So far this week I have compared cubist, expressionist and abstract paintings to images I photographed in nature. Today I want to venture a bit further and talk about a subject matter that is frequently found in visual art and also a regular motif for the traveling photographer. Doors, in other words.

Doors as the substrate of a painting as well as its subject can be found as early as the fifteenth century. Dutch painters used triptychs: a format that consists of three panels that are hinged together and can be closed like a door. They functioned as a prayer aid, trying to help the observer to enter a meditative state with access to the divine world, but clearly setting up a boundary between every day life and the sacred through the focus on passageways. Doors were prominently painted within the triptychs as well, driving the point home of separation but also access to the divine. Different painters addressed different audiences: Robert Campin (1375-1444, usually identified with the Master of Flemalle) painted the annunciation within a domestic setting in the Merode Altarpiece to encourage private devotion in the home. Rogier van der Weyden organized the Miraflores Altarpiece in a series of archways to aid monks in completing the rosary. And Hugo van Der Goes created in the Portinari Altarpiece a Nativity scene to encourage hospital employees, and comfort sick patients with the notion of salvation. The use of doors was clearly linked to religious contemplation and communication with a higher power, but solidly set in environments familiar to the viewer.

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That is somewhat different when we reach the romantic era, where religion is changing, with people turning to more secular forms of comfort, leaving a weakening church behind and, for pragmatic reasons, separate what used to be church functions from their origins. Take cemeteries, for example. They used to be on church grounds, but are now, with the growth of populations in the 19th century, their own separate entities often at a distance from the city gates.

One of the most famous paintings of the era is Caspar David Friedrich’s depiction of a funeral at the abby in an oak forest. It is a dreamlike landscape, the church in ruins, the portal open to be taken on by nature, which also looks, frankly, decrepit. Some lonely monks try to bury what is presumed to be the painter (who by the way was involved as designer for all the modern secular cemeteries around Dresden.) The door between life and death, between the past (with its comforts of structured religion now decaying) and the presence (where nature is not exactly up to task to provide divine comfort) – how more symbolic can it get? (I learned all this here, in a fascinating essay on Friedrich’s burial paintings.)

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Moving forward in time, we find more reductive representations: Matisse’s french door that seems to frame a void. Original the central space contained a balcony and a landscape, but he blackened them out, at some point relating that “I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.” What are we supposed to experience? A sense of night, beckoning? Something reduced to framing of uncertain passage? Is it me, or does it give you goosebumps as well? (If you live close to Baltimore or visit, don’t miss the Baltimore Museum, housing the largest Matisse collection in the world and opening a new center next year.)

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Artist with a sense of humor to the rescue: Just look at Marcel Duchamp’s door that he installed in his French apartment in 1927.

It served two doorways (between the studio and the bedroom, and the studio and the bathroom). The door could be both open and closed at the same time, thus providing Duchamp with a household paradox as well as a practical space-saving device. The “practical space-saving device” belongs more to a set for a bedroom farce. Duchamp’s rooms-whether filled with string, prank doors, or readymades provoking pratfalls-all confound the logic of work and efficiency. Instead, when Duchamp altered the purposes of both rooms and objects, to provoke play rather than work, laughter becomes their new “function.” A detailed, clever description of Duchamp’s life-long, successful attempts to avoid work (or point to it as a factor in alienation if used within the industrial context) and introduce play (helped by the fact that he was “kept” by numerous rich benefactors all of his life) can be found here.

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Might as well turn to the surrealists and who better to serve us with passageways into another realm than Rene Magritte? I would not mind having these two doors, painted 23 years apart, in my life. That little cloud, which sails into (or out of) proximity to the sea, obligingly using the passageway instead of ignoring it and flying high, looks like it is curious, but also might be squashed in an instant if someone bangs the door… reminding me that I better pick my own path instead of following the beckoning of open doors. So who is victorious here?

And what was improved here? Some shade provided? A time-travel capsule if you dare step through that door? Many happy little clouds giving that sky a jubilant feel? Your guess is as good as mine, but these are doors that invite rather than forbid.

And finally here is a door that appeals to me visually, but I would never ever follow an invitation to pass through it from its painter, Willem de Kooning. If you have it in you to read a review of his work, dripping in psychoanalytic jargon misplaced in an art review, but truly perceptive once you get to the core issues, you’ll understand my reluctance.

Luckily, there are many other doors to chose from.

Closing the door on today’s musings is music by a contemporary of Friedrich: Felix Mendelssohn.