Art attacks

I stood in front of the painting, taken there by fond parents who had seen it before, wondering what the fuss was all about. It was not very big (30 by 20 inches), not in the light of its international image, at least, and hardly impressive either, with its rather po-faced model stolidly posed and solidly shaped, gazing out at the adoring crowds through a thick slab of bullet proof glass. Around me, people jostled for the best camera angle, while unsmiling gun-hefting guards looked grimly on, holding back the next wave even as the first lingered in front of the work. It was perhaps the best known of Leonardo da Vinci’s creations: the Mona Lisa, or La Giaconda, the lady with that enigmatic smile that has been suggested to be because of unknown secrets or just plain gas by researchers the world over, for centuries now.

I have never liked her. She looks like she needs a good whack upside the head and told what is what, as they would say. Her smugness irks, her smile irritates. And I just cannot see what the fuss is about. Now we all know and I unreservedly accept that Leonardo was a genius. His inventions and drawings are superb, perfect for even modern science classrooms and works of real art in themselves. For such a complex man, he was able to put things in such a beautifully simple and straightforward manner that it delighted my coldly analytical little mind and heart. And he matched the genius of Michelangelo and his ilk without effort, blending seamlessly with all the rest of Europe’s intricate history. But this strange woman with a silly smile? HA!

A few years later, I was wandering about Madrid with my parents and bumped into another old acquaintance of theirs: Picasso’s Guernica. It was in a niche in a small room, dimly lit and sort of grey in ambience. I stood in front of the work and something within me shrivelled. My mind recoiled at the sheer violence and pain in the painting, the way in which even the distortions of cubism and the unreal-ness of Picasso’s creativity could bring such violence and anger into a small space. In shades of black and white, there was agony in a mother cradling her dead child, horror in the impaled horse screaming in its tortured dying. A dead soldier lay at the base of the work, limbs scattered, daggers stabbed, women staggered. And, for some reason the worst of these disturbing images is a small bird, standing on a shelf at the top of the painting. While Picasso is rarely serene, this was totally unsettling.

I shivered. Let’s go, I insisted to my mother, who I knew would be as upset by the vibes from the artwork. My father ushered us out fairly quickly, himself not as cheery as normal. It was not an unusual response to the painting. Picasso did it to express his horror at the Nazi bombing of the Basque village of Guernica, in Spain. Over 1,600 people were killed, the town decimated. It “clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death,” Picasso is reported to have said. A reproduction in tapestry hangs in the United Nations building in New York. The very name – apart from the painting itself – now symbolises the horrors of war. To me, it is a nightmare I would rather not remember.

In total contrast is a charming piece of sculpture that I would love to own, though I know it can never be mine. Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi has a huge fan in me, for just one piece of his, though all the others (like the Bird series) that I have seen are also fabulous. It is the golden head of a girl, Mademoiselle Pogany, her ponytail sleek over her neck. It begs to be touched, stroked, gazed at with admiration of a woman with the lines of a thoroughbred racehorse. It also helped that my mother said she saw me in it! Along with Henri Moore, Alexander Calder and Georgia O’Keeffe, the works of Brancusi are about joy, positive feeling, sunshine and flowers. And those, for me, are what make art worth seeing.