Memory

I have made several visits to the current exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum, Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945. Thursday's visit was with my daughter from Portland and her spouse.  It is quite an extraordinary show, with many very well known artists from that fraught period of the history of Germany and the World.  Many of the paintings and sculptures had been displayed in a large 1930s exhibit of works the Nazis called Degenerate Art.  As we left the gallery I recounted my experience of viewing the exhibition for the first time a few weeks earlier.

I was pleased on that first visit to find examples of the work of Paul Klee.

Ships Departing by Paul Klee

Klee had been a favorite from the time I was a child.  I was very taken by his use of color in his abstract compositions.  I particularly remembered a picture of his depicting a reclining nude in a rainforest setting.  

When I got home I searched the Web for that particular picture I remembered with such fondness. It came as quite a surprise that no such painting by Klee seems to exist. Looking around at the work of other artists of the same period I decided that what I thought I remembered as a work by Klee was probably The Dream, painted in 1910 by Henri Rousseau.

So, a very long-held and cherished memory was a very poor representation of reality.  It got me thinking about what memories consist of, how they are stored and recalled, and what unreliable records they often are.  One of the things that distinguishes this particular memory is that it was possible for me to test its accuracy.  Many -- perhaps most -- memories are not so easily verified or refuted. 

"Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies." - Julio Cortázar