We recently went to the new Whitney Museum of American Art. I hadn’t been to an art museum in a long time – just ask my wife who is quite frustrated by my lack of enthusiasm for art museums. When we went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the event was so noteworthy that our daughter wrote us a postcard asking, “How did this happen?!” I usually associate most art museums with getting tired from breathing the bad air. I like art, really I do, but I’d rather do so many other things before going to see it. However, the Whitney is worth going to just for the building and the views of the city and the Hudson River. I spent half my time looking at the art, and half outside on the balconies or standing at the huge windows overlooking the river.

My favorite works included some of my old standbys: Edward Hopper’s Railroad Sunset (which has always seemed like a Japanese Landscape to me somehow) and Grant Wood’s Study for Breaking the Prairie. But the two works that I still think about were Jasper John’s Three Flags, and a 1970 film by Howard Lester called “One Week in Vietnam.” Somehow the two works are connected in my mind.

I never really had much of an opinion one way or the other about Jasper Johns. We just barely covered 20th century art in both of the art history classes I took in college, and I haven’t learned much about art since then. (See the aforementioned art museum opposition.) Maybe listening to my sister-in-law discuss the art with her children put me in the right mood, but his works in the exhibition really made me think (probably in the way that art is supposed to make you think.)

The Howard Lester film flashes the photographs, names and hometowns of American soldiers killed over a period of seven days during the Vietnam War. The film is riveting – both difficult to watch and hard to step away from. I watched at least two loops, wanting to take in the faces and names of these men. As I watched, I thought if a map could ever be as moving as this image.

This is my first effort.