For Emily (Wherever We May Find Her).

Poor Emily Thomas.

She thought she was doing the right thing. When she wanted to spend some quality time with her young daughters, she didn’t take them to see Saw IV. She didn’t take them to an Ultimate Fighting cage match. She didn’t plop them in front of Nickelodeon and curl up with Sidney Sheldon novel and a tumbler of scotch. 

She took them to the Milwaukee Art Museum. You know—pretty things, white walls, quiet footsteps on shiny marble floors. A nice place.

She walked around with her family, and generally had a good time. We know this because she told us. Because this is the age of Internet 2.0, she wrote about her visit on her family blog.

As I recall, she and her kids liked the Georgia O’Keeffe paintings. And the Milton Avery pieces.

I can’t confirm that recollection, however, because her blog is now “closed.” Available only to invited visitors. Why would that be?

Possibly because poor Emily has been pilloried by the local art community for daring to have—and express—an opinion about a work of art that didn’t match up with the prevailing wisdom. “Ellsworth Kelly’s “Red, Yellow, Blue II,” for example, struck her thus.

“Wait, I get it,” she wrote. “The ‘artist’ …is coming back over the weekend to put something real onto those primary colored rectangular pieces of crap.”

Sure, it’s a bit snarky. But nothing compared with Dorothy Parker or Alexander Woollcott in their heyday. She also was a bit offended—perhaps in deference to her little girls—at the big-bottomed bronze by Gaston Lachaise and at a bawdy painting of a topless prostitute by Jan Lievens.

For these heresies, Thomas has become the focus of a Milwaukee art-world brouhaha. She is an example of the appalling level of art “literacy” in America. Of the inadequacy of arts education. We fear for her girls, who will grow up in such a closed-minded, philistine household. She just doesn’t “get it.”

Well we showed her. She’ll know better the next time she has an opinion about a piece of art. She’ll keep it to herself—probably like hundreds of other people who walk past Kelly’s painting, unnoticing or bemused, but silent.

What are we supposed to “get” when looking at Kelly’s painting, exactly?

“My work is made of single or multiple panels: rectangle, curved or square,” Kelly wrote in Notes of 1969. “I am less interested in marks on the panels than the ‘presence’ of the panels themselves…. I have never been interested in painterliness (or what I find is) a very personal handwriting, putting marks on canvas. My work is a different way of seeing and making something which has a different use.”

Critic Arthur Danto sees Kelly’s work as the endpoint of the modern movement, which Kelly believes consisted of “the breaking up of traditional forms and the reorganization of them in increasingly simplified ways, culminating (of course) in Kelly’s own single-form, single color paintings.”  In this way, he’s painting the “end of history,” the final end point of modernism—three colors that are the source of all color, inscribed on three separate panels.

“So girls,” I can imagine Thomas saying, “this painting is about the end of history. What do you think?”

Kelly’s piece is a ripe one for the “my-kid-could-do-that” school of criticism. Danto would say, as he does about a lot of Modern Art, that it is a piece of “illustrated philosophy,” the embodiment of an idea or concept. I don’t think any work of art ends there. For me, there has to be something else, something tangible, a sensory experience that gives…dare I say it…pleasure.

I like Kelly’s piece as a piece of architecture, I guess. I like the way it registers from across the gallery. I like watching people move against its backdrop. And I sort of like the witty, childlike gesture of reducing painting to a pre-school song: “Red, yellow, and blue; Red, yellow and blue; the colors we take…”

Do I like it any more because I’ve read Kelly’s and Danto’s thoughts about it? Probably not.  Do you?

It’s unfortunate that the arts in America have a chip on their shoulder. They’ve had to scrape and claw for respectability. And beg for the resources that might go along with acceptance.  We should have more arts education. It’s not surprising that the art community should jump on poor Emily and use her to promote the importance of art and art education.

Because art education should start with a simple question: “What do you think?” Not with Janssen’s History of Art. Not with D-major arpeggios. Not with a four-hour performance of King Lear. It should start with engagement. Soliciting and encouraging curiosity. Opening a path for the exchange of ideas. It should start with conversation.

So Emily Thomas, wherever you are, we’re sorry. Please come back to the Milwaukee Art Museum. Please keep exposing your kids to new things, and asking them what they think. And if it’s not too late, tell us what you think, too. We promise to listen this time.