At the end of my essay last week on “Aesthetic Chills” (Part 1 and Part 2), I asked readers to write in if they had their own experiences to share. To my great pleasure, quite a few did.
More than one wrote to agree that the recent Delcy Morelos show at Dia gave them chills, confirming something that I had thought was a very particular experience of my own. Most often, however, the accounts confirm that a chill involves personal associations or encounters that are specific to a specific way an artwork was presented or encountered.
More than one involves a video work featuring music, the medium that remains the best trigger. But some people claim to get chills reliably from specific painters or works they have a deep relationship with.
Below, I’ve gathered some of the “chills-inducing” art moments that people sent in.
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Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, 2012. Photo Elisabet Davids, courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.
A “chills” artwork that comes to mind for me is Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors piece, which I saw at the Broad. It’s similar to 40 Part Motet, in that there’s a speaker and a screen corresponding to each performer in Kjartansson’s band who are all in different rooms of a big house. The aesthetics are very “Arcade Fire,” very 10-15 years ago. The song is haunting, but the part that gave me chills is at the end when all of the performers have left (they walk into a field together) and the cameraman in the video goes around and turns off the cameras one by one. As the screens in the gallery flicked off, people in the gallery naturally moved to gather together at the last screen. There was no ultimate gesture—just all of us standing at the same place when the last camera was unceremoniously shut off.
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Alphonse Mucha, Woman in the Wilderness (1923).
I vividly remember visiting the Mucha Museum in Prague, filled with Alphonse Mucha’s vibrant Art Nouveau works. His pieces, bright and colorful, mostly depict upbeat themes: posters for operas and his “Seasons” series featuring goddesses wrapped in flowers, set against vivid backgrounds, all compressed into 2-D within his signature elaborate frames. As I walked through the galleries, the works started to blur together, their distinct style becoming almost repetitive. But then, just before the gift shop, I turned a corner and saw Woman in the Wilderness—a massive painting of a woman sitting in the snow, head thrown back to the moon in a mix of agony and acceptance, as wolves crest a hill. The painting was a stark, dark contrast to the flowery colors of the previous rooms. And then, chills hit me as I realized the woman’s face bore an uncanny resemblance to my great-great-great-grandmother’s—a woman who fled the Bolsheviks in the early 1900s. Unlike my ancestor, this figure in the painting didn’t escape, or so we’re led to believe. In that moment, the connection felt immediate, a haunting tie to my past, and a jarring shift from the joyfulness of Mucha’s other paintings.
—Jennifer Simkin
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Arthur Jafa, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016). Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.
For me it was watching Arthur Jafa‘s Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016) at SFMOMA. Maybe it was Kanye’s soundtrack. But I got chills up my spine. I probably watched it 10 times in a row that day, and 20 times on YouTube since just to remember what it felt like the first time.
—Marilyn Minter
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Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) Photo: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
There is a specific kind of chills you get from seeing an artwork in person for the first time, years after studying it in a textbook or slides in art history classes. It’s a recognition of the familiar (and maybe nostalgia for being a student), but also a distinctly novel physical experience, like being in the same room with a celebrity. This just happened to me in seeing Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) in London for the first time, 10 years after studying and writing about it in my first art history class.
—Anonymous
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Giotto, Joachim’s Dream (1303-1305).
I’ve experienced chills from paintings a few times, most memorably with Renaissance works: Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (had choral auditory hallucinations), the Gioconda (the movement caused by my own breath creating an illusion of the figure breathing herself, plus the background becoming activated into swirling figures), and Giotto’s Dream of Joachim (an awareness of simulation, what is being dreamt, who is the dreamer, etc.)
A common thread in all was that the experience came after long periods of contemplating the image, not averting the gaze. A long duration of viewing seemed integral and the intended method of experiencing the works (perhaps in contrast to the immediate impact demanded of the painted medium nowadays).
—Jack McConville
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Edward Hopper, Automat (1927) (Photo by Francis G. Mayer/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Any Edward Hopper or Frances Bacon’s as a kid would trigger my chills.
I can’t remember where I saw my first Edward Hopper. But the first time I felt the loneliness and space, it sent chills down my spine.
When you see Francis Bacons in a book, his work is powerful. But when I saw his piece in MoMA, it sent chills down my back instantly—the anger, the despair, pouring out of it. I still think about to this day. Just thinking about it now is giving me the chills.
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Paul Cézanne, Apples (1878-79). (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
As a painter, I get chills whenever I see a painting by Cézanne, even a photo of one. I feel the old master ruminating in front of the “motif,” crystallizing the image in his mind before decisively placing his color blocks to construct a reality “parallel to nature.” Reliving his process gets my heart racing with excitement over the difficulty of his chosen method and his masterly command of it. Several times I have broken down crying, realizing my own inadequacy in the light of Cézanne’s power to focus intensely on transforming an optical impression into a delicately balanced color composition.
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Even a dozen years after I experienced Ceal Floyer’s sound work ’Til I Get It Right (2005) at Documenta 13, I still get chills watching it on video: Tammy Wynette’s voice echoes in a small, empty room at the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany: “I’ll just keep on/’til I get it right.” She sounds anguished but determined, and she just keeps going. This moment of catharsis, of clarity, is on an infinite loops. It’s an edit of a snippet of Wynette’s 1972 song of the same name, and the full line is, “I’ll just keep on/falling in love/’til I get it right.” Floyer’s elision broadens its message. It becomes about the exhibition, about art, about life, and perhaps about all things that can never fully be resolved.
—Andrew Russeth
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A visitor stands in front of a painting by Mark Rothko, at the exhibition “From Kandinsky to Pollock, the art of the Guggenheim collections”, on March 17, 2016 at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. (Photo Vinvenzo Pinto/AFP via Getty Images)
I have those experiences when I look at Rothko’s paintings. It brings me into an exciting new world of color, happiness, and warmth.
—Anita Shapolsky
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El Greco, Christ Blessing (1600) from the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. (Photo by VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)
I am 79 now. Seeing quite a lot of art, but not as a pro art person.
I have one very memorable chill. Aged about 18. Walked in to the Edinburgh art gallery. Directly in front of one as you entered, probably just the specific El Greco exhibition they had at the time, hanging singly, no other paintings in sight, was El Greco’s Jesus. Just the portrait. It gave me the actual chills…. the tingles-up-the-back-of-the-neck thing.
I think you then turned to the side to enter the rest of seeing his work, none of which I remember seeing at that time at all, nor do I remember any of the rest of that holiday away from my home back down in Surrey.
I’ve never had art chills from pictures again. A land chill, yes. Here in New Zealand where I now live, I had the same experience when cresting a hill in my open top car to look across a river valley to the Southern Alps.
Such an odd sensation and I think, as you said, it has to have an element of the unexpected.
—Anne Moore