There’s a chapter in my book about all the weird things that dogs  pick up and bring to you.  I tell the story of how, on a walk in a neighborhood woods,  my dog found a sex toy – a king-size vibrator – and didn’t want to give it up.  I describe my efforts to get this thing away from him.   I thought this was  pretty unusual.

In my experience, sex is not one of the major themes of dog walking. I’m not talking about dog sex or the intimate face-in-the-rear-end way that dogs have of greeting one another.  I mean sex between human beings.  If I were to make a list of all the things that dog walking has taught me – about the animal-human bond, about the beauty of the natural world, about the surprising joy that can be found in a daily chore – sex would be at the bottom of the list.

I have, on a few occasions, come upon a parked car in which two teenagers (I assumed they were teenagers) were making out, or whatever, but this was just an inference. And my response has always been to walk in the opposite direction.  I have always assumed that people who seek out these out-of-the-way “fringe places,” which I also find congenial for walking the dog, do so because they want privacy and this is the best they can do.

A few months ago, however, I came across an article in the New York Times that made me realize how naive I have been.  The story, “Puttenham Journal – Ancient Church, Welcoming Pub and ‘Public Sex …” is by Sarah Lyall and tells of pastime in Great Britain called “dogging.”

“Dogging” means having sex in a public so that others can watch.  For some reason, a lot of this has been going on in the village of Puttenham, about an hour’s drive from London.  Puttenham, the article says, has fewer than 2,500 residents and “is famous for its ancient church; its friendly pub, the Good Intent; and its proud inclusion in the Domesday Book — an 11th-century survey of English lands.”   Now, it is prominently featured on Internet lists of good places to go “dogging.”  So many people come to a particular woodsy field for this sport that the police have designated it a “public sex environment.”

One of the protagonists in the story, I was pleased to see, is a local dog walker, Ms. Jules Perkins.  On a recent walk, she told the reporters, she encountered “two blokes sitting side by side, watching a man and a woman having sex. Nearby, there were two men sunbathing together, wearing nothing but tight little white underpants.”

Later, Ms. Perkins found a pink vibrator in the bushes. “I gave it to the police,” she said. “They said, ‘What should we do with it?’ I said, ‘Put it in Lost Property.’ ”

Here, I admit to feeling slightly disillusioned. I could no longer claim that my experience of finding a vibrator in the woods was unique.  Perhaps it isn’t even unusual in that part of England.

This all came to mind because the United Kingdom edition of my book is out this week. It has a different cover and also uses British spellings (“manoeuvres” instead of “maneuvers”) and substitutes some British terms (“ mobile” instead of “cell phone.”)  However, it doesn’t include the term “dogging” in my speculation of how a vibrating dildo found its way into our the woods.

But if there’s another edition, it definitely should.

For years, I was haunted by a certain dog walk.  Not a dog walk that I had taken or even witnessed firsthand, but one that that took place more than a half century ago. Ethologist Konrad Lorenz described it in his book, “Man Meets Dog.”

Now, I like to think that I have taken my dogs on some good walks, and yet, I have never come close to this one.  It’s the gold standard of dog walking.

Lorenz, unable to get any work done in the stifling heat of August, decides to “go to the dogs” with his Chow,  Susi.  Man and dog proceed through their Austrian village – no mention of a leash — and Susi flirts with the grocer’s dog and growls at several enemy dogs who are behind fences. In the meadow outside the village, Susi chases field mice, catches a fat one, and eats it.

They reach the Danube River. Here,  Lorenz strips off his clothes and the two of them plunge in and swim the wide river.  When they reach the other side, “She bursts forth in an ecstasy of joy, races in small circles round my legs and finally fetches a stick for me to throw for her, a game into which I willingly enter.”

They hike through the virgin wilderness flanking the shores of the river.  Lorenz and Susi lie down in the warm shallow water, and nap a little, after which Susi takes off after a huge muskrat:  “the apotheosis of all Susi’s dreams, a gigantic, a godlike rat, a rat of unprecedented dimensions.” There is tense stalking, and a short thrilling chase with the rat disappearing into its burrow.”

Then, man and dog lie in the mud for the rest of the afternoon. Lorenz wallows, lazy as a crocodile, having achieved the desired state of animal consciousness.  Susi grows restless and experiments with frog hunting, without any luck. Finally, they head back, exhausted and happy.  Man and dog drift down the Danube in the fast current, returning to the spot where Lorenz stashed his clothes.  Passing through the mousing meadow, Susi catches and devours three fat field mice in quick succession.

So, there it is. For the dog, it was a walk that had nearly everything: if not sex, then flirtation; opportunities to growl at one’s enemies.  The thrill of the hunt.  A challenging swim. A game of fetch . A trail rich with tracks and scents. Pursuit of the giant muskrat.  Another swim.

On top of it all, Lorenz joined his dog in everything. He stripped off his clothes and jumped in the water, wallowed in the mud — everything but eating mice.  That’s truly “going to the dogs.”

I heard poignant dog-walking story  at Thanksgiving dinner.  The teller was our host’s brother-in-law, Marc, an orthopedist in Philadelphia.

Marc and his wife, Bonnie, live in one of Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs.  For 17 years, their family dog was a bearded collie (a herding breed that looks like a sheep dog) named Winston. Marc frequently walked him and he had discovered one of the universals of dog walking — that, being out with a dog, strangers are more likely to talk to you.

I had noticed this, too. The most obvious reason is that being out with a dog in a neighborhood makes you more socially accessible.  You’re not on your way anywhere. You’re perceived as having the time.  More importantly, your motives are completely transparent. People can see what you’re doing, why you are out and about.  Lastly, dog walkers project a virtuous image.  It’s seen as an altruistic thing to do.  After all, plenty of dog owners don’t bother to give their dogs a real walk, but merely turn them out in the yard.

So it happened that Marc was out one morning some years ago with the dog.   He hadn’t walked much past the bottom of his driveway, when he encountered a woman crying.  He asked her what was wrong.   Without any coaxing, she blurted out “My husband left me!”  Marc  was a bit taken aback at this sudden confession, but his heart went out to her. He sympathized and showed concern.  The distraught woman responded by telling him the whole story of her marriage and abandonment.  “It just came pouring out,” he recalled.

Winston also recognized the gravity of the situation and didn’t yank to get on with the walk.  The woman cried some more and put her head on Marc’s shoulder. He offered what comforting words he had and patted her on the back.

As he told the story, he assumed the posture he was in then, one hand vaguely patting an invisible back.  He still looked concerned. I could picture it all, like a scene from a John Cheever story, in which heartbreak plays out against that backdrop of seeming contentment, an affluent suburb.

Anyone else have a dog-walking story?

Dogs lap at their water bowls with such gusto.  They lap and lap and lap so loud and long that I end up wanting a drink myself.

When, out on a walk,  my dogs go in the creek for a drink, they get all four feet in the water.  Ellie drinks from a stationary position, but Luke has a funny style.  He opens his mouth and takes a walk, lapping a little, but letting the current do most of the work.

It looks like a lazy dog’s solution to a problem. Why bother with all that lapping when you can just walk with your mouth open? It reminds me of those animated cartoons of the glutton who, rather than biting and chewing his hot dog, simply opens his mouth and pushes it straight in.

Dog lapping seems so extravagant, I think, because I unconsciously imagine what a volume of water I would take in if I drank that long.  I don’t take into account how much more efficient my mouth is for drinking than a dog’s.

As to why my mouth works so much better — well, I never gave that much thought.  I always assumed that the dog’s challenge was to drink while standing on all fours and bending over.  If a dog could sit in a chair and was able to raise a glass to its mouth, I reasoned, it could probably drink as easily as I do. And maybe that’s true.  It didn’t occur to me that if I got down on all fours, I would have a way of drinking that’s not available to a dog: I could use suction to slurp the water up into my mouth.

Until I read an article about cat lapping in the New York Times, I didn’t know that dogs lacked the ability to slurp. Or that dogs lap differently than cats. Scientists never knew how cats got liquid into their mouths, because they lap too fast for the human eye to see. Everyone assumed that cats did it the same way that the slower-lapping dogs did, which is to form a crude cup with the tongue and haul the water in. It took four research engineers and high-speed photography to reveal the cat’s method, which involves dipping the curled over tongue into the liquid, lifting a tiny column of liquid that sticks to it, then snapping the mouth around it before the column falls back into the bowl. As usual, cats pull off the harder trick.

The reason for all this lapping in the first place is that both cats and dogs lack the ability to form a tight seal with their mouths — which is essential to creating suction — and is something we, with our much smaller mouths can do easily.  Forced to lap, a very inefficient and arduous way of getting liquid into the mouth, I give credit to my dog for  coming up with his own elegant solution, which a scientist might call the partial-immersion-open-mouth-walk-and-lap technique.

Published in The Record, November 14, 2010

They were the big three of modernist photography, their careers and ideas as intricately bound together as the sound of their names: Stieglitz, Steichen and Strand.

Together, they took a 19th-century medium and brought it up to speed with the artistic revolutions of the early 20th century.  In the span of a few decades they had established photography as an art form that could stand on its own two feet, no longer dependent on historic documentation for its relevance and no longer dependent on painterly effects for its aesthetic value.

Their story is told in a compact, artful exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum that is divided into three galleries, one for each artist.
Alfred Stieglitz is the mastermind here, a Hoboken-born whirlwind of creativity and proselytizing who somehow knew all the right things to do in launching an avant-garde movement. He gave his group a radical-sounding name, “Photo-Secession,” that none of the members understood (secession from what?), published them in a sumptuous journal called Camera Work, and exhibited them in a cutting-edge gallery called 291.

Stieglitz’s early photographs of New York City (more can be seen in a show at the Seaport Museum New York) found powerful mood and atmosphere in such gritty scenes as a lone locomotive chugging through yards at Long Island City or the dark watery maw of a ferry terminal.

But he is best remembered for his photos of a young painter from Texas, Georgia O’Keeffe, whom he later married and whose fame would eventually eclipse his.  Today, the pictures –more than 300 – are a monument to one of the great artist-model relationships.  What made them so strikingly modern, however, was the artist’s seeming delight in chopping his model into parts, an act of abstraction with roots in modernist painting.  The first “portrait” you see here, for example, has no head – only hands and a torso.

Granted, O’Keeffe had beautiful hands, but she had far from beautiful feet, and Stieglitz isolated those as well, just as he did her breasts, her back, her pubis and the taut tendons of her neck.  The whole set of pictures is often referred to as a “composite portrait.”

Edward Steichen was trained as a painter and you can see it in his earliest, turn-of-the-century photographs, which are soft-focus, dimly-lit scenes of woodlands and ponds – more like memories of places than real places. Stieglitz paid $5 each for several of them – a vast improvement over the 50 cents Steichen had been getting up to then, and he was soon part of the scene.  Steichen spent a lot of time in Paris, where he not only absorbed lessons from painters but sent modernist pictures back to Stieglitz to exhibit at 291.

Steichen’s brooding, poetic “The  Flatiron” – shown here in three different prints –  was influenced by Whistler’s tonalist “Nocturnes.” You can see it in the pale, blue-green sky Steichen achieved by adding pigment during the printing process.  You can also see the influence of Japanese prints in the way the building’s form is flattened by being cropped at the top, and in the intrusion of the horizontal branch in the foreground.

In Paris, Steichen photographed Rodin’s plaster cast of Balzac, that famous hulking statue of the writer in a bathrobe. Rodin, hoping to raise the money to cast it in bronze, had Steichen shoot it outdoors in the moonlight –  an ideal setup for the Steichen sensibility.

Paul Strand was a high school student when his teacher, the social documentary photographer Lewis Hine, took his class to Stieglitz’s 291 gallery.  He, too, began his career with a pictorialist approach, though his soft-focus scenes were more brightly lit and favored an elevated point of view, often with a small figure, as in in “Winter, Central Park, New York” from 1914, in which a small female figure makes her way across the white landscape.

Strand, like Stieglitz, abandoned this dreamy style for a more sharply focused, undoctored photography, that he applied to cubist-inspired still lifes in which tabletops seemingly tip up and bowls in their roundness seem to yearn for geometric purity.  In yet another phase, Strand went out into the streets to capture images of ordinary people.  In order to get candid expressions, he devised a camera with a fake lens on the front so that he could appear to be photographing someone in front of him, when he was really photographing someone standing to his side.

His famous photo of a beggar blind woman belongs to this humanist phase,  though Strand, it would seem, hardly needed the trick camera here to get a candid expression.

Stieglitz, by the way, deserves credit for one more accomplishment. He effectively started the museum’s photography collection by giving it 22 of his own works in 1928.  In later decades he gave the museum more than 600 additonal photographs by himself, Steichen, Strand and others. Those gifts made this show possible.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street. 212-535-7710 or metmuseum.org
Through April 10.

Published in The Record,  October 28, 2010

Try to imagine the kind of publicity that would be generated if President Obama went to Kabul and donned military garb to oversee the war in Afghanistan. First, there would be the 24/7 coverage by the international media showing the President in the role of commander-in-chief.  We would be bombarded with images – from televisions, computer screens, newspapers and magazines.

Now, picture a similar situation in the year 1644. The leader is the young Spanish King Philip IV.  The war is over the region of Catalonia, which had broken away from the throne and allied itself with France. An army has been dispatched to beseige the fortified city of Lerida.  King Philip sets up headquarters in the nearby village of Fraga

There was no media and no “coverage” as we understand it today. The camera wouldn’t be invented for another two centuries.  Still, the king and his court understood the power of the image. It was important that the people be able to see the king in his heroic role.  What to do?

Summon the court painter Velazquez!

So it was that Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez (1599-1660) came from Madrid to Fraga, where a makeshift and shabby studio was set up for him in the house where the king was staying. The king sat a mere three times for the portrait. Working hastily, Velazquez nevertheless produced a masterpiece, showing Philip in crimson military attire, a sword at his side. You can see the urgency – and also the virtuosity – in his impressionistic rendering of the embroidered red jacket with its silvery needlework.

It also worked as propaganda. Just how much it was used to mold public opinion, is explained in a fascinating one-painting exhibit at The Frick Collection.  The painting, purchased in 1911 by Henry Clay Frick, is in the spotlight after a recent cleaning removed old coats of darkened varnish.  The brighter colors and enhanced depth prompted art historians to look more deeply into its history.

The painting is a curiosity because Velazquez typically painted King Philip IV in somber black clothes to convey his steadfast moral character. Previous monarchs may have been depicted as flamboyant or conquerors, but difficult times demanded a different kind of public image.

“The King at War: Velazquez’s Portrait of Philip IV” is a reminder, in an age when images fly at us with machine gun rapidity, of just how much a single image can convey.

Royal portraits were very important then because that was the only way that most people ever saw the king. As soon as the paint was dry, the portrait was sent to Madrid, where it was put on display two days after victory was declared. It served as the king’s stand-in.

Because the vanquished were not foreigners, but rebellious Spaniards, the king had to be represented as both triumphant and forgiving. It hung in the nave of the Church of San Martin, where a priest underscored the message that Philip was not an oppressor, but  a divine agent of God’s will who had brought fallen angels back into the fold.

Purely as art, Velazquez’s portrait demonstrates his legendary ability to depict an optical, rather than a physical, reality. He was the first artist to take into account that the eye did not register everything with equal precision.  In this picture, the king’s face is the most sharply focused.  Things close to the face, like the delicate white cloth over his shoulders, are also clearly seen.  But the arm and the sword hilt, which are actually closest to us, are blurry.

So, in this case, Velazquez’s technique also served the political purpose of the picture.  The king may be dressed for battle, the painting tells you, but look instead at his face, whose expression is benign, without a hint of bellicosity.

The Frick Collection,1 East 70th Street, Manhattan. 212-288-0700, frick.org.
Through Jan. 23, 2011

Published in The Record, Oct. 21, 2011
To be considered a serious contemporary artist, you need to be working from some theory.  Often as not, these theories have a deconstructionist flavor, which has to do with taking things apart and analyzing their meaning, or lack of.

In architecture, for example, this has led to buildings that seem to subvert fundamental architectural assumptions, such as those of Frank Gehry, which often look like they are crashing down or those of Peter Eisenman, in which supposed supporting columns don’t really touch the ground.

You have to know a little bit about this kind of thinking to understand Katrin Sigurdardottir.  She is an Icelandic artist with an MFA from Rutgers, who currently works out of a studio in Long Island City. Sigurdardottir makes what look like quirky architectural models or – when they are bigger – installations.  She is fascinated with stage sets and illusion.

A few years ago, she did a piece for PS 1 in Queens that consisted of an elevated platform reached by two ladders. Visitors who climbed up and poked their heads through the holes would see an icy-looking landscape of mountains and islands, an illusion shattered the moment another visitor’s head poked up through the adjacent hole.

Her pieces tend to package this kind of funhouse experience with a philosophical rationale.  Without the philosophy, her work wouldn’t get past museum gatekeepers.  Without the entertainment, there’d be little in it for the average visitor.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently exhibiting two Sigurdardottir pieces that use as their jumping-off point two of the museum’s 18th-century French period rooms.  Period rooms are the dioramas of the museum world.  They have real furniture, real trim, real chandeliers – everything but the real building around them. With her interest in theatrical illusion, period rooms are a natural for Sigurdardottir.  Her variations put her in a territory twice-removed from reality.

The last time the original period rooms figured in a special exhibition was for the museum’s 2004 “Dangerous Liaisons,” show, which put costumed mannequins in steamy tableaus. Sigurdardottir takes you to a much different terrain, more dream world than bodice-ripper.

Both her constructions are called “Boiseries,” the term for the ornate and intricately carved wood paneling of the French rooms.  The boudoir from the Crillon in Paris (which contains a daybed that once belonged to Marie Antoinette) is translated into a free-standing octagonal box with plain stage-prop construction on the outside and fancy woodwork on the inside.  In the bright interior, everything is the same flat white – walls, ceiling, floor, upholstery, chandelier.  It’s like a wedding cake turned inside out.  The original room was designed so that four angled mirrors would magnify the light of the candle chandelier, but Sigurdardottir has made them one-way mirrors, so that you can peer in from the darkened gallery outside, but see no sign of yourself in the mirrors’ infinite reflections.

The other piece, Sigurdardottir’s riff on the room from the Hotel de Cabris is in a different gallery of the 20th-century wing. Instead of a closed chamber, this one is a jagged zig-zag construction, as if the ornate walls of the room had been peeled off and put in a free-standing line.  It looks like a very long series of hinged-together wooden screens — except the panels get progressively smaller, slanting down from human scale to dollhouse scale.  The slant produces skewed angles and out-of-kilter rectangles. Again, the effect is surreal, like a three-dimensional rendering of a Salvador Dali painting.

They’re fun to look at, these two “Boiseries.”  They’re sufficiently strange to engage your curiosity.  Chances are you’ve never seen anything quite like them. In philosophical terms, I suppose you could say they are abstractions of simulations, some stripped-down, manipulated essence of a museum diorama.  In the Hotel de Cabris one, there is even a third remove from reality – diorama, abstraction, toy (the dollhouse model).

You get points for figuring this out.  What you don’t get is any understanding of why, or any real emotional satisfaction. Like a lot of art today, it’s kind of cool, which seems to be enough.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street. 212-535-7710 or metmuseum.org
Through March 6.

I go back and forth in this blog from writing about art to writing about walking the dog, but sometimes the two intersect.

At the current Jan Gossart show at the Metropolitan Museum (review posted here), there’s a drawing of the Roman Coliseum. The year is 1508. Gossart is a Netherlandish artist, sometimes called a Late Gothic Mannerist, which meant that he had a penchant for the strange and peculiar. Not surprisingly, he was drawn to this tremendous ruin with its air of flamboyant decay. In those days,  more than a thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Coliseum was already in the fragments that we recognize today.  It had trees growing out of its crumbling walls. Heaps of dirt around its base suggest the area was being used as a landfill. What better place to dump the trash?

I got to thinking about this on my next dog walk. This is not a new subject for me. I’ve had lots of occasion in walking around the Meadowlands to think about the fascination with ruins, even if my ruins are the remains of a washing machine motor.

Gossart was a few centuries ahead of his time.  It wasn’t until the Romantic period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that poets and artists really got into mooning over ruins.  The poem everyone reads in high school is Shelley’s “Ozymandius.” In it, a traveler in Egypt contemplates the inscription from a broken statue in the otherwise empty desert (“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair”). Among artists, there was the German Romantic painter Casper David Friedrich.  He typically painted young men enthralled by nature (sunsets, seascapes, alpine views), but also painted these same souls in reverie amid the ruins of a Gothic cathedral.

The attraction to Medieval ruins, it is said, grew out of an early-industrial age nostalgia for a simpler time, a time when goods were made by craftsmen rather than on assembly lines, when cities were few and far between and most of the world was still unmapped and unexplored.

My own favorite painting in this genre is the last one in Thomas Cole’s “The Course of Empire.”  In it he charted an imaginary society’s rise and fall.  The paintings show the same piece of hilly land near the sea at different points in history. The first is “The Savage State” with its wilderness and primitive settlements. Then there’s the “Arcadian or Pastoral State,” which looks like Classical Greece.  “The Consummation of Empire” looks like Imperial Rome with all its excesses. The “Destruction of Empire” depicts the barbarian invasion. The fifth and last painting is a twilight scene titled “Desolation.” The empire has crumbled. Vines twine around a solitary marble column, glimmering in the moonlight.

I sometimes imagine a similar series on the Meadowlands.  In the first panel Indians would be camping and hunting in a wilderness of cedar forests, sedge grass and sparkling pools. In the second, we’d see trappers catching muskrats, entrepreneurs diking the land and people sailing boats on the waterways. In “Despoilment,” garbage trucks would be dumping their trash and bulldozers would be covering it up. In “The Withdrawal,” the land would be abandoned and fenced off.  Finally, in “Rebirth,” nature would be reasserting itself. Trees and plants would be growing vigorously, animals would be multiplying and, along a simple dirt path, a man and his dog would be happily walking.

“Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street. 212-535-7710 or metmuseum.org
Through January 17. Schedule: 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday through Thursday, to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

By John Zeaman
Special to the Record
Anyone who’s done the European museum circuit knows the feeling.  After you’ve seen your umpteenth “Holy Family,” or “Virgin and Child,” or “Adam and Eve,” with their stylized poses and gestures, your eyes glaze over and the emotions shut down.

That’s the surprise of the wonderful Jan Gossart exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gossart (ca. 1478-1532) was a Netherlandish artist who, through a fortuitous combination of temperament, influences and patronage, managed to inject life into worn-out themes.

How? In “Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance,” the Gossart does what great artists and writers alike have always done: re-imagined old stories with fresh psychological insight.

Take Adam and Eve. If you accept the Fall of Man as a metaphor for lost innocence or the birth of self-awareness, then the characters can be rendered as unfeelingly as the symbolic figures on a Tarot card.

Gossart puts real, believable people on the narrow stage between the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. Although two of his most ambitious Adam and Eve paintings were not loaned for this show, several drawings were and, as is often the case, they are even more daring than the paintings.  You have never seen an Adam and Eve like the pair in Gossart’s 1520 pen-and-ink drawing from the Duke of Devonshire’s collection.

Adam is a man-sized figure but is anything but manly – a lank, pathetic figure who looks half drugged.  He drapes himself on the much sturdier Eve, clinging to a shapely hip. She is no less surprising, a frankly sexual pubescent woman who is calmly in charge of this seduction.

Different in character, but no less original, is the “Adam and Eve” in brown ink from the Albertina in Vienna.  This Adam, whose fig leaves indicate he’s already had his first bite, looks less ashamed than someone who’s dancing for joy.  He could be doing a jig. There’s no hint of guilt in this couple’s readiness to get on with this knowledge-business.

How did Gossart end up doing pictures like this? In his youth, he belonged to an early 16th century scene called Antwerp mannerism, which made a virtue of peculiarity in religious compositions.  Then, in 1508, Gossart went to Italy with his patron, Philip of Burgundy, where he picked up the Italian penchant for nude figures in biblical and mythological narratives. This meshed with his patron’s desire for eroticism in art.

So this show of 145 works, including 50 of Gossart’s 63 known paintings and 35 of his drawings, along with pieces by important predecessors and contemporaries, is filled with memorable couples.  “Hercules and Dianera,” is probably the signature image of this show.  As with Adam and Eve, love is their undoing, but tragedy is still far away (Hercules will later die as a consequence of infidelity). Gossart’s blend of the ardent and the peculiar is evident in the pretzel-like entanglement of the lovers’ legs.

Oddity wins out over the erotic in “Salmacis and Hermaphroditus,” a couple out of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” Salmacis is so maniacally intent on merging herself with the handsome Hermaphorditus that the gods grant her wish – literally.  The two are turned into a mixture of male and female (one set of legs, two torsos) to the eternal shame of Hermaphoroditus.

Gossart brought his psychological realism to religious subjects, too. Never has Christ looked so disillusioned or earthbound as in Gossart’s paintings of the Passion.  Then there is the dilemma of the aged Joseph in “The Holy Family.” Emotionally distant from the gay mother and the squirming baby, he looks straight out at us with an expression that can only be described as mystified.

The exhibit is arranged mostly chronologically. From Gossart’s trip to Italy, there’s a fine drawing of the Coliseum in which he revels in this romantic ruin with the plants sprouting from its crumbling walls.

The last gallery, which is all portraits, is such a joy that I recommend starting from there, rather than at the beginning. These accessible paintings are a good place to get to know the artist before going into the more imaginative subject matter.  Who doesn’t know the pinched, mean faces in “Portrait of an Old Couple,” so self-righteous in their tight-lipped disapproval?

Better to start there and to leave the show with the transport of young lovers.

Among all the signs that fall is on its way, the best is that the ticks are gone and the weirdest is the appearance of giant globular funguses, or, more properly speaking, fungi.  I don’t like saying fungi any more than I like saying hippopotami. It sounds too fussy. If I’m in a conversation and I get to the point where I have to use the plural of fungus, I will hesitate for a split-second, during which time I hope the person will  understand that I know “fungi” is correct but that I’m going to go ahead and say “funguses,” anyway. This is not out of reverse snobbism, but because I think that “funguses” is obviously a better word for pulpy whitish things that feed on other dead organisms.

When he was in fourth grade my son had to do a science project on funguses, and, I learned quite a bit about them.  I learned, for example, that funguses have an entire kingdom to themselves.  Humans, by comparison, are only a tiny branch in the vast Animalia Kingdom, minor tenants, really, in a directory that divides into phylum, class, order, family, subfamily, tribe and genus before reaching Homo sapiens.  Taxonomically, it could be said, funguses outrank us.

Alex and I took a few walks to the so-called Mystery Trails, the little woods in our neighborhood where, at that time, I was walking my one dog, Pete, every day.  I was eager to show off my knowledge of woodland lore and to interest him in this neat place that Pete and I had found. It puzzled me that its charms seemed mostly lost on my son and his friends, who preferred television and video games to swinging on real vines and building real forts.  I kept thinking that his interest in the natural world would awaken with a little more exposure.  It never really worked, perhaps because I couldn’t help mouthing the parental cliché: “I would have loved this when I was your age” (which wasn’t entirely accurate since it was obvious to everyone that I was loving it at this age).

I was able to interest my ten-year-old son in funguses by stressing their well-earned reputation as strange, creepy organisms. Funguses prefer damp, shady places.  They will even grow in the dark (commercial mushroom growers raise them in caves or warehouses).  They are ghouls and vampires in relation to green plants and they flourish amid rot and decay.  Some kill their hosts.  And some – the poisonous toadstool – kill humans.

Tree ear fungus were plentiful in my woods.  Tree ears grow on dead wood.  They start out typically soft and white, like mushrooms. Eventually, though, they grow hard and woody and display attractive growth rings just like the tree itself. Detached, they have a nice fan shape. Alex found a number of fine specimens for his project.  Among the fascinating fun facts we dug up was that the world’s largest living organism was a fungus living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  It was once thought to be numerous individual mushrooms but in 1992 it was proven to be one big one connected by underground filaments.

When dog walking took me to the Meadowlands, a mostly sunny place, I saw less fungus. But one day, following a newly opened path between some pasture and woods, I saw these spooky bulbous white things on the ground.  They were the size of softballs, which is what I thought they were at first. They eventually grew to the size of soccer balls. Unable to resist, I uprooted one and brought it home to show Alex, who was impressed, though probably less so than he would have been 15 years before.  We tried to use it in place of a Halloween pumpkin, but before the date arrived it had  lost its firmness and color and become a mottled black puffball.

I eventually tracked them down on the Internet.  Back then, Google was not the giant organism it is now, and it took some searching.  Now you just have to Google “big white fungus,” and it will take you to sites for Calvatia gigantea, commonly called “the giant puffball.”  Soccer-ball size is typical, but one record-setting specimen grew to be five feet in diameter and weighed fifty pounds.  They are edible. People slice them into “steaks” and fry them in butter. The taste is described as woody.