The thing leans. That's what gets me first — the leaf hasn't been pinned or floated or pressed flat under glass, it's been stood up on its own dried stem and tilted ever so slightly back against the cloth, the way you'd prop a tired actor in the wings. Teatrino: little theatre. And once you've read the title you can't unsee the staging — the drape behind it isn't a background, it's a curtain, gathered and shadowed at the edges of the frame, and the leaf is alone on a dark stage waiting for the rest of the cast that never arrives.
What a strange career move, you think, for the man who gave us the great bright sprawl of American color — Cape Cod light, the Provincetown beach, traffic the size of opera. To end up here, in near-total darkness, lighting one curled brown leaf as if it were the only object left in the world. Except it isn't a move away from that at all. Look at the colour. The thing is copper and rust and honey, and right where it folds in on itself near the bottom there's a stubborn flare of green-gold, the last of the chlorophyll holding on. He's still chasing light across a surface; the surface has just shrunk to the size of a hand.
And that's the small wound of it. We dignify the leaf precisely because it's nothing — the kind of thing you'd step on without looking, raked into a pile, burned. Meyerowitz, by then in his seventies and working in Italy in the long shadow of Morandi, builds it a theatre and waits. Nobody applauds. The leaf just stands there, magnificent and finished, taking its bow.
The thing leans. That's what gets me first — the leaf hasn't been pinned or floated or pressed flat under glass, it's been stood up on its own dried stem and tilted ever so slightly back against the cloth, the way you'd prop a tired actor in the wings. Teatrino: little theatre. And once you've read the title you can't unsee the staging — the drape behind it isn't a background, it's a curtain, gathered and shadowed at the edges of the frame, and the leaf is alone on a dark stage waiting for the rest of the cast that never arrives.
What a strange career move, you think, for the man who gave us the great bright sprawl of American color — Cape Cod light, the Provincetown beach, traffic the size of opera. To end up here, in near-total darkness, lighting one curled brown leaf as if it were the only object left in the world. Except it isn't a move away from that at all. Look at the colour. The thing is copper and rust and honey, and right where it folds in on itself near the bottom there's a stubborn flare of green-gold, the last of the chlorophyll holding on. He's still chasing light across a surface; the surface has just shrunk to the size of a hand.
And that's the small wound of it. We dignify the leaf precisely because it's nothing — the kind of thing you'd step on without looking, raked into a pile, burned. Meyerowitz, by then in his seventies and working in Italy in the long shadow of Morandi, builds it a theatre and waits. Nobody applauds. The leaf just stands there, magnificent and finished, taking its bow.