Why I Hate Modern Art

The most popular painting in the museum was Pavel Tchelitchew’s Hide and Seek

of American Moderns—Joseph Stella, Max Weber, Arshile Gorky

Visiting their homes I saw paintings and graphics by the Soyer brothers, Philip Evergood, David Burlick, Jack Levine, Ben Shahn; etchings by Käthe Kollwitz; lithos by Daumier

There were also reproductions of Modigliani, Soutine, Pascin, Chagall, Rivera, Orozco, Benton, Curry, Wood and Marsh

The only other teenage student was Robert Smithson, who later became a famous Earth Artist

Mark Rothko

Rothko’s paint surface is more inviting and his work has a pure sense of decoration, but do these pleasantnesses add up to some ultimate bliss? What I find bland induces nirvana in some viewers.

The classical tradition understood art as the ideal, the beautiful, the perfect, the purified.

They are more expressive than the painting, but do they deplore violence, or celebrate it?