Modern Art: A Personal Note

 

Modern Art: A Personal Note

Norman Simms

 

 

In 1958, at the age of eighteen, during the summer before I went to university, I used to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. At first, I decided that I would sit in front of a huge painting by Jackson Pollack to see if I could see why there was such a fuss about his work. The squiggles of paint dripped over this canvas made no sense at all but I was determined to see if I stared at it long enough something would get through to my poor naïve mind. After an hour and a half, I could not take it any longer, and wandered around from room to room, until way in the back as far from the entrance as you could go on the first floor, there were a series of tables in which were placed row on row of curious little carved pieces of antique jewellery. I was fascinated and walked slowly around each table, then came back to the first one, read the explanation and the captions and stared intently into each one of these intaglios, a word I have never come across before.

 

The next weekend I went back to the Met again—between which time I worked at a dress factory in Jersey City—and, after less than twenty minutes in front of the Pollack, which still made absolutely no sense to me, I went back to the exhibition of classical jewellery and especially the intaglio. Each one, delicately crafted, and accompanied by a drawing of a mirrored image and an allusion to some mythical or legendary scene from Greek or Latin myth and literature. I tried to see what was supposedly there and sometimes the scene did seem to be filled with human and semi-divine figures and some hint of a landscape. At that stage, especially before there were computers to offer online sites that explained such esoteric matters, or anyone whom I could ask advice, just the fascination was enough to satisfy. The next week I took the subway to Fifth Avenue and walked straight to the room at the back, skipping the Jackson Pollocks and everything else, and walked even further through the exhibitions on display. Then I found some glass covered tables with signet rings and seals from the ancient Middle East, and it took another few weeks to understand that these were from Mesopotamia and similar cultures, and the strange creatures and grotesque masks were supposedly depicting the mythology of these ancient peoples.

 

The end of summer came and it was time to go off to Alfred University, a small private college in upstate New York, where, three times a week at 8 a.m. the freshman class was introduced to Western Civilization. We were asked to read translations of and selections from Sumerian and Mesopotamian poetry, Greek myths and epics and Roman plays and debates. Gradually it dawned on me, when not only reading these assigned texts but also looking at the pictures on the covers and inside pages of these books, that these were the sources or the expression of what I had seen in the seals, signet rings, intaglios and other miniature jewellery during the summer. Over the next several years, moving to Saint Louis, Missouri and attending Washington University, as I made myself familiar with English, French and German literature, and especially in graduate school reading great poems like Le Roman de la Rose and the Divina Comedia, it became evident that those tiny works of art which I used to stare at for hours at the Met were a vast reservoir of images and ideas worked out in the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It took many more years going out into the world, first to Canada and then to New Zealand,  and teaching literature, culture and religion to realize even more clearly that there could be no separation between the words, images and ritual gestures in the art work. Year by year, again with almost no advice or direction from anyone, except what I would read almost randomly in books of art history, culture and psychoanalysis how everything was tied together and my naïve and unstructured scholarly research would illuminate the picture emerging. No longer were they just splotches, squiggles and random dribbles, as in a Jackson Pollock painting, but something profoundly coherent and consistent.  Now past the age of eighty and long since retired as a university lecturer, I am ready to face modern art.