Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

TV’S Unlikeliest Art Critic Tours New York

NEW YORK - Had you been unfamiliar with her name, occupation and eccentric manner of interpreting masterpieces through incidental details, the sight and sound of her would have been surreal: a buck-toothed nun in a billowing black habit chattering about the length of Jesus' loincloth in one wooden sculpture and the comfy plumpness of the mattress below St. Anne in another.

But this was Sister Wendy Beckett, a sometime hermit who is fast on her way to becoming the most unlikely and famous art critic in the history of television, so her tour through the Cloisters in upper Manhattan on Monday was bound to be a singular foray.

Coming upon a 12th-century sculpture of the Madonna and Child, Sister Wendy was told by one of her guides that the colors had not always been so muted, that the blues and oranges were once brilliant, even garish.

"The Virgin always was a fashion statement," Sister Wendy mused.

Then she noticed the missing head of the child, an accident that had befallen the wooden statue somewhere along the way between the Burgundy region of France and this replica of a medieval monastery in Fort Tryon Park.

"She was so loved, and so damaged," Sister Wendy intoned gravely as her hands, like little hummingbirds, fluttered toward the wound. "Love's a dangerous thing."

The incongruity of such passionate, and often sensuous, statements coming from a hunched, bespectacled, 67-year old nun is the secret to much of Sister Wendy's charm and success.

Over the last six years, Sister Wendy, who still spends most of her time in solitude in a trailer near a Carmelite convent in England, has starred in three British television series about art and developed something of a cult following in Europe.

The most recent of these series, "Sister Wendy's Story of Painting," is currently being broadcast in the United States on PBS stations in hourlong segments on Sundays. It ends next week.

The basic format for these programs is to plop Sister Wendy in front of a piece of art and let her lapse into one of her meandering, rapturous commentaries. Her fame owes no small debt to the erotic overtones of some of these reveries, which have occasionally made her seem the Dr. Ruth Westheimer of art appreciation.

In her first series, "Sister Wendy's Odyssey," she clucked over the "lovely and fluffy" pubic hair in a nude by Stanley Spencer. In "Sister Wendy's Story of Painting," she describes the male bison rendered by cave muralists as "great balls of male erotic fury, ready to explode on one another." She also looks to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and espies Adam, who she says is "sprawled there in his naked male glory, but he's not alive."

"All he can do," she says, "is lift up a flaccid finger."

Sister Wendy arrived in New York City on Saturday for a weeklong visit with a dual purpose: a lecture at the Morgan Library on Tuesday night at 6:15 p.m. and a bit of publicity for the book version of "Sister Wendy's Story of Painting" (DK Publishing, $39.95).

Thus she allowed a gaggle of journalists to accompany her on a pleasure trip to the Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is designed to resemble a monastery, dedicated to art of the Middle Ages and nestled on a leafy hill overlooking the Hudson River.

From the moment Sister Wendy stepped out of a car at the entrance, her slyly irreverent wit was on display. After someone praised the pleasantly brisk weather, she said, "I spoke to Him."

Her tour was done partly in a wheelchair - which she used because of her generally frail health and the flaring of arthritis in one ankle - and partly on foot. And it set off signature bursts of her gleeful commentary, in which she channels the emotions of characters in a work of art, weaves strands of narrative around them and latches onto language and images seldom heard in traditional criticism.

"It's a strong, tough little Jew," Sister Wendy said of one Christ figurine. Of a statue of St. Roch with a yapping dog at his feet, she lamented: "I just wish he was taking notice of the dog, which is trying so hard for his attention. A saint should take notice."

Sister Wendy showed a particular fondness for a 12th-century marble arch showing centaurs and other fanciful beasts. "Although I think it's a mark in the stone," Sister Wendy said, "it almost looks as if the paw of the lion is holding a cigar."

Mary Shepard, a museum educator at the Cloisters, confessed that the shadow in question was the identification number of the sculpture, which had probably been put in too conspicuous a place.

"Naughty, naughty, naughty," Sister Wendy admonished her.

In a separate sculpture, St. Anne's expression struck Sister Wendy as a mixture of surprise and relief, betraying "the fatigue of having your first child when you're getting on 50."

"She's done it," Sister Wendy observed, "but she's not going to do it again!"

And when Ms. Shepard showed Sister Wendy a medieval bird cage with two stuffed specimens on a perch, Sister Wendy had an epiphany: These inert creatures could be replaced with real ones that would provide visitors with extra visual and aural stimulation.

"If medieval birds are happy there," Sister Wendy reasoned, "why shouldn't a 20th-century American canary feel quite at home?"

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