100th Post! Consciousness and Art

Last time I mentioned how during the Northern Song Dynasty, a piece of art called "Tearful Citizens" convinced the emperor to stop Wang Anshi's extremist economic policy. I like to believe that when Emperor Shenzong first saw the painting "Tearful Citizen," he realized he was a fallible human being.  Instead of logic, an innate feeling for compassion for our fellow man shifted political dialogue to better society.

Can art still do that?  Can art make us more conscious of the human state?

Recently I spent 6 hours at the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena.  I forced myself to slow down and spend at least 5 minutes on a piece of art that attracted me.  Specifically I'd like to talk about the biggest painting at the end of the 19th century hallway:  The Ragpicker by Edouard Manet.

(Source:  Norton Simon Museum)

As I sat on the bench, staring intently at this painting for half an hour, I noticed many people would barely glance at the piece.  Only one person bothered to appreciate standing for a minute before moving on. 

The caption next to the painting explained how Manet was trying to romanticize the freedom of the paper collector, unbounded from the birth of urbanization and modernity in Paris.  

At a glance our instinct is to dismiss the ragpicker as not worth noticing, but if we put ourselves in Manet's time, most paintings depicted opulence, joy and luxury.  Why spend so much time and effort on something so low-brow, so common to reality?

I first noticed the tall sturdy stick the old man carries in is left hand.  Though the hand is course and rough, the glow and roundness shows power in his hand.  While the left hand provides balance, the right grips his earnings, and opportunity to live for another day.   The ragpicker's hat tilts upward, and provides movement in his eyes.  He's looking upward for another chance towards opportunity.

It's easy to live with money.  Not only does the ragpicker have to live with the burden of carrying his garbage, what's heavier is the burden of poverty.  His shoulders are slack, and his legs bow outward not because of the weight of the refuse he carries.  Instead the brown sack he carries is empty.  His body is distorted because he carries the burden of poverty.

In many ways, aren't we just like the ragpicker?  Aren't we trying to sift through the junk and dirt of the human world to find value?  Manet piece show's that even with nothing, we still are the same human being.