I had a speaking gig last week in New York City. I stayed three blocks from the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and was able to visit on two different occasions. My mother is an artist so I have spent my life surrounded by art and an artist’s sensibilities, especially as a young child. I spent countless hours waiting for kindergarten and watching my mother paint. As an adult, this might explain why I operate with an assumption that influential artists are both consciously and unconsciously anticipating shifts in our collective psyche. They are expressing general patterns of trauma, change, and realization.
Paul Cezanne subtly messes with shape, form, perspective, and light.
Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror"
I am struck by the attack on traditional shapes and forms that arguably begins with the subtle work of Paul Cezanne and reaches its pinnacle in the works of Picasso and Matisse. (I proudly display the awful photographs I took of all these painting when I was at the MOMA. At least, they are brought to you firsthand.) Picasso’s painting “Girl Before a Mirror” clearly exemplifies a dissipation of form. Already an amazing combination of distorted shapes and colors, the girl looks into the mirror and perceives a darker, even more distorted view of herself. He gives us a distorted, skewed view into the subject and in so doing upends our sense of space and form. Picasso is undoubtedly making commentary about the incongruent impulses and perceptions that make up contemporary personhood, but also the way self-perceptions reflect an even darker picture of that reality. And yet Picasso still reveals a profound, transcendent beauty to the overall pattern of the subject as a whole. This painting creates a beautiful design.
Matisse’s "The Piano Lesson
In the other painting above, “The Piano Lesson” Matisse alters our sense of space and form by breaking rules of perspective. The painting presents multiple subject matters, impossibly floating as a flat pattern of shapes while also telling a story about his son’s piano lesson. In the lower left is a representation of Matisse’s most erotic sculpture. In the upper right sits an angular, stern representation of the piano teacher. The result is two stories happening on his son’s face. The left eye is ambiguous and shadowed while the right is a view back to the ‘normal’ world. In the work as a whole, different planes of visual reality are combined into a singular story of the artistic struggle between eroticism and rules.
Jackson Pollack accelerating time.
Then I came to the few paintings of Jackson Pollack. His most famous works represent a tidal, if not temporary, shift in painting. He leaves behind shape, form, and our sense of space. Instead, he accelerates time. Pollack no longer spends time painting conventional or unconventional shapes and forms. He paints with splatters by famously using wooden sticks and hardened paintbrushes to throw paint onto his canvasses. His works were not haphazardly either. On his most famous pieces, he made over 400 attempts to reveal the desired patterns.
Relative space, relative time are both emerging realizations coming from developments in 20th century physics. Picasso and Matisse can be seen as expressing its implications and effects on the human subject. They show a subject twisted and distorted in its shape by a splintering sense of contemporary reality, by a world coming in too much, too fast. Pollack anticipates an acceleration of time and a loss of cohesiveness – global warming, environmental degradation, diminishing natural resources, globalization, cultural diversity, terrorism, computers, cell phones, emails, texting, Facebook, information age, CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, Al-Qaeda, Isis, and ebola. Too much, too fast, with too much to think about.
And yet, Pollack creates a pattern, as do you and I. We make it work, always finding a way forward, always finding beauty, always willing to start another day. I am not saying that Picasso, Matisse and Pollack are directly or consciously telling a story about our consciousness. They are reflections of the times they live in and for times ahead. They help us feel a story. They help us feel its beauty.
We are all part of a story that is coming in too much, too fast. I am grateful that I practice yoga, that I have a mind-body practice to stay grounded in an ever-changing world. What do you do?