Mouthing Off at the MoMa

On Fridays from 4pm-7pm, the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd St. offers free admission to guests compliments of Target. The only stipulation is that guests must agree to face long lines and crowded galleries. My Uncle was in town visiting this holiday weekend, and we decided to take advantage of the free admission and visit the MoMa.

I first visited the museum in December, and was quite pleasantly surprised by their collection. Not only do they offer temporary exhibitions and permanent installations of modern art, but also a wide selection of the work of Pablo Picasso (my personal favorite). Pictured at right is one of Picasso's most famous paintings, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

I was not, however, impressed by the descriptions that accompanied many of the paintings. First of all, I am suspicious of descriptions that purport to reflect the artist's own sentiments. I find it hard to believe that artists analyze the thematic significance of wide brush strokes, for example, during the creation process. But what annoys me even more than the supposed credibility of the descriptions is the language used to craft them. Take, for example, exhibit A, which is the description that accompanies this painting, italics mine:

The result of months of preparation and revision, this painting revolutionized the art world when first seen in Picasso's studio. Its monumental size underscored the shocking incoherence resulting from the outright sabotage of conventional representation. Picasso drew on sources as diverse as Iberian sculpture, African tribal masks, and El Greco's painting to make this startling composition. In the preparatory studies, the figure at left was a sailor entering a brothel. Picasso, wanting no anecdotal detail to interfere with the sheer impact of the work, decided to eliminate it in the final painting. The only remaining allusion to the brothel lies in the title: Avignon was a street in Barcelona famed for its brothel.

Alluding to a recent hilarious piece in Esquire (definitely worth a look), the highlighted sentence needs to have its car keys taken away. What I mean is that the sentence is unreadable and superfluous for the sake of superfluousness. All it's really saying is that the painting is really big, which emphasized how different it was for its time.

When I saw Salvador Dalí's famous work, The Persistence of Memory, I was surprised by how small it is. Having studied Spanish and Latin American art both in high school and college, I had only seen this piece in books, and therefore expected it to be much larger than it actually is. The description that accompanies this piece is as follows, once again, italics mine:

Dalí rendered his fantastic visions with meticulous verisimilitude, giving the representations of dreams a tangible and credible appearance. In what he called "hand painted dream photographs," hard objects become inexplicably limp, time bends, and metal attracts ants like rotting flesh. The monstrous creature draped across the painting's center resembles the artist's own face in profile; its long eyelashes seem insectlike or even sexual, as does what may or may not be a tongue oozing from its nose like a fat snail.

Upon reading this seemingly forced bit of explanatory prose, my Uncle asked me, "What is 'verisimilitude?'" His response, I'm quite confident, is shared by many museum patrons. Verisimilitude is not a word that often works its way into daily conversation, and using it to describe Dalí's phantasmagoric work (another little-used word...look it up, it's a fun one) makes the description inaccessible to the average person.

"It means simliar to the truth, I think," I replied after pondering the term. In fact, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines it this way:

NOUN: 1. The quality of appearing to be true or real. 2. Something that has the appearance of being true or real.

There you have it.

We continued our perusal of the fifth floor galleries and came upon a lovely painting by Claude Monet entitled Agapanthus. I was curious to know what the title meant, and guessed aloud that it must be the type of flower in the painting. I've already admitted to being a nerd, so it should come as no surprise that I am the type of person that always looks up the things that I don't readily know. So, when I got home, I looked up "agapanthus," and found it to be the Latin genus name for the African lily, or lily of the Nile. The term comes from the combination of the Greek terms agape, or love, and anthos, or flower.

What, then, is the lesson in all of this? Bring a good dictionary the next time you decide to visit a museum. You might just learn a few things!