Art N' About

Author: JOYCE MAN

Discovering a good museum is immensely fulfilling. Finding it inside a converted turbine hall is even better. But if you combine these two with the chance to see one of modern art's most prodigious works, well then, you're either just plain lucky or, more likely, you've entered the Tate Modern.

Modern art has many critics and I sensed that the day I was at the Tate, I was accompanied by many of them. One woman exclaimed with nasal snootiness, "Really, I don't know what the hell these curators are thinking," while the guards standing by conversed amongst themselves, "There are a lot of them today," "them" being the usual disapproving crowd who just couldn't get enough of Jackson Pollock's paint-splattered panels at the entrance nearby. When I returned to Middlebury and told a friend I'd gone to one of the world's foremost modern art exhibits over break, his face darkened and he muttered something about bad high school art under his breath and added, "I hate ready-mades."

I've long struggled to explain what is so great about modern art (a motor rigged to a plastic phallus - impressive, is it not?) but at the Tate Modern, ready-mades aside, the audience is made ready to open their minds.

Just a hop over the pond in London is this enormous collection-three floors permanent and two rotating-of iconic modern works. Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare" stands shoulder to shoulder with Dali's "Metamorphosis of Narcissus." In one room was a Magritte painting while a series of Giacometti's elongated human forms stood in the next. And if you, like me, rather despised Jackson Pollock or Picasso before, then at the Tate at least you understood what they were getting at.

The permanent collection, in fact, is such a great survey of recognizable works that my friend and I were barely able to skim through the three floors by the end of five hours even though we jogged through the last part, past the Andy Warhol Marilyn and red self-portrait. Apparently, some Damien Hirsts and Rodins were also hanging around, but when you can ignore the master sculptor and the guy who did the shark in the tank, well, then you know you're in a big museum.

And then the best part -Rothko's Four Seasons murals. Commissioned originally for a prestigious restaurant in Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, they are nine stunning paintings in red and browns that are now housed in one black-paneled room at the Tate. Any lover of Rothko would have been in their element and I, a dedicated follower who had taken copies of his paintings along on the year abroad in his native country, Russia, was exactly where I need to be. There can be no two ways about these panels. You either love them or hate them, but rest assured you'll do it with a passion. And why not? Rothko certainly took his art with intensity. When he was found dead in 1970, having slit his own elbows, his blood formed a pool 8 ft. by 6 ft. that uncannily resembled his paintings.

It almost made missing the Saatchi Gallery and the young British artists worthwhile. But then again, what good is the gallery without that infamous shark encased in a blue tank? Now there's modern art for you.