Le Salon des Refusés

I love art. I really do. Most of it. But modern art I just don't get. To me, it's an Emperor's New Clothes type-of-thing; a critic deems it worthy and the rest of the art world jumps on the bandwagon. Oh yeah! Me too! I see that now! So much of it is subjective and relies on you accepting the artist's interpretation of reality - but what's wrong with "real" reality? Like Keats said,

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

My husband and a bundle of  twigs... I mean, modern art.

A few weeks ago my husband and I had dinner at the art museum restaurant. Along the wall behind him was a massive canvas of what appeared to be twigs curled into swirls. Like my husband described it after a few glasses of wine, it looked like crows would fly out if you fired a shotgun into it.



According to our server, this is a famous piece by some famous guy and is an interpretation of Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night." What, you didn't get that? And it's not just bundles of dry twigs -- it's carefully arranged dried maple saplings (that look ready to ignite at the slightest spark).

At which point my husband asked the server if he could smoke.

In honor of this piece, I asked mes artistes en residence to create their own interpretations of "Starry Night." After ascertaining they had no idea what "interpretation" meant, here's what I got:

By MM, age 5. Memorable because this is her first work that does not contain a princess and/or a ballerina.

By V-Man, age 3. "Starry Rocketship." Most of what he "interprets" involves rocketships. 

The baby was banned from participating in this interpretative experiment because all he did was chew on crayons and spit the wax slivers onto his high chair tray. Which looked, now that I think about it, kind of like modern art.

Educational tidbit for the day: Le Salon des Refusés
Back in 1863, a bunch of revolutionary artists in Paris shrugged off the classically-accepted ideas of art. They were the laughingstock of the art critic bunch, who unanimously said nothing would ever come of these guys. They were right, of course; we know nothing today of Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro or James Whistler. When the Paris Salon, a juried art exhibition, refused to show anything but pieces that adhered to the classic forms, the emperor ruled that rejected artists could show their work next door. That exhibition became known as "le Salon des Refusés" - literally, the Salon of Rejects. 

Favorite art books:
The Private Lives of the Impressionists, by Sue Roe
Lust for Life, by Irving Stone. An eye-opening view of a tormented genius. You'll never look at van Gogh's Sunflowers the same way.
The Annotated Mona Lisa, by Carol Strickland
For fiction, Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland is an interesting account of Auguste Renoir as he creates one of his masterpieces

For the wee ones:
Any of the board book artist series by Julie Merberg and Susanne Bober, like this one
The Laurence Anholt series. He has books on van Gogh, Degas, Matisse, Monet, Picasso, da Vinci, and Cezanne
The "Come Look with Me" series by Gladys Blizzard