painting past present

This is a painting, red and black.

For a person newly informed of art and artistic history, a visit to the MoMA's Abstract Impressionist New York exhibition is almost as surreal as some of the artworks themselves.

My approach to going 'round the gallery was similarly subjective and (logically) illogical - beeline to the painting that I deem that I 'like,' then butterfly my way around the rest of the paintings.

I'd look at the painting, then read the tag - "Oooh, I read about him/her/this/it!!" - As excited as my little siblings when they first learnt to read.

So I had to pick a painting to blog about - the red and black one at the top of this post.

Let me tell you a few facts -

• The Japanese flag is a red circle on a white background, like so:

• In 1945, the first atomic bomb (used in warfare) was dropped on a place called Hiroshima.

• The title of the red and black painting is: Blast, I

It's not so easy to dismiss now, is it?

Painted 12 years after the actual Hiroshima bombing by Adolph Gottlieb, Blast, I, to me, raises the question - what is destruction to modernity? [and even vice versa]

It's the paradox of the old and the new, the past and the present that keeps jumping out at me.

The subways of Manhattan, Robert Moses restructuring, New York's pride in surpassing Europe by 'doing' Classical architecture bigger and better...

painting the past in the present that becomes the past.