Backlogs - Learning at MoMA

In-Gallery lecture on American Modernism

Last monday I attended the last lecture in my MoMA class: Modern Art and Ideas 1915-1945 (courtesy of Marion as a birthday gift). The class was a series of 4 In-Gallery lectures given by the curators of different stylistic schools (Dadaism, Surrealism, etc.), followed by a more intimate workshop with about 8 other people, roaming room to room through artists, artistic periods and continents.

The lectures were in and of themselves an interesting sociological experience, allowing to observe people with an interest in art discover, learn, ask and discuss aesthetic, philosophical and political points, in what is undoubtedly an international elite of learned people (I saw notes being taken in Hebrew, Greek, Korean and Japanese, by people sitting next to each other, while I was frantically scribbling my roman characters in the first such endeavour since my early years at university). The workshops were something to cherish for the spoiled participants that we were: wandering for hours around one of the largest collections of modern art in the world, with no other public than our handful of classmates (…and the security guard doggedly following us around).

Blissfully empty galleries, and Umberto Boccioni's
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)

During this time, I realised that the path of artistic discovery that Marion has had me threading upon these past 8 years has actually begun to bear its fruits. Not only were I able to follow most of the references made in the lectures about preceding and following periods of artistic development, but I also had the feeling I could fit what I was learning in an understanding that was, to some extent, there already. My knowledge remains sketchy at best, with gaping holes here and there and with a tendency to forget the names of half the artists the minute you hear them. And yet I am now able to gleam why a shovel hanging in the air and a white square on a white background should be in the same room in a museum.

Theo van Doesburg study (left) and painting (right) for Composition VIII (The Cow) (1918)

In addition to making me acquainted with the layout of the MoMA (which I was able to boastfully display to Marion today) the class became a routine excursion into midtown, where I now feel less of a tourist and more of an occasional visitor. And I can now leave the city with the feeling that I know at least one of its several wells of aesthetic wealth, and with a renewed and enhanced understanding of why people have been doing, watching and discussing art for such a long time.