Climb Every Mountain

By Richard Lacayo

Michel Kimmelman is not the kind of art critic who spends all his time in museums. He's the kind who finds himself trudging up the side of Mont Ste.-Victoire, the peak in Provence that was Paul Cezanne's perennial motif. Or getting lost in the darkness of the Nevada desert while pondering Michael Heizer's massive earthworks. Or setting out to visit the world's largest collection of light bulbs, only to detour to a museum of hunting decoys, musing all the while on the history of connoisseurship and the evolving notion of the marvelous.

Kimmelman sets out on most of these cultural pilgrimages in search of a transcendent experience. He doesn't always get one, but we do. Though he is the art critic of the New York Times, his light-footed and surprising book The Accidental Masterpiece (Penguin Press; 245 pages) is anything but a dutiful gathering of old clips. It's the work of a man who is both intellectually and physically intrepid, somebody who peregrinates between art-world topics and his own life experience, shedding light on such questions as the uses of suffering in the creative process or the sources of the urge to collect.

Kimmelman's ascent of Ste.-Victoire--a bit of a disappointment, as it turns out--sets off a chain of thoughts about how people can disagree on what is beautiful, which leads to a review of the challenges that Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp made to the very idea of beauty. And that brings Kimmelman to reflect on the changing Western response to mountains--the Romans found them desolate, Martin Luther even thought they were part of God's punishment for man's fall--and how the dangers and hardship of a mountain trek, the very things that made mountains unappealing to earlier generations, were then reconceived by Immanuel Kant and by Romantic painters like Caspar David Friedrich into the shivery pleasures of "the terrifying sublime."

Kimmelman doesn't have to climb mountains to find inspiration. A trip to the supermarket with his 5-year-old leads him to think about how art transfigures the commonplace, which puts him in mind of the hushed brown crockery in the still lifes of Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin and the pulsating gum balls of Wayne Thiebaud, which in turn bring him to a wise and lovely conclusion: "Artists who push us to look more carefully at simple things may also strike a slightly melancholic note. They remind us of a childlike condition of wonderment that we abandoned once we became adults and that we need art to highlight occasionally, if only to recall for us what we have given up." If that's so, then maybe Kimmelman is not so different from Chardin and Thiebaud. He brings back to us some of that same state of wonderment in the face of the world. But he does it through an adult's experienced eye. --By Richard Lacayo