Stand still and look stupid

I was at the Detroit Institute of Arts this afternoon. I first went to the special exhibit of paintings by Claude Monet and Frederic Edwin Church. There were less than a dozen Monet paintings from early in his career. My favorite was of his wife and son standing on the crest of a windy hill. The Church part, which ends Sunday (the Monet part stays open for another month), focuses his travels around the Mediterranean in the late 1860. Many items on display are quick studies done when he traveled to various sites. He did some full scale works when he returned to America. The most eye-catching is his view of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives in which the Temple Mount is bathed in bright light (yeah, a lot of religious symbolism there). He also painted a few artificial scenes in which Greek ruins and Crusader castles and perhaps a few other time periods are jumbled together. We’re told his point is that civilizations crumble. My favorite Church painting is displayed prominently in the DIA, though was not part of this exhibit. It is his painting of the eruption of the Cotopaxi volcano.

After lunch in the cafe I visited the two galleries for temporary exhibits. One had images of homes from fanciful to cute to decrepit. The photo gallery had a series on Detroit Hip-Hop artists (I’ve heard of Eminem, but none of the others).

Then on to the Detroit Film Theater and the documentary, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. It begins with a quote from Lamarr, “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” He movie starts in her native Austria where she is seen as smart. She noticed that when she entered a room she turned heads. So by age 16 she tried for the movie business. In 1938 she fled Austria, less because of the Nazis and more because of her first husband – she got tired of being the ornament on his arm.

So off to Hollywood, where she was known as “the most beautiful woman in the world.” It was a curse more than a blessing. Playing roles just because she was beautiful was never enough and her career was rocky. When not acting (such as when she was supposed to be sleeping) she used her smarts to invent things. One was a design for an airplane wing for Howard Hughes. The big one was a frequency hopping system to prevent Germans from jamming American torpedoes. The Navy dismissed the idea because it came from a beautiful woman. That technology is now a core piece of WiFi, Bluetooth, cell phones and several other technologies. Lamarr never got paid for her idea. We still don’t allow smart and beautiful women to reach their full potential.