ART show for week 4

The art show I am documenting about right now is in the Santa Barbara Art Museum. It is called "A Drawn to Modernism: Selected Gifts from Wright S. Ludington". Having gone to the art museum last week only expecting to see the Charles Garabedian exhibit, you can imagine my surprise when I found myself looking at a Rodin sculpture, a Matisse painting, a Dali drawing, some Edward Munch paintings, Picasso drawings, Derain pieces, Moore, Nash, Sutherland, Lewis, and a great deal more. The exhibition contains European drawings and prints, fragile pieces that have received little exposure in comparison to other works of the period. The prints and drawings are not displayed in chronological order, rather they are installed in a manner that "evoke9s0 the elegant, harmonious way that Ludington displayed his collections in his own home". What I enjoyed most about this exhibition is that it showed the simple things these famous artists created, not the usual pieces that everyone knows about. I feel as though I've now seen a part of Picasso a part of Dali a part of all the artists that no one has ever seen or known before. The exhibition made it clear that all of these artists started somewhere, somewhere simple before they became world famous, just as we as budding artists do. Their drawings, mere sketches, are so subtractive in that they include only the bare minimum of details needed to convey the image. They leave out all the excess, all the stuff we deem as necessary and show us that in fact it's not necessary at all, it's only extra. I applaud the artists of the Modernism period, truly innovative before their time.