Atlanta's High Museum

OK, that’s cheesy. The High Museum in Atlanta is hosting a show called “Picasso to Warhol”. For an art nerd such as moi, this was a gotta-see on our recent visit to that city. The exhibit featured a few iconic works by 14 of Modern Art’s prominent masters, culled from New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It was like hanging with a room full of big-time celebrities. These are the pictures reproduced in every Art 101 textbook. And I got to see them in person! If you’ve ever met a major media star, after seeing them a zillion times on the tube, you know the feeling of going all Jello-kneed and thinking, “Omygawd! They really do exist!” You get to see them in their all too human glory. How deeply the makeup is troweled on. The gray roots. The thick glasses they wear off-camera. But it’s them! The real deal in the same room as you!

It was like that. Up close and personal, I could see areas on the Picasso where he’d worked over and worked again until he got it right. I could see how Matisse sloshed paint on the canvas just to get the color on, not caring about technique, seeming a little bored with the process. I could see Jackson Pollock’s fingerprints in the thick paint of early works. And as mechanical as Andy Warhol pretended to be, his personality showed through in underlying pencil work. He was having fun. Of course, no reproduction, no print, no digital image on-screen can ever catch the true color or tactile verve of the original. It’s the difference between seeing someone speak on TV and having them in front of you, looking directly into your eyes. You’re not just a passive consumer; you’re a participant. You’re in the room with them!

I got to the High Museum early on a Tuesday. A few others also arrived early to beat whatever crowds might show up on an off day. It seemed I’d have the place pretty much to myself—just me and Pablo and Henri and a few of our closest buds hanging out.

But before I was in the door, a dozen school buses pulled up and simultaneously exploded gobs of pre-adolescent kidlings all over the sidewalks and front lawn. They were way too excited about being anywhere but their classrooms. I swear, paint peeled from canvas as uninhibited shrieks sliced through the galleries. You just can’t buddy up to Miro with six rows of writhing mini-humanity between you and the painting.

And then I recalled being in Italy and seeing busloads of French, Italian, and German kids ushered into the presence of some of Europe’s great art. Sure, they fidgeted about and made inappropriate noises in other languages. But how lucky they were being exposed early to such stuff! These wonderful images—superficially irrelevant as they may seem to kids absorbed in the day-to-day business of being kids—were now a part of their richly evolving visual vocabularies. So I began to watch these American kids ushered into the presence of great Modern Art. I’m an old guy. This stuff is familiar to me. How does it look to fresh eyes? Eyes attached to bodies that might just as soon be playing tag on the lawn outside?

I noticed that their teachers and chaperones wisely let them run freely within their groups. No lectures were given. Presumably, a lesson of some kind had preceded the field trip. As a whole, the mass of kids flowed through the galleries in a sort of mindless Brownian movement. But here and there, clumps would congeal around a particular work for a few moments—an eternity in kid time. And then out of the mob, another clump would form in front of another work. If there was anything to see, each kid was free to discover it on his own. A half-dozen girls stared into a highly polished bronze egg-like Brancusi sculpture. Three boys grinned and pointed at a Duchamp “Readymade” snow shovel hanging from the ceiling in a corner. A gaggle of kindergarteners took deep breaths and blew in unison at a Calder mobile. As it began to dance majestically, they giggled with delight.

How do fresh eyes view these textbook icons of 20^th century Modern Art?

Playfully.

Just as the artists first created them. Before they were celebrities.