Art Is a Subjective Experience
/When I first saw Monet’s La Pie (The Magpie), I liked it right away, although I couldn’t tell you why. It was something about the light. But it was more than that.
Standing in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris with the rest of my study-abroad classmates and my art history teacher explaining the painting—Monet’s use of light to create contrast, focus and depth, to create an effect—I listened and retained the information. But it didn’t change how I felt about the painting.
When the average private collector walks into a gallery, they’re most likely looking for a visceral experience rather than an academic one. They want to buy something they like, not something that advances a style more than the others or whatever. For the average collector, art is subjective.
A Feeling
“How important is technical virtuosity or innovation to the average art collector? How much does a painting’s place in the development of art matter?” asks Liz Moss, owner of the Elizabeth Moss Galleries in Falmouth, Maine. “Probably not as much as you’d think. A lot of it is about a feeling.”
With the Magpie, Monet was going for exactly that—a feeling.
According to Musée d’Orsay scholars, “in the late 1860s, Monet started to extend the need to capture sensations and render ‘the effect’ to all transitory, even fleeting states of nature. Taking Pisarro, Renoir and Sisley with him, Monet tackled the great challenge of a snow-covered landscape…Sun and shade construct the painting and translate the impalpable part-solid, part-liquid matter. The Impressionist landscape was born, five years before the first official exhibition when the movement was given its name.”
However, people didn’t necessarily like it. In fact, the 1869 salon jury rejected the painting with its unique use of pale colors and light.
“[The public], accustomed to the tarry sauces cooked up by the chefs of art schools and academies, was flabbergasted by this pale painting,” wrote critic Felix Fénéon at the time, according to the Musée d’Orsay.
Five years later, a new school was born, and today no one questions Monet’s use of pale colors and light in his paintings.
Jean-Bob
However, art collection goes even further than the emotions a piece evokes on its own. The fact is, I can’t look at the Magpie without feeling emotions—from the painting itself, and from the memories surrounding it.
I can’t look at it without thinking about my old art history teacher, Jean-Bob—a gray-haired, chain-smoking caricature of an old-school Frenchman. He used to roll his own cigarettes from loose tobacco in a pouch, his fingers and moustache and teeth were tobacco-stained, and he constantly blasted everyone within a five feet radius with fetid coffee and ash-tray breath.
He was also a funny guy. He never bothered to pay for the correct teaching certificates for the museums. Instead, he rushed us around from painting to painting, whispering so the museum staff wouldn’t catch on. We actually got kicked out of the Louvre once.
Art as Subjective Experience
I still love the Magpie today, for the same intangible reasons I did then—something about the light evokes an emotion in me, one that I like. But it goes beyond that.
When I look at the Magpie, I think of Jean-Bob and that day in the Musée d’Orsay. And about my semester abroad—the culture, the travel, the feeling that the world was opening up like a flower. It’s all mixed up together. (I even fell in love that semester.)
It makes me smile to look at the Magpie. It’s a sensation, informed by emotions. And it’s subjective.