Forty years ago, when I was 11 years old, my parents dragged my sisters and myself on a trip to West Berlin from Stuttgart where my father, a naval officer, was stationed. The journey there was made by train, passing through the bleak, gray squalor of communist East Germany. The railway was lined with ominous checkpoints and towers bristling with soldiers armed with machine guns. When you went to West Berlin in those days you really knew you were going somewhere and it was all thrillingly dangerous. This was where and when I really saw a piece of art for the first time. I saw, it, absorbed it, and felt the full impact of what power a great piece of art has to change the viewer forever. It was at the Egyptian Museum in Charlottenburg and it was the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti. Art, as I discovered that day, has the power to permanently change the way we see the world.
Nefertiti's bust is attributed to Thutmose, the ancient sculptor who was a favorite of Nefertiti's husband, the Pharaoh Akhenaten. It was unearthed in the workshop where Thutmose created his artworks so long ago. This occasion marked the first time I looked at an art object and found myself transfixed. I don't have any explanation for how and why it happened at exactly that place and time and with that particular piece of art but the explosion in my mind was sudden and powerful. While slouching resentfully around the museum to let everyone know that I wanted to be doing something a lot more cool than looking at dusty, broken rubbish from Egypt, I eventually found myself face to face with Nefertiti. Looking at her casually and with no real interest, the realization that it was more than 3,000 years old suddenly began to bloom in my head until I suddenly felt the full weight of human history come crashing down on my shoulders. Uncountable generations of people had been born, lived and died since the sculpture was executed, and it was right there in front of my eyes. Time stretched out behind her, flowing backwards with a vertiginous force, palpable in her presence.
The patina of the sculpture's surface is ancient; each and every chip that mars the figure testifies to its improbable survival as millions of anonymous people had lived and died around her. She did not hold me enraptured with her sightless gaze while I admired her beauty; No, for me it was a frightening experience. She looked past me impassively toward the future where she would quietly endure for another 3,000 years and I would likely pass into oblivion. There were just so many lives between mine and hers, thousands of years of history during which whole civilizations had risen and fallen. She bided her time in Thutmose's lost workshop and waited to be re-discovered. Seeing her for the first time, I was forced to recognize the insignificance of my own existence. That's kind of a lot for an eleven year old to absorb and I had no words to give voice to what had just happened to me. To avoid feeling foolish I kept my mouth shut about it and did not say anything about it to anyone.
The bust possesses great presence, an elegant serenity that clearly indicates her awareness of her place in the world. She was a great queen who ruled alongside her husband. In her time she was celebrated for her beauty and her very name means "the beautiful one has come." That she remains an icon 3,000 years later is due to the great sculptor, Thutmose. The lines of her neck are long and graceful, the eyes wide set and almond shaped. Her lips and jawline are strong and yet delicate at the same time. The headdress is that of a queen, exuding power and dignity. It is an architectural crown with its conical shape and radiating lines. When you see the barest outline of that headcovering you are instantly placed in ancient Egypt. It exists almost as a sculpture on its own, emanating from her head with a power that has not been exceeded by any other crown ever created by human hand. This is the bust that created an archetype of feminine beauty for all time. Once seen, Nefertiti cannot be un-seen. It's hard to imagine now that she has only been known since the figure went on display in Berlin back in the 1920's when it created an international sensation. She remains in the mind, now and forever, as a standard of beauty. Any other woman called beautiful has to be compared to her. Was Audrey Hepburn's neck more or less graceful than Nefertiti's? You can say yes or no but you cannot negate the fact that the two will always be compared. The artist perfectly captured Queen Nefertiti at the apex of her power and the peak of her beauty and so it is to him that she owes her eternal fame and in creating this work of art, Thutmose in turn lays claim to his place among the greatest artists in human history.
This is the power of great art: it permanently changes the way you see. You cannot stop seeing it or reverse that process of change. Once a powerful piece of art captures your mind, your perception of reality is forever altered. Many works of art I have encountered since then have moved me more than Nefertiti. There are greater sculptures, paintings, plays, novels, musical works and other works of art. They all have the power to create an out of body experience. This is the original meaning of ecstasy; you stand outside of your body and when you regain it, your vision has been changed. Nefertiti was my first experience of the power of the paradigm shift that extraordinary art can produce within a person. For the first time I understood time and beauty.
Art, as my patient wife explained to me, is a conduit through which we gain access to the infinite. The door to eternity is opened and we experience a sacred moment of being, connected to all other people in a transcendent, transfigurative sense. That moment I experienced with Nefertiti allowed me to truly see the meaning of time and beauty, things that endure and things that are lost. I enjoy all kinds of art but I am not very well educated about it. I go and read the inscriptions sometimes but I mostly just look at the stuff. It moves me or not. I don't get all of it and I don't feel compelled try. I concentrate upon the things I do like. What I feel is the sense that art has a vital place in our lives that cannot be replaced by anything else. Art points to an ultimate experience of existence on a higher, unattainable plane. The best art is sacred in that it transforms us and carries us beyond the experience of mundane, everyday life into the realm of the infinite, the sublime. When an artist achieves greatness, whatever the medium or form, that artist performs the miracle of opening a passageway from the finite to the infinite, from the secular to the sacred. We, forever changed and enriched, cannot undo the miracle, cannot unsee the seen and cannot deny the experience.
For drama's sake, I prefer to think of myself as having been victimized by my parents' aspirations for their children. My sisters and I were dragged around on all manner of seemingly relentless cultural excursions. There were the driving adventures with my parents in the front seat and me in the back, riding the hump, miserably sandwiched between my older sisters. Not infrequently, those trips ended with almost no one speaking to anyone else. My mother traveled armed with a long wooden spoon which she used to enforce discipline. At the first sign of insurrection, she, without even turning her head, would reach back and sweep across the back seat with the spoon to be sure that everyone got at least one nice crack. I often bitterly resented these forced feedings of culture; they were family trips to hell, often as not. Pompeii in the middle of August is not fun for a boy. It is torture. However, because of one trip to see a bunch of dusty Egyptian relics in Berlin my whole world changed. It's for this reason that my wife and I cheerfully force our kids to submit to cultural indoctrination as well. We try to limit their exposure so that when we leave the museum they complain about not having enough time to see everything. That's when we know we did it just right.
When my son was three he caused something of a stir in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by lying down on the floor and imitating the poses he saw painted on the Egyptian sarcophagi. People stopped and stared at the strange kid, not knowing what to make of him. He gets it on a visceral level. He thinks the painted boxes are cool. I think they're cool, too. I hope that he and his sister will one day have kids of their own and that they will drag their resentful, slouching, complaining offspring around to museums as well. I can't help hoping that my grandchildren will behave badly enough to embarrass my kids, just enough to draw a warning from the museum guards.