How I Learned to See Modern Art
I was taught by the best
Growing up in New York City in the 1950s and ’60s, I spent a lot of time hanging out in museums: the Met, the Frick, the Guggenheim, the Hayden Planetarium, Yankee Stadium. I was on a first-name basis with the dinosaur skeletons at the Museum of Natural History. I practiced my high school French sitting in the spectators’ gallery at sessions of the United Nations, setting my headphones to the French-language simultaneous translation. I was that kind of kid.
But one place that always held a special fascination for me was the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street. This revered institution houses undoubtedly the greatest collection of modern artworks on planet Earth, the crown jewels of the art world, the select of the select. Not just any old van Gogh, but The Starry Night:
Not just any Dalí, but The Persistence of Memory:
I and the Village, by Marc Chagall:
The Sleeping Gypsy, by Henri Rousseau:
Christina’s World, by Andrew Wyeth:
And countless other treasures. But among all these riches, two pictures, in particular, made a lasting impression on me. As I recall, they were mounted facing each other on opposite walls of the same room: Pablo Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror and The Piano Lesson, by Henri Matisse. With these two works, Messrs. Picasso and Matisse taught me what modern art was all about.
[S]ince you know you cannot see yourself
So well as by reflection, I, your glass,
Will modestly discover to yourself
That of yourself which you yet know not of.—Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar, Act I, Scene 2
Picasso’s Jeune fille devant un miroir (Girl Before a Mirror) was my first introduction to cubism. We see her side-on, her body turned to face the mirror rather than us. The mirror itself is turned at an angle, so that we see her there reflected from the front. She has the classic Picasso split face, showing both front view and profile together. Combined with the angled mirror, the effect is to portray the same subject from multiple viewpoints at once, the essence of cubism.
The girl is young, pretty, and apparently pregnant. (It turns out, though I didn’t know it back then, that she is in fact Picasso’s then-current mistress and muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter: 23 years old at the time he painted her in 1936, 28 years his junior, carrying their daughter Maya.) She’s drawn in the long, sinuous curves that are one of Picasso’s hallmarks, set off by contrast with the diamond-checked wallpaper. Her body in the flesh, at the left of the canvas, almost seems enclosed in an oval frame like the mirror, emphasizing the reflective symmetry of the composition. The curve of her arm, reaching across the mirror, breaks the symmetry.
But look again at that image in the mirror. The colors are shadowy and somber compared with the left half of the canvas. The face appears only in profile, looking back at the girl but not out at us. The features look haggard and troubled; is that a tear falling from her eye? The girl’s flowing blonde hair on the left is covered by a shawl in the reflection; her firm, youthful, bare breasts and belly are instead clothed, skewed, and sagging. The mirror shows her to herself not as she is, but what? As she will oneday be? As she feels herself inwardly? As she imagines or fears herself to be? Something deeper, something enigmatic about the human condition, is being conveyed here.
Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
—Ezra Pound
Facing the Picasso on the opposite wall of the museum gallery is La leçon de piano (The Piano Lesson), by Henri Matisse (1916). This is a masterpiece of visual rhythm and rhyme. To me, the key to the whole composition is the metronome, whose acute angle is echoed in the candle holder sitting on the piano, the strut supporting the piano’s music rack, the wedge-shaped shadow on the student’s face, and of course that big green—what is it?—on the left: a billowing curtain, a shaft of sunlight, a garden or field of grass outside the window? Whatever it is, it dominates the canvas with that same sharp angle. You can almost hear the relentless beat of the metronome as the boy struggles with his finger exercises.
But those severe angles and stark verticals aren’t the only elements of the composition. Notice how the filigree of the wrought-iron balcony railing rhymes with that of the piano’s wooden music rack. (The lettering on the rack, reading backwards, identifies the instrument as having been made by the Austrian master piano builder and mediocre composer, Ignaz Pleyel.) The sensuous, reclining nude sculpture at the lower left balances and contrasts with the stern, rigid figure of the piano teacher on her high stool at the upper right. To me, those graceful curves and filigrees embody the flowing music that the pianist (in collaboration with the composer) pours into the strict rhythmic discipline of the metronome. It’s what the poet Ezra Pound is getting at in the epigraph above: letting the music of the poetic line flow through the rhythm of the poem’s meter. You can see it at work in the earlier epigraph from Shakespeare’s Julius Cæsar, the way the music of Shakespeare’s language flows through the iambic pentameter of the blank verse.
Flowing beauty within structured discipline: a perfect definition of what the artist does, and that these two masters, Picasso and Matisse (not to mention Shakespeare and Pound), taught me to see.
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“How I Learned to See Modern Art” by Stephen Chernicoff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
