I grew up admiring art. My mother took classes at the Minneapolis Art Institute and lugged posters and recreations of artwork to my elementary school to teach us everything she had learned. Once, she brought in a dead fish, slathered it in paint, then slapped it down on construction paper for her discussion of Paul Klee’s “Golden Fish.” She took me to training at the Art Institute, and by age ten I was a trained youth docent for the Institute’s Clementine Hunter exhibit. Anytime we went anywhere, overseas, other cities, we had to go to the Art Museums, and we would stand in front of one painting for hours, ooo-ing and ahh-ing together.
“The Three Dancers” by Pablo Picasso is violent, beautiful and provocative. It is, arguably, my favorite painting of all time. It was painted around the same time as the turmoil of his crumbling marriage to Olga Koklova, and the emotion evoked by the bodies of the dancers reflects this underlying tension. Two of the dancers are plainly visible, facing out, their arms thrown up with the motion. They are not smiling. The third dancer is obscured by the shadows cascading from the window. This black profile exudes a kind of pain, the kind only expressed through art. For some reason, when I saw the third dancer, it stuck with me. Maybe, under the shadows, the third dancer was smiling. Maybe, the third dancer was enjoying the dance, rather than moving through it out of obligation like the other two. Or maybe, the third dancer was disappearing slowly and was really not dancing at all. That scared me the most.
The visible faces terrified me. They held a certain complacency that I hope never to truly comprehend, however, to a point, I can understand. Don’t we all have something that we dance through, faking it, making it seem like it is okay, when in actuality it is only the motion that keeps us going? A friendship gone bad that we can’t seem to get out of? Writers block? That feeling in the pit of your stomach when you lie to your mother? But we move through it, we stick with the friend, the lie, the story that is going nowhere, because we are so caught up in the dance that we can’t even tell that we have stopped smiling.
I think that Picasso had it right. Art should be scary, and beautiful, and thought-provoking. And it should make you reflect on your own life through the lens of the painting.
