"… But I know what I like"

“… But I know what I like”
by David Benjamin

“Mona Lisa looks as though she’s about to be sick.”
— Noel Coward

PARIS — As I was passing an art gallery yesterday on rue St. André des Arts, a painting caught my eye. It depicts three female figures sculpted in stone against horizontal panels of black and white.

Momentarily, I thought this image exceptionally artful and crossed the street for a closer look. At second glance, I saw it as merely decorative. Neutral in color and subject, it would blend into almost any interior decor. It would look nice over the sofa, denote its owner’s good taste and never wear on the senses.

As I changed my mind, I suffered the realization that — after all these years — I still “appreciate” different art for different reasons that clash violently. Smartass though I claim to be, I have no visible philosophy of art.

Some art I like for its clarity of representation and sheer drama — like Gericault’s oils and Rodin’s bronzes.

Some art gets to me because it brazenly defies bourgeois convention: Modigliani’s nudes, Monet’s slapdash lily pads, Picasso’s cock-eyed (and cock-nosed) portraits, the madman grotesquery of Hieronymus Bosch.

There are artists who captivate me with their unique mastery of technique, like Winslow Homer’s brilliant watercolors.

And then there’s stuff I like just because I like it, from Rubens and Manet to Reginald Marsh and Walasse Ting.

But I wouldn’t have reached even my present stage of aesthetic irresolve without the influence of a teacher named Liddicoat and, unwillingly, a girl named Quigley.

The Quigley Episode: My only “elective” class in four years of high school was Roy Liddicoat’s basic art class. Roy was prone — as was I — to the occasional passionate outburst about the perversity of the human condition. This became manifest one day as he leaned over the shoulder of a sophomore named Quigley and inspected her work. Most of my classmates were in awe of Quigley’s talent for reproducing romantic images from popular magazines. Quigley adorned each perfectly rendered line-by-line enlargement in soft pastels, lending it an air of sentimentality that virtually dripped treacle off the pages of her sketchpad.

Mr. Liddicoat watched her draw for a while, took in the oohs and ahs from the girls surrounding Quigley and, finally, snorted.

“That’s not art,” he said.

He followed by stating the obvious. Quigley’s draftsmanship was both flawless and rigid. She lent to her forgery neither honest feeling nor even a whiff of imagination. Her choice of subjects was appalling. Her inability to interpret the image and her reluctance to alter a line even as much as a millimeter revealed a creative vacuum that might someday prove — Roy lamented — both commercially lucrative and artistically criminal.

Roy walked away, leaving Quigley stricken and her fans bewildered. I suspected that I’d just found a new friend. As the year progressed, I proved myself not nearly as skillful as Quigley. But Roy was much more tolerant of my style — which was primitive and disorderly, a sort of abstract expressionism with dark shades of Dante.

Eventually, Roy gave me the run of the art room, with unfettered access to all the art supplies I felt like squandering. Mainly, I exploited huge rolls of white butcher paper and gallons of tempera paint, covering the brick walls of LaFollette High with 20-foot posters promoting football games, sock hops and theater productions. I invented a typeface for this, of which Roy approved.

Besides all this, Mr. Liddicoat convinced me that art is not merely an elective in life. It’s a piece of the whole person that leaves a cold and toxic void if it’s not there. So when I had a chance in my third semester of college, I signed up for Art History with a softspoken half-blind prof named Dedrick. We, his students, spent weeks studying Mr. Dedrick’s lovingly shot slides of the fragments of art that survive from the ancient Sumerians and Persians, Egyptians, Phrygians, Parthians and Babylonians. It was all old and dry, but Mr. Dedrick’s love made it breathe.

This led, inevitably, to the Oriental Institute Incident.

The Oriental Institute, on Chicago’s south side, was a sort of shrine for Mr. Dedrick, which meant that we all got a field trip one day to Hyde Park. Barely had we reached the wondrous Mesopotamian rooms when one of the museum’s U. of Chi. MFA interns spotted Mr. Dedrick and somehow deemed him easy pickings. Might’ve been the Coke-bottle glasses, the tweed suit, the scuffed brown shoes. Or maybe just his air of amiable grace.

Once buttonholed, Mr. Dedrick followed the voluble intern meekly, listening to the kid rattle on about this papyrus scroll or that bug-eyed votive figure. Never once did he interrupt. As his students lurked nearby, smirking at the irony of this postgrad naif lecturing the Midwest’s foremost expert on the art of the ancient Orient, kindly Mr. Dedrick waved us away. He nodded encouragement to his infant mentor and gratefully took in the Reader’s Digest condensed version of lessons he had dispensed from his lectern — with a joy that never faded — a few hundred times.

And I was convinced all over again of the power of art to bridge eons, unite strangers and fill the air with patient contemplation.

Since Mr. Dedrick, I’ve followed art casually but steadily, discovering a useless knack for identifying many artists at first glance. I can spot a Mary Cassatt at 50 paces and distinguish a Steinlen from a Toulouse-Lautrec without breaking a sweat.

(By the way, I know where Steinlen is buried, in a Paris grave that can be found only by accident.)

Still, for all my superfluous art knowledge, I can’t explain my preferences. I can’t shake the conviction, for instance, that the Mona Lisa is one of Da Vinci’s lesser achievements. And I’ve never warmed up to Cezanne — and feel guilty about it.

On the other hand, I grew up with Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers and I won’t tolerate anyone speaking ill of Norman. I think Will Elder’s “Little Annie Fanny” strips in Playboy deserve a wall in the Guggenheim, along with Al Capp and Walt Kelly. I don’t know why but I prefer Wright to Van Der Rohe, Matisse to Miro and Thurber to Durer. And I like Durer, but just a little bit less. In a tossup, I’d go with Brancusi over Henry Moore, but I’d object to the tossup. I prefer Diego to Frida, Willy Ronys to Robert Doisneau and J.M.W. Turner to just about anybody.

Why? Who knows?

None of my choices are empirical, aesthetic or even artistic. I’ve tried to get my mind right by reading art magazines about art, but all I figured out was nobody that should ever read art magazines. After a half-dozen glutinous paragraphs, you start pondering an amendment to the First Amendment.

As a lifelong know-it-all, I’m frustrated by this persistent uncertainty about the meaning of art and the way it fuzzes up my sensibilities. I should like Rembrandt more than Delacroix. Shouldn’t I?

There’s a cliché that covers my dilemma, but I can’t even get that straight: “I know quite a bit about art, but I don’t know why I like what I like.”