traditional paper diaries are arranged in a variety of thematic cases. Some are staged to highlight the development of artistic techniques, while others were selected to show the childhood of the artist. Some focus on specific dates—such as January 1, the traditional day of false promises—or dates of historical significance. On September 11, 2001, Janice Lowry drew a sketch of the Twin Towers and an airplane, and wrote, “The only solution is for me to do ordinary things, just regular things.”
Lowry’s diary is full of color and clippings, appropriate for a visual artist known for assemblage. But even though the diaries here are primarily written by visual artists, it is striking how many of them are mostly text. The selection of the diary, the handwriting of the artist, perhaps even the choice of pen reveal to the expert a hint of personality. But to most viewers these are just so many illegible words, made important by placards highlighting interesting stories.
So what makes a diary exhibition exciting? The answer is so obvious, and so trite, that it hardly bears mentioning: Through exhibits such as these we may peruse at our leisure the private lives of others. The exhibition catalogue claims that “reading an artist’s diary is the next best thing to being there.” Diaries, the forbidden tomes of lovers, best friends, and teenage children, offer a peek into the mysterious, unguarded thoughts of those we think we know. We have access, and the access itself is of interest.
This exhibition plays with the line between public and private, as well as its relationship to life and death. Joe Hollier, for example, is alive and well, and his experimental video diary is strikingly public. So perhaps now is a time when we no longer associate our daily record with privacy. But the more important question, for many of the artists here, is this: Once dead, do we still have a right to privacy? Is privacy anything the deceased deserve?
What is curious about “A Day in the Life” is its cheeky flirtation with exactly that issue. We enlightened observers are the basest gossips and, under the cloak of scholarship, snoops of the highest order. The tradition of nachlass—the academic term for a collection of a scholar’s papers left after death—allows us to know a scholar more comprehensively, or so we believe, through a lifetime of text. A diary is a permanent, fixed portrait of a human life as lived.
But for the living, what responsibilities does it entail? Consider the blown-up artwork overlooking the exhibit from its place of honor on the wall. It is a page from the travel diary of Maryette Charlton, an artist of various media, whose charming scribble of the Leaning Tower of Pisa gives as much information about the artist as any words written on the page. This is all that we desire from an artist’s journal: notes by the hand that made art, and fragments of the art made by that hand. But a quote adjacent to Charlton’s magnified diary addresses a darker concern: “This book is not intended for other eyes than the writer’s, and when they are forever closed, I hope this book will be laid in the fire.” This is not from the Charlton diary but from the journal of Blanche Lazzell, a printmaker. And her diary is found among the lovely cases of open books.
We are sometimes shamed by our desire to see these objects, but our motivation, surely, is not entirely bad. We seek to know other souls in a way not easily attained in our guarded interactions. The living can deceive, but diaries lie only as the self lies to self. Diaries offer a hint of the real. Is that not, in itself, art?
Tara Barnett is a writer in Washington.
