The Tel Aviv Museum of Art hosts a quite impressive collection of Modernist painters: impressionists, expressionists, cubists, surrealists - Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc. etc. - you get the picture.
I thought I didn't like impressionist art anymore; or any of the Modern Avant-Garde, because they are so overconsumed. Probably one of the first notions one has of art is impressionism; or rather, it is an art which has come to such a degree of pleasantness almost everyone would agree on the beauty of a Monet painting, it's candidness, it's aesthetic value - it is, in short (and maybe that is the most sordid thing one could say about art): pleasing to the eye. Impressionism seems to have lost - at least it did for me - every sense of radicality or even shock it must have had. Nowadays, you can find a reproduction of an impressionist painting to adorn everybody's living room; noone is offended anymore, quite the contrary.
I was somehow bored in advance, then, by the impressionists section of the exhibition. But a second look on a Degas painting - yet another one of the ballet scenes he is so (in)famously known for - puzzled me: Was I hallucinating, or was the background of the midst-rehearsal scene really a landscape -- did the wood floor actually discharge on a placid green field and trees? There could be no doubt about it. Was it - even more witty - the representation of a stage setting, and thus not "real" nature at all?
Thus, I suddenly discovered an incongruency in the painting: something was louche, as the French say, in this picture, something was not quite fitting this presumably harmonious and intimate moment of supposedly unobserved female figures abandoned to a moment of pause. Not only the way in which the painting was made - so comforting to our eye today, so outrageous to the impressionists' contemporaries - but what it supposedly depicted questioned the sense of reality or realism, of what was or wasn't "really" shown in this picture.
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