Last week we talked about the relationship of the old with the new, the past with the present, the relationship of history with today. I said that our interactions with art often contain this duality and how we approach art is sometimes like how we think about history. It’s not perfect analogous, but there’s enough in the way of similarities to help you think about what you’re doing when you look at art thoughtfully, and it can help you be more receptive to new art if you’ve found yourself dismissive of it in the past.
This balancing act between old and new is always there as artists react to things they’ve already created themselves, and interact with broader art history as a whole. Part of what a good museum will do is show us how these interactions play out.
One thing we can think about when we interact with a piece of art we’re not familiar with, is to try to understand it within the context of the particular artist’s overall work. That is to say, you can understand this individual piece, in light of all the other work this one artist has already produced. (Actually, a lot of us already do this without even realizing it. It’s what you do when you listen to new music that your favorite singer or band just released.) Solo exhibits at art museums can work this way too if they’re big enough, although it’s a lot harder to do this with an artist whose style doesn’t really evolve much. Norman Rockwell comes to mind: You can’t really get as much insight into how he paints by looking at his works from the 1930s through the 60s, no matter how many you look at. If from day to day, month to month, decade to decade, literally nothing at all changes, it’s hard to think of history. Good thing that’s rarely the case.
This is the best way I’ve discovered to get into the work of a difficult abstractionist. I remember one exhibit at the Modern in Fort Worth that was like this, and it let me understand for the first time the abstractions of a painter named Richard Diebenkorn. Usually at a museum you’ll see only one or maybe two of his works and that’s not enough. Here I looked at painting after painting of his, pieces that on first glance looked pretty well similar. Then I started to pick up on the differences that start to appear. In the course of one afternoon, he became one of my favorite abstractionists.
Another way to understand the work of an artist is to see him or her in the bigger historical evolution—as part of the evolving, always changing trajectory of art itself. These are ways that the past can help us understand, and appreciate, the present.
