I was browsing through the New York Review Of Books the other day when, before I could stop myself, I was in the middle of the sort of sentence that can damage your brain. It was on the subject of the French painter Fernand Leger and his 1911 visit to a Paris gallery where he saw (fasten your seat-belts, please):
". . . canvasses of Picasso's and Braque's fully developed analytic cubist manner, works organised in linear grids that supported complexes of transparent interacting planes, out of which the subject could be reconstructed, only to be reabsorbed into an overall abstract pictorial scintillation."
That's not the full sentence, but I think it's enough to suggest some of the dangerous thrill I felt on reading it. I had no idea what it was about, but then I have no idea what most modern art is about either. And the sentence seemed so perfectly to sum up everything I didn't understand about it that the effect was almost scintillating (in an overall, abstract sort of way).
I know I'm not alone in being stupefied by modern art. I suspect the only time most modern paintings touch the lives of ordinary people is when they turn out to be fake, as (reportedly) has the Van Gogh picture a Japanese bank paid £20 million for a few years ago. Van Gogh may not be exactly modern, but he has inadvertently reminded us of the capacity of all art to bring joy to ordinary people's lives - specifically in this case the thought that the worst thing we'll ever be talked into buying is a dodgy second-hand car.
The NY Review article was not completely incomprehensible, I hasten to add. Further on, for instance, the author speculates interestingly that Leger may have been partially colour-blind, able to recognise shades of red, but not green: "Green is the colour he used least well, and he tended to avoid it. When, after the war, he adds secondary colours to his primaries, the oranges and purples hold their own against the reds, yellows and blues, but the greens often don't."
It's an intriguing idea that an artist could be influenced by such a simple physical defect. And it makes me wonder if, for example, Monet was secretly short-sighted, painting all those vague impressions of Rouen Cathedral only because he couldn't see it properly. We'll probably never know, unless the New York Review Of Books tells us so.
But back to the Leger article where, further on again, the writer takes a dim view of the artist's series of forest paintings. "Despite his protestations to the contrary he had very little feeling for nature. His flowers, for example, have the distinction of being the ugliest and most repellant ever to have been painted. His birds aroused amused derision in Picasso's circle."
Now Leger's flowers may not be the prettiest, but this last bit seems like a bad case of the pot sneering at the kettle. For what it's worth, Picasso's guitars and wine bottles have always aroused more than amused derision in my circle, and I can't imagine his birds were much better, if he ever painted any.
But at least I have some understanding of Picasso. When I took an evening art class some years ago, I too found myself breaking up the human body into geometric shapes that were superficially unrecognisable as human.
Admittedly, I wasn't trying to do this, it's just the way they came out. And if a future art historian ever studies my efforts, he might conclude that my style was influenced by a more-than-partial inability to draw.
I prefer to think I was suffering from shock at the time, because I'd had no prior conception of the sort of course I'd enrolled in.
In my innocence, (I still thought of Rolf Harris as a major artist then) I'd opted for an innocuous-sounding title, "Drawing from life", which I took to mean drawing flowers and cows and kitchen furniture and so on.
I also assumed we'd be sitting at desks, being shown how to draw by a teacher. Instead, I walked into the first class to find a dozen or so people standing around at easels.
And I remember two distinct thoughts occurring to me, in the following order: (1) There is a naked woman in the room; and (2) Completely naked.
So maybe Picasso had a similar trauma before he lost his mind and started painting the way he did. And I think I also know how Leger felt when he first visited America: where, despite his love of cities, the NY Review says he disliked the consumerism and was "bothered by New York's verticality".
I was in New York last year and, on the last day of the trip, I attempted to visit the Guggenheim Museum. Unfortunately, I was severely bothered by the verticality of the admission fee, which was a spanking $15 with no reduction even though it was only an hour until closing time.
Much as I was interested in modern art, I decided it wasn't worth $15 an hour. And although I also shared Leger's dislike for consumerism, I spent the time in Bloomingdale's instead.