The Element of Play in Twentieth Century Art

Extract

In approaching contemporary art it is useless to try to determine to what extent it conforms or not to a previously conceived notion of art acquired from past centuries. It is more advisable instead to understand what idea, perhaps even an original one, this art imposes on us. In other words, when faced with a new experience, we should draw from it the original “problematic,” that is, formulate appropriate ideas to explain it. If we limit ourselves to the first years of the twentieth century, we can observe both in its content and style one particular characteristic: the importance of play. Artists have sought in related activities, such as dance or music, an image analogous to their own. They have sometimes looked for it in activities like those that interested Vermeer: The Weigher of Pearls or Lady with a Spinet (in Buckingham Palace), or in this inscription of the artist in one of his paintings relating to music: Musica laetitiae comes, medicina dolorum, which we are tempted to take as a motto and to apply to the activity of the painter himself. The same impression is given by some of the paintings of Watteau, the Musician or the Indifferent, in which we feel that the painter wanted to say something about himself. Through this catalogue of images of music or dance the artist seems to have acquired with particular pleasure an awareness of the possibility of his own art. These somewhat remote images are the ancestors of a family of buffoons, harlequins and clowns, which multiply to an extraordinary extent at the beginning of the twentieth century.