Messenger With Keepsakes

I went to MoMA, and took pictures.

Then, this weekend, I went to the Frick and died of happiness, then came back to life and was semidisappointed by the Whitney, was enhchanted by 20 inches of snow in the city and trekked to the Met where I also took pictures.

In other news, I have a new goal: to create a brief and informative website that can be used by students or by people who are going to museums as a kind of “cheat sheet” to the basics of art history—movements, artists. Easy to use and find, and brief, unlike searching through long articles in Wikipedia or elsewhere trying to find just a crystallized, small piece of information.

So there’s my goal…. How to do it though!?

On December 22, we went to the Frick and the Met. Because of the transit strike, most of the Frick was closed, except for the back galleries and the special Memling exhibit. So while I really would have liked to see the rest the Frick’s collection was stilll very impressive.

The Memling exhibit was really good, although portraits, while I think they would be really interesting with a background of the person, have never really been my favorite. But Memling’s were so tiny and some of them were really fascinating. I loved the rest of the Frick though. Vermeer—Ingres (though that gallery was closed, I saw it through the window)—Whistler—a bazillion van Dycks—and AH, a panel from Duccio’s “Maesta”! It was pretty amazing.

We had lunch at the Met’s special dining room and then headed into the museum. Some really lovely drawings in the “Clouet to Seurat” exhibit, where I made a lot of sketches. And then we went to the 19th century European paintings gallery, which I got lost in, heh. I don’t like those galleries quite as much as others though. I need to spend more time there to decide which one I like the best. Probably the Renaissance and Baroque rooms…

The next day, I went home! And next Monday, I head to MoMA…

On December 21, I went to the Guggenheim in NYC and saw their show, Russia!. Russia! took over the whole museum to show the evolution of Russian art from the 13th century to the present, and was a great exhibition, in my opinion, although I’ve heard from others who didn’t enjoy it as much as I did. Interestingly it closes tomorrow.

The first few sections highlighted medieval-like, scripture-based art (that didn’t interest me much). They made a lot of innovative textile pieces though that were quite amazing. Their work was a lot more abstract (close to later Byzantine pieces), I’d say, than in other places at the time.

They had a section of Western masterpieces that were from the collections of czars and czarinas that were great—a Bronzino, Reni, Rubens, and many van Dycks (who is seemingly more popular than I’d thought).

After that, a whole… lot… of… portraits… portraits after portraits after portraits! Not much variation and not much expansion on who was who on the labels, which would have made it more interesting in my opinion. A few standouts that I liked: Dmitry Levitsky’s “Portrait of Agafia Dmitrievna Livitskaya, Daughter of the Artist” and Karl Briullov’s “Portrait of Countess Julia Samoilova” which is beautiful and very Ingres-like.

As you moved into the 1800s there were more landscapes and provincial scenes. Following that into the late 1800s/early 1900s is where the exhibit started to get really fascinating. Ivan Kramskoy’s “Unknown Woman” is beautiful and captivating, and Arkhip Kuindzhi’s “Patches of Moonlight” is a fascinating landscape. The detail and scale of Mikhail Nesterov’s “Taking of the Veil” was breathtaking. The realism of many of the later works made me really feel as if I were in the cold snow of Russia (“Capture of a Snow Fortress” by Vasily Surikov comes to mind).

The work of the 1900s followed many of the same innovations of other Western art—cubism, abstraction. Later, more contemporary works focused on the war, Stalin, communism, etc. And the newest paintings and scultpures moved into different mediums and daring compositions. I actually thought that Vladimir Yankilevsky’s “Triptych No. 14” was a real person and was amazed by the tilted scale and shading of Dmitry Zhilinsky’s “Gymnasts of the USSR.”

Overall I enjoyed the show (and, obviously, spent $35 hard earned dollars on the catalogue!). As others pointed out to me, the middle sections—overwraught with portraits—does seem to blur together but the contemporary collection was unsurpassed and well done.

Tonight David Childs, of SOM (a.k.a., Skidmore, Owings, and Merril, LLC), the company that’s designing the Freedom Tower and three other sites in New York City (among many many other things), gave a lecture about the NYC sites he’s working on.

It was a really amazing lecture… the guy can certainly talk very, very eloquently and one can see why people are so drawn to having him be their architect. He can sell both himself, his company, and his/SOM’s ideas—to such a convincing extent that it would worry me, were his works not so good. Combined with an amazingly high tech visual presentation, his speech was extremely well done and impressive.

He talked about four different sites in NYC that (I gathered) he personally is working on. First, the site in Columbus Circle; second, the proposed new Penn Station; third, 7 World Trade Center (just across from Ground Zero itself); and finally the Freedom Tower.

What is fascinating about his work is the overarching theme throughout it all: the importance of integrating the building into the original plans of the city, including windy streets like Broadway, and his commitment to and respect for the city itself and its people. Additionally, he constantly mentioned artists and how their artwork was being integrated into the buildings lobbies and landscape (this is especially in conjunction with the WTC buildings). He’s big on open spaces and parks.

The beauty of his work is in its modernity—the “water glass” he uses to reflect the sky, surrounding buildings, and weather to connect passersby with the buildings and retain the integrity of the city space, and the daring shapes of his skyscrapers—a diagonally-laid out space to reflect Broadway for the Columbus Circle building, a twisting diamond-square-octagon shape for the Freedom Tower. The glass, even (or perhaps especially) in early representational pictures, looks amazing and intoxicating, reflecting the city’s light and sky.

I haven’t particularly followed the work surrounding the Freedom Tower and its propositions but I know some people who are opposed to having anything built there. I probably would have tentatively sided with them before seeing Childs’ presentation, but now? I can’t imagine anyone else designing such a building: maybe it was in the way he sold it, but it’s beautiful, and I can’t wait to see it in actuality.

Today in Intro Art Hist we started discussing northern Renaissance painting (Limbourg Bros., Campin, and van Eyck’s altarpiece were today), and after going nuts with bliss about the beauty of their paintings and the fact that I’m taking a N. Renaissance Painting course next semester, I decided that I should post my schedules for this term and next!

Fall 2005
CLGR105 Elementary [Ancient] Greek
ART105 Intro to the History of Art
ANTH105 Linguistics and Anthropology
ENGL101 Autobiography and Invention

Spring 2005
CLGR106 Elementary [Ancient] Greek II
ART106 Intro to the History of Art II
ART230 Northern Renaissance Painting
CLLA220 Literature of the Empire [Latin]
PSYC105 Intro to Psychology

And there you have it. I’m so excited for N. Ren. Painting!

Maybe for a senior project or something… I want to get all of the FLLAC’s collection up in an online database. How awesome would that be? I kind of want to do that for CMA too, but no one would ever let me do something like that there. But at the FLLAC—? I bet I could.

Just a thought…

Before I go back to Pittsburgh for Holiday Break, I’m staying in the city for a few days to go museum hopping! (And I’m seeing The Woman in White! Ahh!) Basically, it should be the most blissful experience since my five hour marathon at the Met. So, here’s my little ‘wishlist’ of the museums I must, must, must see and the exhibits I’m checking out, for future reference. Expect long and detailed notes on all of them in late December!

• The Frick Collection – Memling’s Portraits (web)
• Guggenheim – Russia! (web)
• Museum of Modern Art/MoMA – Pixar: 20 Years of Animation, Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon (web)
• The Whitney [maybe?] (web)

So. Excited. I love art.

Contrary to popular belief, Woodstock is not actually where the famous concert occured—instead, that’s a place about two hours away. But the charming town of Woodstock, with buildings that seem like miniatures and practically a million quaint little coffehouses, is home to a lovely little school of art.

For part of my docent training, we took a Saturday trip about one hour away to Woodstock from Vassar. The School of Art is a small, quiet compound outside of “downtown” Woodstock that offers classes to the general public. We visited the printmaking studio, where Kate McGloughlin, a printmaking instructor, taught us about the basics of lithography and showed us quickly about drypoint etching and woodcut. That was good because I’d done drypoint before but not lithography or woodcut and I never really, truly understood what litho was.

Anyway, she was extremely awesome: charismatic and funny and down to earth. She was so smart and into her work too. She primed (forget the exact term, though I should know it, heh) a block especially for us and showed us all the steps… even using her bare hands to spread the acid/gum mix (yow). Obviously she’s not into the “scientific” aspects of litho (although she definitely did know what she was talking about) and more into the earthy, artistic aspects of it, which was great and refreshing.

We went to this adorable restaurant with AMAZING food (I had baked brie, and strawberry chocolate chip pancakes) called Joshua’s (I think). Mmmm.