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Friday, April 23, 2010

This Is Art?

Cleaning off my desk this morning I came across an article I saved about an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Let me be honest. I have a love-hate relationship with the National Gallery. The west wing is one of my favorite places in the city. The religious paintings by Fra Angelico, Millet, Rembrandt, El Greco, the engravings of Albrecht Durer, even the nasty little demons of Hieronymus Bosch -- all invite one to a serious reflection on the most important things in life.

When I was home schooling I would take my children to meet their cousins at the gallery for scavenger hunts. "Find a painting with an angel kneeling. Find David standing over the head of Goliath holding the giant's sword. Find a painting with an insect. (I included this because there's a portrait of a Churchman with a fly on his cassock. I wish I could remember the artist. I always wondered if he included the fly because it was bothering both him and his subject.) Find a sculpture of an unusual animal." The scavenger hunt was a fun way to introduce children to the great masters, and we spent many happy hours exploring  the exhibit halls of the west wing.

And then there's the east wing which houses the modern art collection. Don't get me wrong. I like some modern art. I particularly enjoy the colorful works of Marc Chagall. But much of modern art is simply nonsense. I remember an exhibit in the east wing years ago which supposedly depicted the stations of the cross (I only knew that from the title.) It consisted of fourteen white canvases sporting lines positioned in different places illustrating each station. I'm serious. I stood in the middle of the room and said, "The Emperor has no clothes." It's the same way I feel about Andy Warhol and his Campbell's Soup can. This, along with Mark Rothko's black paintings, demonstrates the con man at work. Perhaps that's where the term "con artist" comes from. Warhol always seemed to be wearing a cheshire cat grin. I wonder if he was thinking that there's a sucker born every minute to keep charlatans in business.

Which brings me to the current exhibition in the east wing tower running through January next year. It reflects the dark side of the museum - literally. A special exhibit of Mark Rothko (The museum has lots of his work.), it consists of seven large canvases in various shades of black.

Last month, Blake Gopnik wrote a gushing review in The Washington Post. By the time I got to the end of the article I thought he couldn't possibly be serious. He must be putting the reader on. More's the pity if he was actually serious. Let me give you a sample of what he wrote. Here's how he describes the paintings:
Close looking at these seven pictures - they repay hour after hour of attentive contemplation--made me realize...that they are so rich in their own particularities. They aren't just black on black.... They are every color of black against every other tone and hue and shade of it. Those distinctions, rather than their common gloom are what really come to matter about them. After an hour or two of looking, some of the paintings in this dispaly can end up seeming almost colorful, as though all that shared blackness cancels itself out.... To get anything at all from them beyond the poorest paraphrase of them as merely "black" -- you have to keep moving around them, from near to far and side-to-side, catching at the way different lightings and angles of view reveal different things about them..... Looking at the "dour" blackness in these pictures, it turns out, is all about the joyous light it takes to make that looking possible at all -- it's a kind of paradox, and like most brainteasers, it's full of restless energy. It is literally a lighthearted affair. As you look at these fiendishly complex paintings, you also become aware of the tremendously energetic artist who brought them into being....
Uh...yeah. Could anyone really spend an hour or two looking at those things? I'm getting the same feeling I had about the "Stations of the Cross" exhibit. If this is art, my one-year-old grandaughter's scribblings are masterpieces. As for the reviewer, well, there's no accounting for taste. If he wants to consider different hues of black as art, I might suggest he do a review of the paint sample wall at Lowes.

Gopnik began his article with a fanciful notion (not the artist's) about the paintings being "flesh-colored." He admits that, "Of course when Mark Rothko painted these works in 1964, he didn't have the skin of African Americans in mind. I'm' suggesting that we might want to as we look today." Again, could he possibly be serious or was this his idea of an early April fool's joke?

He then pooh-poohed those who might be tempted to describe the work as moody or dark and relate it to Rothko's suicide in 1970. But why is that interpretation any less accurate than his claim that the paintings are "light-hearted"?

I've been longing to take the trek into D.C. to visit the National Gallery again. If I do, I may just drop in at the east wing for my chuckle (or sigh) of the day. The disintegration of art forms to the banal and ridiculous is typical of a culture in decline. Can anyone deny that the United States in in decline? This is just one more sad example.

We often hear the Middle Ages described as "dark," an irony when one considers the soaring cathedrals, stained glass windows, and illuminated manuscripts. No, it is much more accurate to call our age dark. And if you want to see what that means literally, immerse yourself in modern art like the Rothko exhibit. If you can find there the "joie de vivre" described by Blake Gopnik, I recommend you see an eye doctor.

5 comments:

  1. Hi, Mary Ann! Being able to read artists' minds (what there is of them in some of them), I have intuited that the painting you have shown represents a black cat in a windowless room on a dark moonless night, except there is no cat and the view is blind. Can I be an art critic, please? Pretty please?

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  2. The real ridiculous aspect is that the National Gallery of Art probably paid a pretty penny to display that. Translation - our tax dollars at work!

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  3. Believe it or not, I see the shoulders and face of a man. But, then, of course, I wear very thick glasses.

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  4. Are you sure you aren't seeing dust on the photo and taking it for dandruff?

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  5. I recall San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art had an exhibit of Marc Chagall's paintings in the Fall of 2003. I thought all of his paintings were strange in the sense that there was something weird included somewhere in the picture. I left that exhibit with a kind of queasy feeling.

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