Learning to look at paintings

I would like your help to design a program to help me learn to appreciate paintings, and to learn about art history. If you read the dannelse and reading-ambition project, you'll see that even in areas I don't know much about, I'd like to learn more, and I would rather ask what is it about this work that makes people appreciate it than whether I like it or not.

Where I'm coming from

Traditionally I have not been very interested in visual art, although I've been to some museums. I remember one in the Netherlands with paintings illustrating historical periods as being very interesting. We have also watched some documentaries about painters in the cinema. We really liked one about Caravaggio, bought a book with his paintings, and also went to Sicily to see one of his paintings there.

Recently I was in Estonia and went to the national art museum there. I spent a whole day and really liked it. I liked a lot of the beautiful, detailed historical pictures, and how they showed the different periods: how painters from Russia, Germany and Estonia depicted similar topics, but in one period inspired by Italian painting, in another by mythology or a different style. It was really interesting to see how that changed. And then the 1920s, with this crazy experimentation with cubism and pointillism and all kinds of things; then after 1945, socialist realism under the Soviets, and how that too slowly started to be subverted.

Nasjonalmuseet

Inspired by this, I went for the first time to the National Museum in Oslo, and I liked it so much that I bought an annual pass, because I thought I would want to come back and spend more time there.

There was an exhibition of the Norwegian artist Asta Nørregaard, which I think is just wrapping up. She was very traditional and mostly painted portraits, but also other pictures, and somehow I really liked her work. I spent a lot of time looking at it, and I ended up getting a book about her and reading her life story, looking at the paintings and at all the people she interacted with, and how she pushed against the more modern styles by being very traditionalist. I loved the painting of Jesus, but also some of the paintings of gardens, and some of the portraits are amazing. The painting of Elizabeth Fearnley is incredible.

Then I walked through the museum and looked at a lot of the older work: the Dutch masters, religious paintings, paintings of cities, paintings of mountains.

What works for me

I love paintings with a ton of light and darkness, like Caravaggio. I love Hieronymus Bosch and that kind of incredible detail. I love images where there's a lot going on. I can spend ten or fifteen minutes in front of a picture, zooming in and out, looking at different details, thinking about the people, the situations, the moods, astonished at how someone was able to create this with a brush, and at the geometries and the light and the textures.

What doesn't, yet

Then I come to the modern section, almost anything after 1900, and it leaves me completely cold. Munch, Picasso, Kandinsky: it's kind of nice to look at Kandinsky, but it doesn't speak to me. I don't feel I could spend hours looking at a picture. Some of Munch's pictures are nice, but again, a glance feels like enough. There isn't any depth. I'm not saying there isn't, but I can't see it.

And there's the classic I could have painted that feeling you sometimes get from pictures that are neat geometrical patterns and the like. What's the richness? What's the value?

The idea

So now I have a year's pass, and I think it would be really interesting to build a learning program around it: the specific pictures in the National Museum's collection, and any upcoming special exhibitions. To make trips there and look at specific paintings with an intention, and to listen to podcasts, watch documentaries, read books, or do other things that prepare me for different ways of engaging with the art. Both to understand the older art more deeply, and to begin slowly approaching modern art, because I'm open to it being great, but I'm not there yet.

Why it matters to me

As I said, I like detail in images, and I like beauty, even when it's not so profound. But I'm also deeply shaped by a historical view. Part of why it's fantastic to listen to an opera from four hundred years ago, or to see an old painting, is thinking about what it tells me about the people who lived then, about all the people who have looked at this painting or seen this opera over the centuries, and how it connects me to them.

Reading about the artists matters a lot too: building up an image of all these intellectuals, how their lives crossed and what influenced them. That's very important to me, in addition to the painting itself, of course.

Do you want to interview me about this, or do you have enough information to proceed?