It's wonderful to see a Picasso up close. So why did I take a photo?
“OK, so you are looking at The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí, arguably his most famous and recognisable work,” says Tony Ellwood, director of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV).
We are only about one-third of the way through a guided tour of the new Winter Masterpieces exhibition, MoMA at NGV, but with promise of “the Dalí” the crowd packs in a bit tighter, gets a bit quieter and grows a bit more excited.
The painting is immediately recognisable – it’s the one with all the melting clocks. I’ve seen prints of it on share-house walls, on tea towels, as the cover picture of Facebook events, even replicated in 3D as functioning clocks that drape over shelves at 90-degree angles.
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“It’s one of those images that you think you know because it’s been reproduced so often,” says Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. “So you have the idea that actually it’s quite large.”
In reality, the painting is small – much smaller than I would have thought. But the surprise of its size doesn’t change the impact of seeing it in person. The colours are vibrant, more so than any reproduction has been able to depict, and despite the image being so very familiar, there’s still something remarkable about seeing it in real life. It feels new, different.
This is a recurring theme throughout the exhibition, made up of over 230 works on loan from MoMA. You are brought face to face with familiar scenes and shapes, and repeatedly have your expectations challenged.
It is a remarkable achievement for the NGV – for many of the pieces, this is the first time they’ve left the gallery. And there are an impressive amount of “big names” on show. Kahlo. Mondrian. Matisse. Van Gogh. Dalí. These are the A-listers of the art world – and this is a chance to “meet” your idols.
The works are divided up into eight separate rooms, which progress roughly chronologically and are loosely grouped by theme. It is the first time the NGV has dedicated its entire ground floor to one exhibition.
Each room has its “rock-star” piece, the one that people flock to first before stepping back and taking in the rest. In one room a man to my right hisses “It’s a Pollock” in excitement. “Go look!” In another I’m so distracted by Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair (1940), I completely miss a Picasso.
In an era where it is easier than ever to replicate art, where many of the things we are seeing in this gallery are things we’ve seen before, there’s an inherent challenge for these works to live up to their reputations. But at the same time, that is one of the main reasons people will come to see them – to see how the legend stacks up to reality.
For me, seeing Piet Mondrian’s Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930) was simultaneously thrilling and hollow. It’s a work that inspired Yves Saint Laurent and countless replicas (and Etsy shops)
in the decades since. I’ve loved it so much from afar, the real thing never stood a chance. But even so, the opportunity to be just inches away from it is not something I would trade.
For every piece that can’t meet an impossible standard however, there’s one that surpasses expectation. It’s brighter, perhaps. Livelier. Or there’s a detail you only take in after seeing it in real life – in “the Dalí” for example, you can get close enough to see that the “monstrous fleshy figure”, as it is officially described, is a side profile of the artist’s face, complete with eyelashes. In between the “rock-stars”, too, there are new favourites-to-be.
Amateur photos of these artworks on display are going to fill our newsfeeds. There will be so many selfies with the Van Gogh that greets you at the entrance, with the Warhol Marilyn Monroe series, with Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic Drowning Girl (1963) that you’ll feel like you’ve seen the exhibition 10 times. One man tsk-ed as everyone struggled to capture their own image of “the Dalí”, shaking his head and saying under his breath “look with your eyes not through a screen”.
But this is part of the experience too – at least in moderation. My phone is filled with photos that no one but me will want to see. It’s because these images are so easy to access, to copy, to buy a cheap print of to slap on your wall, that we want proof – these pictures say I was there, that I saw these works in person.
The exhibition is so large that to get to the second half we need to pass through the gift shop. On the wall there is a print of “the Dalí” for sale. It’s bigger than the original – and just a little bit duller.
• MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art is showing at the National Gallery of Victoria until 7 October