Picasso Was Right
Pablo Picasso said that “the purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
When I read that quote, it immediately crystalized my experience of visual art. One of Cynthia’s and my friends has a beautiful collection of paintings and photographs on the walls of her home. Most of the time when we visit her, I glance at them as I pass by on my way from one room to another, and I’m pleased to see them, but when I take the time to look at them—really to see them and take them in—they have an uplifting effect on me. Their images and colors, their composition, the imagination and talent that the artists put into them, take me out of myself and, to use Picasso’s words, wash the dust of daily life off my soul.
That’s why I love going to art museums. I can walk into the museum thinking about my to-do list or an issue I’ve encountered in my writing or editing or worrying about a problem, and as I look at the art, I transcend whatever I’ve been thinking about and am transported to another place where, captured and captivated by the art, I experience inner peace. I find that a visit to an art museum for an hour or two is transformative, not just for the time that I spend there, but for hours after I’ve left.
I don’t like all art; I like art that is aesthetically appealing to me or intriguing and provocative, art that takes great skill to create and/or that comes from an original idea that I find worth thinking about. Often art that I like surprises me; often it moves and inspires me; often it makes me stand in front of it in awe of its beauty or thinking about what inspired the artist to create it and what meaning I see in it.
In 2015, Cynthia and I took my mother, who had just turned 93, to two art museums on two successive Saturdays. In the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, we saw paintings by Whistler, Gaugin, Braque, Picasso, and Van Gogh. In the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), we saw contemporary and ancient Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian art, and an incredible work by the late Chris Burden, who recreated a version of the dirigible originally built by Alberto Santos-Dumont in 1901. Santos-Dumon’s dirigible was the first one that worked, and it flew around the Eiffel Tower. Burden’s dirigible flew in a 60-foot orbit in the Resnick Pavilion at LACMA.
My mother loved seeing the paintings and photographs, and she especially loved watching Burden’s dirigible fly around the large space that seemed tailor-made for it. It was wonderful for Cynthia and me to see her joyful experience of the art. She walked slowly with her walker, stopping in front of each painting and photograph, taking her time to appreciate it. Often she stayed in front of a piece for a long time, letting it work its magic on her. Standing among the group of museumgoers in the Resnick Pavilion, she was entranced as she watched Burden’s dirigible in flight.
Afterwards, on both Saturdays, she told us how much she enjoyed seeing the art. Not weighed down by her everyday concerns and challenges, she glowed. Her smile as she thanked us for taking her to the museums was youthful and ageless. At 93, she embodied Picasso’s powerful observation that “the purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
