My Slow Journey Learning to Appreciate Art

It has taken me many years to be able to say I am beginning to appreciate fine art!  I grew up in a family that never went to museums, never had art books or magazines in the house, and I really can’t remember giving much thought to art museums.  They just weren’t on my horizons.  My first trip to an art museum was post-college, and I was visiting a fellow I was dating in his home city of Chicago.  He arranged for us to visit the Art Institute of Chicago one Sunday afternoon.

I could appreciate the setting and the building, both of which are magnificent, but once I got inside I was overwhelmed and clueless.  I didn’t have anything I could draw on from within me to even begin to figure out what I wanted to look at, and I couldn’t find a way to relate to the significance of the work.  I watched others to see how they approached viewing the art, and all I could see were people standing staring at pictures, and sometime talking about them.

It didn’t even occur to me that I could just tell the person that I was with that this was my first trip to a museum.  But looking back, I guess I was trying to impress the guy and had no way of knowing if visiting art museums was something everyone did, and I had just missed out somehow.  What I remember most about the visit is walking into the building, and then having ongoing anxiety attacks and wondering how long before we could leave.

Once I escaped, I didn’t think much more about art as I decided that it wasn’t something I could appreciate since not only could I not connect with it, I became extremely uncomfortable because I couldn’t seem to connect with it.  However, once I decided to move to Boston, circumstances brought me back into that world.  As I was leaving one job to take another in Boston, my colleagues gave me a membership to the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) as a going away gift.  They were excited to see my reaction as I think they thought it was a very clever gift.  Indeed they were right, but they were not aware of how estranged I felt from art.  I remember staring at the gift card for some time as I don’t think I even understood what a membership to a museum meant.

Once I moved to Boston, I frequently heard people referring to the MFA.  I did have several opportunities to visit the museum at the invitation of others, but I still had the same reaction as my first visit.  Mostly I liked the gift shops and the restaurants and some of the decorations and settings, but I was always thinking about how soon I could escape.

My visiting experiences slowly began to change when I made friends with a woman who had taken art history courses in college and whose parents had taken her to museums in New York as she was growing up.  Another plus was that her favorite painters were the Impressionists, and so those were the galleries we always visited when we went to the museum.

Slowly I found that I could begin to have some success in differentiating works and identifying who painted them.  I bought several art history books and began studying the Impressionists.  As an art genre, Impressionism seems easily accessible to me.  At the very least, I can appreciate the beauty of the scenes, and I marveled at the difference in looking at the picture close up and seeing that it didn’t contain the detailed specificity like a photograph, but when I stepped away from it, I clearly grasped the “impression” that the artist intended.

Slowly, I felt like I was beginning to be more at ease with appreciating the beauty of art and the experiences that an art museum could offer me.  I persisted in visiting art museums, and I lost some of the anxious feelings about wanting to escape once I was inside.  I did figure out that I had a definite limit in how long I could look at different works of art before I simply felt overstimulated.  Coming and going as I wished was not an issue when I was by myself.  When visiting museums with others, I learned that it worked to suggest that we split up and meet at a commonly agreed time and place.  If they wanted to visit longer than I did, I could hang out in the café and people watch or read a book.  One side benefit of having a membership is that one doesn’t have to associate the cost of entrance with the length of stay.  Since a year’ membership is paid in one lump sum, I don’t have to weigh the price of a single admission fee – say $25-$30 – at some museums, so I feel more free to come and go as I wish.

Gradually I became a member at other art museums in the area, and some of them have reciprocal memberships so I have been able to visit different kinds of art museums which have helped hone my understanding of what is available to see and how to view it.  Now when I visit a museum, I take time to read over the map of the permanent collections, and to read reviews of the special collections.  I zero in on what I would like to see, and if something catches my interest as I’m making my way to the intended exhibition, I just stop and enjoy it.

My real breakthrough in this endeavor is the result of my enrolling in lecture series and courses offered by area museums.  Often the lectures are tied to special exhibitions or periods of art.  Currently I’m attending a semester long lecture series on the Impressionists at the MFA.  Often the lecturer is able to contextualize the artists’ techniques in the history of the period in which he and sometimes she painted.  I am learning so much from these experiences, and I am very excited as I am experience a whole new world of interests that I had earlier concluded were not accessible to me.

I took a short course at the Davis Museum on Wellesley College’s campus, and it was a different introduction to viewing art.  The class was small, about 8-10 people.  The instructor selected 8-10 different paintings within the Museum that we would view during each class.  She walked us to each painting and then she asked us a series of questions about it.  For example, What did we think the artist was trying to say?  Could we guess what period it was painted in?   Her approach really helped me gain my confidence in my ability to view art in a meaningful way.  I was flabbergasted – but quite joyful – one day when she pulled me aside and asked me where had I learned so much about art?

So the message of this Blog is don’t write off areas that intrigue you but that you shy away from based on initial less than positive experiences.  What I learned from this is that my first experiences were less than positive because I had had no preparation for how to understand art.  Now I feel more confident and having learned some basics and having felt moved by what I’m viewing, I am excited to continue exploring, learning and looking forward to the joy of viewing beautiful art.