In Plain Sight: The National Gallery x The Lonely Palette

Episode 3: Go Deeper

Lara: To get a lot of folks that are like, I don't really like modern art. They're like, I just don't get it. And I'm like, well, maybe you're reading. Maybe you're trying to get too much into it. Like, like there's not as much. I said, it's not as intimidating as you think.

Tamar VO: This is Lara, our visitor experience representative from episode one.

Lara: Sometimes the the metal box on the floor is just a metal box on the floor. Like, it's just about its structure. And I said, you don't have to, like, overthink. Just sort of take it in and look around and and if you're drawn to something, go towards it and don't overthink why you're drawn towards it.

Tamar VO: Modern art. Those two little words. Is there anything else that can strike so much fear in the heart of the average museum goer? When you're used to straightforward, legible paintings and sculptures in the West Building, coming into the modernism of the East building can be pretty destabilizing. Pretty weird. Everything in the West Building is recognizable. Yeah, that's a ceramic vase. And that's a painting of people, or a landscape or a bowl of fruit or a dog.

But then you cross the street and it seems like the canvases are now spattered with paint, or lined with grids, or barely containing the shapes that seem to want to float away. A car tire is cut apart and reassembled. A giant mobile floats in the air, catching the breeze. And of course, it makes you hear a lot of so on and so forth. And my seven year old could do that. And when you get to the modern galleries, it's natural to ask, well, what does this mean? What is this piece about? How did I just go from Post-Impressionism to Fauvism to Cubism to Futurism, when the subject matter of these paintings all kind of look similarly shattered and rebuilt and hastily glued back together again? How could I ever understand the nuances of this stuff without a graduate degree? But I promise you, you can.

Tamar VO: I'm Tamar Avishai, the host of The Lonely Palette podcast and a visiting storyteller at the National Gallery of Art. And this is In Plain Sight. In these three episodes, we're going to explore this idea what it means to open yourself up to an art museum, one artwork or conversation at a time, and how the tools to do this have been here for you all along. Literally in plain sight, just waiting for you.

In the last two episodes, we looked at the museum itself, how it's staffed, and how it's curated to best let you experience these artworks in the way that has them best speak to you. And in this episode, the rubber is going to meet the road. You know now how to look. So now what do you see? And when it comes to modern art, that giant head scratcher, how do you see past the abstract shapes? Or, maybe, how do you embrace them? To experience something deep inside yourself. After all, we're full of abstract feelings. That's just the human experience. And so we can relate to these paintings a lot more than we think we can. But still, here's someone to help with that process. This is Harry Cooper.

Tamar: So you are the curator of modern art at the National Gallery? Why modernism?

Harry: Why modernism? I think, you know, same reason I like modern poetry. I like modern music, especially jazz. I think it goes to just like, not that this is conscious, but it's even if it's 100 years old, it's it's of our moment somehow. I still think it's of our moment. You know, I still think we're dealing with some of these issues about how do we put the world together. It's so confusing. You know, how do we make order some of those great modernist concerns? How do we invent new languages if old ones are tired, which we're not so much, um, concerns, you know, of the old masters. I never really like going into archives and dealing with, like, you know, yellowed papers and everything. I like the idea that it's. It's something I could sit down with gray. I could sit down with Cezanne and, you know, have have a conversation and, um, it wouldn't feel that, you know, maybe that alien.

Tamar: Yeah.

Tamar VO: I love this idea that we could sit down with Paul Cézanne. I mean, hopefully not for long. He was known to be kind of a pill, but still. And that he wouldn't feel that far away from us. We can recognize from his work just how relatable and human he was, how actually pretty similar to us.

And this is what modern art is all about at its core, human beings painting the modern world, life as it was being lived, not in togas, not separated from us with allegory or biblical imagery, but the real, gritty actual world. A mountain outside of Cézanne's window becomes a destination thwarted by roads that lead nowhere. A bowl of fruit on Cézanne's table becomes an example of his own subjective perspective. We see the outcome of his own eyes looking, looking away, looking back, and skewing everything slightly each time. A Cézanne painting might look like just a still life. But there's a reason it's a still life that doesn't quite add up. Where we see the side of the wine bottle and the tops of the apples in the same glance. And the reason is because we human beings never see anything all at once, and we're never going to see everything the same way as anyone else does. Cézanne's paintings are an illustration of that fundamental fact. We're seeing things from his unique perspective only. And yet it stands to reason that if an artist is so deeply present in his or her own world, like Cézanne, is that they're going to paint in a way that we connect with human to human. We're going to feel the powerful emotions that moved them to create. Just ask Jade, a visitor in the Picasso gallery.

Jade: I usually am drawn towards pieces that evoke some emotion in me, I think.

Tamar: Do any do any of the paintings in this room evoke any emotion?

Jade: Yes, I would say for me it would be this one over here.

Tamar: Let's walk towards it.

Jade: Okay.

Tamar VO: We're looking at Picasso's The Tragedy.

Jade: Looks like a family. Maybe a woman, a man and a child. And they're on a beach. Um, and it's used mainly by with blue paint. Um, I think it's only blue paint, really, with variations of slight, um, skin tone shades as well. But, um, even in the skin tone shades, there's a lot of use of blue as well.

Tamar VO: Even more than the color is the positions that these figures are in. They're huddled towards each other. Their heads are lowered like they're turning away from something unspeakable. They're connected by whatever this tragedy is. And also, it seems, experiencing it in their own individual ways As a viewer, it's a lot of ways of grieving to be asked to hold.

Jade: So it's a very cold painting. Um, you can kind of feel the temperature of it. Um, I like pieces that, um, kind of make me feel that way. So. Yeah.

Tamar: I mean, you say that you're drawn to a painting that evokes something emotional in you. This is kind of... I mean, this is sad. Yeah. This is this is kind of a bummer painting. Yeah. Is that... that's just kind of an emotion you want to feel, you want to just kind of hold right now? Like listening to a sad song?

Jade: You know, I kind of like extreme ends of the emotion spectrum, I guess you could say. Um, so, yeah, I think that they like great sadness. And this just speaks, like, very loudly to me. Yeah.

Tamar VO: So how did we get here? Not just from the West building to the east, but to this place in art history. The Renaissance wanted to paint with the accuracy of looking out at the world, as though through a window, by the 19th century modernists, who also had the recent development of the camera at their disposal. They were bored with all that it had been done to death. We figured out perspectives. There are new problems to be solved, like how different our own subjective experiences actually are from one another. Thanks, Cezanne. Like how colors activate our senses and our emotions. Hey, Van Gogh. Like how a canvas is actually flat, you guys, why do we spend so much time denying this when maybe we can revel in it? And the amazing thing is that modern art doesn't expect us to have a quote unquote right answer. It actually thrives when we bring our own meanings and interpretations to the table.

Brett: This is our newest sculpture. It was installed three years ago by an artist named Christopher Wool.

Tamar VO: This is Brett McNish again, the National Gallery's grounds manager. We're back in the sculpture garden.

Tamar: Can you describe the sculpture?

Brett: It is, uh, bronze in color and, uh, has a round, uh, pipe, and there's a lot of it. Um, so my understanding is the artist was inspired by his time in Texas. And seeing after a tornado the tangles of wire. Uh, it is very large, uh, about 20ft tall and about is wide, and it looks like a massive tangle of wire.

Tamar: Yeah. I mean, it looks like when I try to, you know, back when we all had, uh, AirPods before they were AirPods, when they were just earbuds, and you keep them in your purse and you or your pocket, and you pull it out and you're stuck with trying to figure out how to untangle it.

Brett: Yes.

Tamar: But, but big.

Brett: That's great. Just one little girl last summer who, heard her talking with her mother, and she said, this looks like a bowl of spaghetti. So I just love that, I love that.

Tamar: Yeah. And you know, the thing about about people kind of coming to art in their own time and place when it's not their area of expertise, is that, you know, you don't have to know that the wool sculpture is actually speaking to something that, you know, had a tragic impact on people to recognize the tangle piece of it, even if it's silly, because that invites you then in to kind of viscerally understand, you know, like opens you up to something that you can relate to.

Brett: That's such a wonderful way to put that. And, um, I heard a saying years ago and it was, uh, we liked the we liked the spark. We don't fill the bucket.

Tamar VO: Sometimes you can bring your own range of lived experiences and figure out what an artwork just reminds you of a well-chosen metaphor or simile might be exactly what this artwork needs to come alive. And even more than that to resonate with you. But sometimes you just have to let the experience, the unrepeatable, singular experience of standing before a work of art wash over you. Sometimes that work is a Rothko, and it elicits a very particular and very personal emotional response.

Samantha: When you get someone who's connecting with the art, it's like super rewarding.

Tamar VO: This is Samantha from Visitor Experience.

Samantha: I'm like, that's you know why we do it? It's like, you know, people will come to us and be like, wow, I just saw the Rothko exhibit and it made me cry or like something like that.

Tamar VO: Even if you spend just a little bit of time at the National Gallery, you're going to hear a lot about the Rothkos. Everyone talks about the Rothkos, those saturated blocks of color that dissolve into one another. You can't avoid them. And if you happen to have ever given a gallery talk on Mark Rothko, then okay, you'll already know this. But if you haven't. Let me tell you. Start with a show of hands. How many of you are here? You can ask because Rothko stirs something deep, deep inside your soul, and you just want to be there in their presence, soaking in the subtle, diffuse layers of color that meditatively dissolve into one another and maybe get a good cry in half. The group will raise their hands, then ask, okay, how many of you have no idea how that half is getting to that place? And Rothko does absolutely nothing for you. They're just these blurry color blocks. Who gets all worked up about blurry color blocks? And maybe that's why you're at this gallery talk. You're hoping that I'll explain to you just what the heck those people are experiencing, that they get all worked up about blurry colored blocks. That's when the other half will raise their hand. I guarantee it.

Myself, I've experienced both. It can depend on my mood that day, on what I'm processing in my own life. And it can depend on the Rothko. They're all different. They all bring out different elements of each other when they're side by side. You can see Mark Rothko's emotional journey right in front of you, and inadvertently, you can find yourself on your own. So I was pretty excited to see these Rothkos. The National Gallery has the largest collection of Rothko paintings in the world. I took the elevator up to the fourth floor of the east, building, the tower level to a spot tucked away almost like a secret attic, albeit one so filled with light that it feels like the closest the museum gets to the heavens. This is where they stash the Rothkos.

Tamar: Where are we?

Claire: We're at the top floor of an impossibly complicated east wing of the National Art Gallery. But it's worth it, because you get up here and the light is beautiful. I always head to the Rothko's, and every time I come different Rothkos are here. So I'm looking like, oh, my, what's here? Oh. I know this museum owns a lot of Rothkos... Oh my God. My heart goes out to that one. What do you say I get teary? All I can say is, I. It's so hard to explain it.

All right. The last time I was here, I was all by myself, and one of the guards, after I'd been here a while, came to me and he said, I've worked here for two years, and I don't understand why what anybody sees when they look at Rothkos. And I said, do you go to church? And he said, oh, yeah. And I said, oh, did you sing in the choir or anything? He said, oh, yeah, yeah, I sing in the choir. I said, well, how do you feel when you're singing in the choir? And, and the all the music blends together and you, you just go someplace. I said, that's how I feel when I said. And he was he nodded like, oh, because he knew that feeling of kind of just being, I don't know, I don't understand it, but I compose music and it's the same kind of feeling that you. You give yourself over to something, and I, I think here in D.C. had a quote from one of the critics, I think maybe in the post Washington Post, and the man said, you don't go and look at Rothkos. You go inside Rothkos.

And that's clicked with me. And I think that's probably true of all works of art. But some each individual responds to different things differently. Right. Because we're all individuals. But that's it's not a fake feeling. That's honestly the way I feel. And I'm 82 years old. I'm very aware that life is going to come to an end. Somehow I respond to his need to just get to the basics like what is life? What? What is? Is there a meaning? But does there have to be a meaning? Or are we just alive and we're just going to do this? We're just going to go. We're just going to live. We're just going to go. And what can I say, I'm kind of kooky about Rothkos.

Tamar VO: Modern art, abstract art. Art that is meant to be felt almost even more than it's meant to be seen. Art that you're meant to give yourself over to. It is almost like a religious experience. Chords are struck somewhere deep inside of us, whether it's Picasso's distraught figures or Rothko's darkening colors as his own mind darkened, or even Cézanne's unreachable mountain. When we encounter the sublime and more than that, when we're open to it, we feel seen and we feel held. Thank you for going on this three part journey with me through the National Gallery of Art. I hope you found something here that helps you make these hallowed marble walls of an art museum feel less intimidating, and more like a place you can settle into and get comfortable. It's the place you can take a long look, and with the help of the incredibly open and generous people that I spoke to, we discovered what more we could see when we look together, and how that can even raise more questions than answers. And that that's okay, because we can just let that all dissolve away. We can give ourselves over to the intensity of emotion that a great work of art can light within us. That had been in plain sight all along.

In Plain Sight was written and produced by me, Tamar Avishai. The senior editor is Annie Yi. Our executive producer is Isabella Bulkeley. The music is by Blue Dot Sessions, and you can see all the images at www.nga.gov/inplainsight Or at thelonelypalette.com. Thank you for listening.