I took my Mom to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Wednesday. Though she grew up three hours north of New York City and has lived upstate her whole life, she’d never been to the Met.

We went on the grand tour: through the Egyptian wing into the various European, Greco-Roman, and American wings (and all of their accompanying sculpture gardens), a pause in the Vermeer Milkmaid exhibit, and through the more exotic work of the African and Southern Pacific wings.

Then we came to the modern wing – which, admittedly, is my favorite. I love the glorious older works, but something within me just connects with the more contemporary work. I brought her past the Picassos and the Braques and the Dalis to my favorite piece in that wing: Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), by Jackson Pollock.

There’s a long, leather-covered cushioned bench in front of the painting (which is enormous) and I sat her down and said, “This is one of my very favorite pieces in the entire museum.”

She laughed, and then realized I wasn’t kidding.

I spent the next fifteen minutes explaining why I liked it so much. I explained Pollock’s technique in painting the picture – innovative ways of spreading the paint, with many intricate layers. Pollock worked with the canvas on the floor and painted from all four sides, using many tools – anything but the traditional ones. He was pushing the boundaries of what defined painting. To borrow a phrase from Cal Seerveld, he was playing with “new dimensions in the practice of painting.” When I look at Pollock, I see someone playing with the idea of painting as painting.

I also explained to my Mom that the best artists work within a living tradition, knowing what came before them and not ignoring that history, yet pushing forward. I pointed out to her that Pollock, as an Abstract Expressionist, paved the way forward for artists like Makoto Fujimura, whose paintings have been called the “redemption of abstract expressionism.” I work with Mako and know that he has a deep appreciation for the traditions in which he works (not just abstract expressionism, but nihonga), but that he is critically praised because of the ways he extends and expands the definitions of those traditions. Pollock was doing something similar.

“When you look at art like this, you have to think about the process and the concept, not just the finished product,” I explained. “If I went and threw paint at a canvas, it wouldn’t be the same thing, because I am in a different place in the history of art. But Pollock was thinking ahead of his time.”

I could see a light go on in Mom’s mind; now, she understood. We finished a lap around the rest of the wing, and she looked at the colored panels and the pop art with new eyes.

The very best modern art isn’t a farce or a joke. It’s worth looking at, because (as Nicholas Wolterstorff points out) it is an expression of our impulse to create the new, not just be satisfied with the old – an impulse we’ve inherited from our Creator.