What Is Art? Mom Knew

That right: My mother knew. She got the nub of the matter into a parable that must've come to her from her father. He knew too.

Once upon a time (said she) the great painter Leonardo da Vinci was just starting his career. He went to the King and asked to be given an important job. The King had never heard of him and said Leonardo must submit a sample of his art to show he was qualified. He thought Leonardo would go away and come back with a painting, but no. "Let someone fetch a large sheet of paper and a piece of charcoal!" said the young man.

Curious, the King made it so. Leonardo had the paper fixed to a wall, took the charcoal between his fingers and drew a perfect circle that touched the very edges of the paper. The King hired him on the spot.

My grandfather was born in the 1870's and set up for a while as a photographer. He kept at it, if only as a hobby, till my mother was born in 1903. I know because he once showed me his glass-plate negatives – he made his own collodion – and one of the plates was the obligatory nude photo of Mom on a bearskin rug. Later he became a cartoonist. One of his cartoons, which scared my mother in her girlhood, showed Capitalist Bosses sucking blood from the necks of toiling Mill Workers. (They sucked it through a pipette, presumably so the artist could avoid showing unseemly physical contact.) Later he took up painting in oils and water color, then wood carving, then sculpting in clay. Hey, he even won a medal at the Chicago World's Fair. No shit!

His view of art was pretty straightforward. The job of a painter was essentially to do what photography does, at least as a starting point – that is, to show you something you couldn't otherwise see because it was far away, or in the past, or hidden behind a big Keep Out. But painters had the advantage of being able to create settings and situations that never existed, and that couldn't be faked up no matter how hard you tried. Also they had color. So they had a leg up on photography, which could only show us things to which a photographer could get physical access, preferably in the daylight hours.

Of course my grandfather detested "modern art," but you couldn't call him an academician; he had no training and no particular interest in the history and appliances of art.

Footnote: Around 1950 Grandpa did a series of semi-abstract watercolors. But they could all be explained if you knew the key, which he wrote in pencil on the reverse of each sheet. For example, a sheaf of half-unrolled scrolls of different colors were "The Years," with one color representing the lean years, one the years of plenty, and black the years of pestilence and war. When he first showed us this series I delighted him by guessing at their meaning and getting nearly every one of them right, which made him think for the moment that there might be something to modern art after all. However, I peeked.