| | “I Hate Modern Art” When “museum rats,” like the editor, hear this often repeated comment emanating from otherwise reasonable and sensible people, we wince as if we were hearing someone scraping a hard surface with a blunt instrument. But this is not a simple and straightforward subject. A good number of years ago, when our sons had not yet started high school, we took them on a bicycle tour of the Danish mainland following a train trip from Copenhagen. We spent several days in Alborg and visited the art museum there. The lads were only moderately interested until they came to a glass-enclosed exhibit of part of a roll of toilet paper with a small amount of human feces. This they found absolutely hilarious. And to my dismay, I read somewhere recently that some artist is interested in elephant excrement. I was saddened that the old and very bad so-called “art” we had seen in Jutland had not disappeared as it should have. What is Modern Art? A crude but helpful definition is “Art produced in the 20th Century.”  It is crude because it excludes Vincent Van Gogh who died in 1890, and Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne, both of whom lived only a very few years into the “new” century. All three of them were “modern” artists in the truest sense of the word. All of them were not interested in reproducing a photographic likeness of anything or anybody but rather a version which accorded with their own vision and personality.
This very personal reaction to reality is one of the keys to modernism and ends up being an expression of one’s mood alone, as is the case of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923 -2002). In most of their canvases there is no objective subject matter at all. I suspect it is the various forms of non-objective art which cause distrust and even revulsion in some onlookers. However, modern art is far, far more diverse than non-objective painting or sculpture. For example, there is the Italian Amedeo Modigliani (1884 -1920)  who painted real people but gave them stylized faces. This art is always agreeable to look at, and his nudes are luminous, some say magnificent. In America there was Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986) whose subjects were recognizable but sparse and bold; and Edward Hopper (1887-1967), a painter of modern loneliness in his cityscapes and city scenes.
In Canada in the 20s, 30s and into the 40s, there was the “Group of Seven” landscape painters of the great Canadian North who deliberately went into regions nobody had ever painted or even photographed and brought back striking and memorable pictures. Earlier, Austria had Gustav Klimt (1862 -1918) and Oskar Kokoschka, (1886 - 1980), painters who made their own very special imprint on landscapes and other subjects.  An artist whose subjects are entirely recognizable but who comes from a special world is the Russian, Marc Chagall (1887-1985), who specialized in Eastern European Jewish themes. Another giant of modern painting is the Frenchman, Henri Matisse (1869- 1954), whose strength was an astounding and delightful use of vibrant and deep colors. The list goes on and on. And there was a whole group of proletarian painters who reflected the misery of the Depression and the plight of the poor. Examples of this concern were Ben Shahn in the U.S., Diego Rivera in Mexico, and Käthe Kollwitz in Germany. Don’t look too long at Shahn’s portrait of the lost and bedraggled Sacco and Vanzetti or you might lose a tear. With Pablo Picasso (b. Spain 1891 d. France 1987) we come into difficult territory. Picasso was a good, if not prolific, sculptor and an outstanding ceramicist. In painting he left an enormous output. He could paint and draw fairly traditional but superb portraits, cubist works, neo-classic people seemingly of the Greco-Roman period, and his signature later works, persons with faces whose features were re-arranged so that an eye may appear at the place of an ear, and a nose may point in a strange direction. As a student, I did not like his monumental Guernica, a portrayal of one of the early atrocities in what was later to become WWII: depicting German bombers acting on behalf of Spanish Fascist forces, wiping out an entire Basque village. While I have come to admire this work, I am still not that crazy about the grotesqueness of many of the portraits of that period. Yet I agree that he was the greatest visual artist of the 20th century. Anyone doubting that statement need only look at a recent UNICEF greeting card on which a dove of peace done with only a few strokes of the pen takes flight.
However, there are three non-objective or “pop” artists whom I can recommend to everyone because all three opened a door of some kind for us and made us see a part of the world in a different way.  Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987), Claes Oldenburg (b.1929), and Alexander Calder (1898 - 1976). Warhol is most famous for his painting of a large number of Campbell soup cans and other already existing objects. His contribution was the thought that artifacts in our everyday life have aesthetic value. Does that mean that a museum curator should be happy to buy a grouping of 15 empty beer bottles from me? No, I don’t think so! Oldenburg took everyday objects and recreated them very much enlarged. For example, there is a ten-meter (33 feet) clothespin in a collection and a number of “soft” versions of these kinds of objects elsewhere. I remember seeing a very large, soft telephone covered in a coarse fabric at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But what I would really love to own is the soft version of a wall plug, the diameter of which was the size of a small, round coffee table. What was astonishing about these pieces was the fact, that once they were taken out of their context, they appeared both strange and familiar at the same time. One of my great favorites is the Mobiles of  Alexander Calder (1898-1976). This consists of a collection of horizontal metal pieces of the same shape which are connected with a hook to a metal arm which in turn is connected to another arm and so forth. The total structure may look in outline like a tree or be a free-form design. The various arms are deliberately balanced against each other and are substantially still. However, the slightest air current puts the mobile in motion - very slowly and very gently. A bright light at a distance enhances the effect with lovely shadows. Calder’s Mobiles prove that a mechanical contrivance unrelated to any person or living thing can be very beautiful. But what about the thousands of works of art entitled Study in Blue, Untitled, Paranoia, Number 20, White on White and so on? There is no objective standard by which these pictures, sculptures or installations can be judged. Even the marketplace can only tell you what someone is willing to pay, and that in turn can be influenced by publicity and many other factors. The best way to evaluate these works is by deciding whether we find them attractive or whether they widen our horizons. This aspect of “Modern Art” is an interesting process but no one should feel threatened by it. If we like Number 20 but think 21 is for the birds, so be it, and if a whole roomful of works does not touch us, that may not be our fault. We owe respect to people who create art, but we are not obliged to like their product. A slang expression is appropriate here: We should always “Get a Life.”
Three web sites to explore
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