Francis Picabia looks at art sideways

When you look at a painting upclose from the side of the painting and see how the artist has applied the paint you can see how pre-determined everything was by the artist, that the artist hadn't been as spontaneous as you thought when you acquired the painting, that the figures that make the image were carefully plotted, thought through completely, and for some reason you feel differently about the picture, almost taken advantage of.

It still might be a very good painting, just not the painting you'd thought you'd acquired, the painting that gave you so much pleasure and that you've made better and better by looking at it so many times through the years, and that it became your painting, familiar to you as your own face, and you stopping seeing it because you knew it so well.

But when you turned it sideways, while finding a place for it on the wall of your new home, you started to see it differently, that it was only a collection of colors placed on a canvas in a certain way--pre-determined shapes, planes, gestures--by a person interested in doing such things and trained to make something of them you'd want to acquire, you see you've made a new painting.

There's a problem however: you can't figure out how to hang the new painting! There's a way of looking at a painting sideways that yields fresh new meaning to it, and brings a sort of spontaneous beauty into the world, but there's just no way to hang such a painting.