Modern Art

Our day on modern art started out with an exercise in the classroom where students helped recreate Dancing Lesson using a modernist’s mindset, throwing out all previous notions that the piece has to accurately represent real life. The goal of a modernist is to express ideas and emotions through the distortion in their work. One of the things that draws me to modernist artwork is that it can often be ambiguous and relies on the viewer to use their imagination to determine what the piece means to them individually. This property of ambiguity also tends to show up in some of the films that I enjoy watching. Stanley Kubrick, considered by many to be the greatest filmmaker of all-time, strived for ambiguity in his films to provide depth and leave the viewer with a puzzle to figure out, hopefully with more than a single solution. If two people walk out of the theatre with different interpretations of what they saw, the film did its job of providing the viewer with an opportunity to have an interesting conversation on the car ride back home.

After the lecture, we went to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection to see Joan Miró’s adaption of Dancing Lesson in person as well as a bunch of other modernist paintings.

Dancing Lesson, Jan Steen

Dutch Interior, Joan Miro

One of my favorite paintings was Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2 because when I looked at the piece, my initial impulse was that I was looking at an ice cream sundae. Is that a tower in a mountain ridge or a straw among mounds of ice cream? Does that red spot in the center of the image have deeper religious meaning or is it the cherry on top?

Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, Vasily Kandinsky

As a fan of the surreal short film, Un Chien Andalou (1929), by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, I was naturally excited when I found out we’d be seeing some of Dalí’s surrealist work. Our tour guide explained that in his sexually-charged Birth of Liquid Desires, we see a man who is simultaneously attractive and repulsive. Holes in the rock, including the one through which the naked male is sauntering, are apparently Freudian symbols of female private parts and the overall suggestion of penetration. Our guide noted that, in general, the surreal paintings on display often dealt with sexual content and dream-like impulses.

Birth of Liquid Desires, Salvador Dali

The Cubist painting below is interesting because it’s communicating principles of movement and velocity. It’s suggesting with transparency that this biker is traveling at a rapid pace. I thought this was a clever mechanism for displaying speed in an image, giving motion to the still.

At the Cycle-Race Track, Jean Metzinger