I stood in the Georges Pompidou in Paris today, fifth floor, modern art exhibition.
Loved it!
Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Kupka, Warhol, Pollock — all there and much more, lurking in the galleries, going nonrepresentational on me, splattered, shattered and re-mattered.
As I looked them over and through, I thought about how modern art has re-imaged our world. It has lifted our mental bed covers, peeped us beneath the surface of our lives and looked us into the strange, improvisatory forms and shapes of things sleeping in our psyches.
The exhibition in the Pompidou is so different from what is in the Louvre where we find the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the raft of the Medusa, the winged bulls.
As I stroll-gawked through the Pompidou exhibit, I thought about how modern art, over time, grew increasingly abstract — and increasingly inclusive. It was the impressionists who started this.
Monet begat Picasso.
With modern art, art became form, and everything became art.
Subjects became increasingly unrecognizable. Form and content merged and became colored lines, circles, curves, arrows, triangles, boxes, parallels, randoms.
Modern art threw reality in our faces — geometricized, essentialized, energized.
I love it, well some of it.
I’ve heard some people don’t
An elitist explanation for this would be that they simply don’t understand it.
I don’t think so. I think we all understand it all too well, and this is actually what disturbs us and either drives us away from it our pulls us into it.
Reality, stopped down to it’s essentials, frightens us, stuff like atoms, electrons, lines, dots, emotions, instincts, body parts, chaos, non-rational reality, the stuff that dreams are made of, the stuff that we are made of.
Modern art hasn’t made a life of it’s own; it is our life, and is unnerving, too real, too ugly, too beautiful and so we turn away from it, just as we do from reality.
Consider Kandinsky. His paintings are life untethered, parts and pieces, horizontals and verticals, color contrasts, essential spiritualities, floating through the flotsam and jetsam of sentience.
Perhaps a Kandinsky is more like a Venus de Milo than we suspect. Modern art is life — with the arms knocked off.
I’m for embracing it, all of it — what flies and what floats, what is rational, what is not, what is recognizable and also what lurks just below that but is that.
To appreciate modern art, any art, one must come out of denial and into acceptance.
It’s that simple.
It’s about you; it’s about accepting youself.
Thrive! 