My recent trip to Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the works of Picasso and his contemporaries has been an epiphany in some ways.
The exhibit I am of course referring to is the Picasso exhibit. As a photographer – I find these exhibits very enlightening. If you are an aspiring fine-art photographer, I would suggest you head over here ASAP. It is worth every penny.
For the past several years – I have visited several museums in the area. MoMa, MET, ICP, National Gallery of Art, and Philadelphia Museum of Art and so forth. I have often found myself during my repeat visits relishing the same art pieces again and again - those that I understood.
During the Picasso exhibit audio tour, the narrator casually mentions about the state of shock people had to this particular piece of art when it was first exhibited in New York. It could have been the reaction of people not understanding about this piece, and more possibly – the “brain” back then – not tuned to understand it.
There are several pieces of Modern Art that seems to fit this bill exactly – Abstracts by Kandinsky, Cubism by Baraque and Picasso, Surrealist by Miro and Dali. Pollack, Rothko, Mondrian… Well, you get the idea.
As a challenge, I recently started reading the biographies of some of these artists. Joan Miro is one of them. In the past, every time I saw this – I kept saying to myself – “WTF man?”. Now that I understand it, I think I will never look at this the same way. It is a wonderful piece of art!
Looking back – I realize I just did not know enough to understand the art. There are a lot of people BS around art. I have seen people gazing at art pieces – and often wondered what the heck they are looking at?…Maybe they are trying to make sense of it as well. But, the fact remains that once you look it these the “right” way – It has a totally different meaning to it.
I had often thought that “art” is pretty much a right brain activity. Just try and understand the cubism, surrealism or any of the other abstracts….man – they need some pretty hard core left brain activity. Some of these give me a headache.
As I read through their biographies, I am now realizing that the paintings are more of a reflection of the artist themselves rather than about anything else. It is about their life – in specific, their personal experiences of leading their every day lives, their dreams, their life styles and their culture.
All I am saying is that – This is just the beginning (for me).
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