I know a lot of people are confused by what Modern art looks like sometimes. I know a lot of people, when they look at say, Picasso, let alone someone like Kandinsky or Malevich, feel like they're either missing something, or even maybe being suckered somehow.
Jackson Pollock is an American artist that confuses, and even alienates, maybe half of the people who look at his artwork. Well maybe not half. But If you don't know what he's up to, having the reaction "My kid could paint this!" is perfectly natural. If a painter named Barnett Newman were more well-known - if I could say "think of a Barnett Newman" and something would immediately pop into your head - his work might be even more confusing and irritating than Pollock.
There's a lot that needs to be known before some of these complex artworks can be understood. And when I say complex, I don't necessarily mean intricate, because some of them look incredibly basic and simplistic.
Modernism is a historical movement so the place to start looking for clues to explain things is in the past.
The French poet Charles Baudelaire was one of the first people to sort of diagnose an emerging attitude that would grow into what we now think of as Modernism. In 1859 he noted that the "desire to astonish and to be astonished is very proper." He phrased it this way: "the whole question, then, if you insist that I confer upon you the title of artist or connoisseur of the fine arts, is to know by what process you wish to create or feel wonder."
Baudelaire and a growing number of others thought that the closer art tried to mimic reality, the more materialistic it became. It became an exercise in imitation, not art, and the less creative it was. That was not how to create or feel wonder.
"Every day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing down before external reality," he said, and "each day the painter becomes more and more given to painting not what he dreams, but what he sees." The creative mind became little more than a stenographer of Reality. That was not art. Art had to do something else. It had to be something else. More next week.
