Life would be drab without modern art

Recently, my husband and I visited San Francisco to see my son and daughterin law and while there, we visited the city’s Museum of Modern Art.

In the museum’s store I saw a T-shirt I wish I had bought. On it was a drawing done in color crayon of a little girl happily pronouncing, “I love the SFMOMA! It makes my brain happy!”

I pointed it out to my husband Jerry because, as we were finishing lunch on the top floor, after touring the four floors below, I had just said, “I LOVE modern art! It blows my mind and makes my brain happy!” I really should have purchased that T-shirt.

I do love art — old art, any art, any medium, but art considered “modern” is my favorite. It makes me think about life and the universe in new and different ways. It allows me to see life through the eyes of a person who sees life completely different from my perspective and/or beliefs.

It never ceases to amaze me how personal one’s taste in modern art is. What might be one person’s beauty is another person’s disgust.

Whatever it is, you have to be open to it and be willing to accept whatever feeling it brings. What might bring outrage to one person might bring peace to another or perplexity to someone, enlightenment to another.

I remember my first experience with modern art.

When I was around 10, my parents took us over to the Seattle Art Museum where a Mark Tobey exhibition was on display.

My parents had not known that. Had they known, judging from my Dad’s reaction to Tobey’s splattered paintings — “Harumph! how’s that art? It’s just a bunch of splattered paint. A 5-year-old kid could do that!” — we might not have gone! But I just loved them and never forgot them.

I loved the colors and the shapes and the splatters. Even at the age of 10, I knew more than my Dad that there was more to each splash.

But even Dad’s reaction was fine. I don’t mean to disparage it.

I think modern art in some cases is supposed to make people mad, make them question, “Why is this art?”

I remember one time when I was talking at a party about Andrew Wyeth, one of my favorite artists. I mentioned his painting, “Wind from the Sea,” and how it was one of the first paintings I had ever seen where I could sense movement. The curtains in the old Olson house blowing into the old room with the muted colors of brown, green, beige and white haunt me—in a good way.

At the party, after I finished describing my reaction to the picture, a woman said, “Tsk tsk. Wyeth is SO sentimental.”

“Huh?” I thought.

While his paintings are incredibly beautiful, they also are disturbing.

“Christina’s World,” the painting of Christina Olson (although Wyeth’s wife Betsy was the model for the painting), a paraplegic, lying in a field, trying to get back to her house, makes my heart ache. I saw it in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and I will never forget it. Is that sentimental? And, by the way, what’s WRONG with being sentimental?

In San Francisco, we saw so many wonderful things, but one of my favorites that just made me laugh hysterically was a room where the artist, Richard Serra, placed long bars made of steel (I think) and took in pots of molten lead and threw it at the bars and walls in the room.

Entitled “Gutter Corner Splash: Night Shift,” because they had to make it at night due to the metallic smell and danger, it was a sight to behold.

Jerry had a quizzical, “What the blankity blank is this?” look on his face.

I laughed because I thought, “Man, this guy had to have…well, gumption, to talk the curators of the museum into doing this to the room. What was he thinking? What were they thinking?”

Serra said, “You’ve got to convince the people who view it that their efforts (his and his helpers) were worthwhile.”

I’m still not sure, but I’m still thinking about it, so that’s a good sign.

My favorite piece in the museum was “Blue Clamp” by Jim Dine. It was a painting of purple, pink, blue, and green drips and swishes forming a giant heart with a royal blue metal c-clamp right in the middle of it.

What I love about this piece is that it makes me think about love—about how sometimes people and things clamp onto our hearts and it’s not always fun—it can just plain hurt, like when someone you love doesn’t love you back, or when someone you love is in pain and you can’t do anything about it, or when you love someone or something so much, and you don’t understand why you do.

Like, for example, my love for my bulldog/boxer mix, Bobo. He’s an idiot. Always whining and getting into trouble, yet every time I look at him, my heart melts.

So, that’s what I immediately started thinking about when I saw “Blue Clamp”! My brain starting whirring, and thinking and just working, and ultimately, it became happy.

Pablo Picasso said “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”

I love that.

Life could go on without modern art, but oh, how drab that would be. Modern art makes us think and it brings beauty and truth into our world and sometimes it just plain stirs us up!

I can’t imagine life without it and the wonderful artists who create it.