Jayne Arksey: The Guggenheim Collections

I experienced my first exhibition of modern art this summer at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, ‘From Kandinski to Pollock - The Art of the Guggenheim Collections’. In the past, I have never really understood modern art, I have always just seen it as pretty patterns with no understanding of the concept.

I am unsure what made me enjoy this exhibition so much; my emotions were heightened due to being away without my children, it was my first day surrounded by the beauty of Florence and so far, I had found it quite overwhelming. Four years into studying photography, I have also started to look at art in a different way so now have some understanding of the effects that particular colours and shapes can have in an image.

I am still not sure that understand modern art completely but I was definitely emotionally drawn to particular images, the most surprising being Mist by Adolph Gottleib. Looking at the two splats of light and dark online now, feels less impressive, however viewing it full size in the setting of such a fine gallery, I felt simultaneously pushed and pulled to and from the image; the feeling was quite powerful.

I also enjoyed discovering the method used by Max Ernst, in using the lines left by rope dropped onto a surface to create work such as Il Bacio.

‘Ernst uses a network system coordinated to carry over its rope configurations on the canvas, thus bringing these random effects to a conscious manipulation.’

It reminded me of the childhood pastime of scribbling on a doodle pad and making it into a picture; in fact the game probably came from people imitating this method.

It was fascinating to see works from Lichtenstein, Pollock and Rothko in all their glory and quite surreal to be so close you could touch them.