This Gaudy Gilded Stage

Last weekend, when I visited PJ in Worcester, I stopped in at the Worcester Art Museum while he was working at the American Antiquarian Society. I had no particular expectations of what I would find there — I was just killing time while PJ worked. So, I was pleasantly surprised by what I found there. The Worcester Art Museum has a strong collection of American and European art. I especially enjoyed the amount of information the museum provides for each of the works on display — every description contained a wealth of information; indeed, this may be the most informative museum I’ve ever visited without the aid of an audio guide. I highly recommend a visit to the Worcester Art Museum.

I’ll start with an example of what I mean about the informative nature of the museum’s comments about the works of art. In a really small way, I’ve started to collect images of the Hindu god Ganesha (maybe I’ll explain why in another post someday). I also like to see if each museum I visit has any statues of Ganesha. The Worcester Art Museum does, a little sandstone sculpture from the 7th or 8th century. As the commentary states, Ganesha is the “remover of obstacles” and the “bearer of good fortune and prosperity.” So far, that’s what just about every museum says about this god. But the Worcester Art Museum goes further: “His large elephant’s head and plump body is a visual metaphor for the unity of metaphysical and worldly experiences.” The description goes on, but this is the bit that I wrote down in my notebook. I liked that this commentary moved beyond mere description to analysis. I found that this move was typical throughout the museum.

After you see the museum’s small collection of ancient and Asian art, you can go into the Medieval art rooms. I really liked a wooden crucifixion group. If you click on the link, it will take you to the museum’s image and description of this work. In the room, you could see the French influence on this Spanish work, since it hangs next to contemporaneous images from France. The next room is an example of Medieval architecture. The museum reassembled a room from a Chapter House, pictured here, which you can walk through and admire.

Usually, I’m a little ambivalent about museums taking a room from someplace else and reassembling them, but this one just amazed me. I was especially impressed by the level of detail in this room’s brick work. I can’t even imagine how much work it took to disassemble and reassemble.

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While in NYC earlier this month, PJ and I visited three art museums: the Frick Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Morgan Library and Museum. This was our first time to visit each museum. I enjoyed all three.

The Frick Collection

The Frick Collection was founded by Henry Clay Frick, who bequeathed his Manhattan residence and many of his works of art to create a public museum for the display and study of the fine arts. It has a premier collection of paintings by seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century masters.

I loved several of the works here. Among my favorites was John Constable’s 1826 painting, Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Garden:

As the audio guide notes, this painting obviously relates the medieval cathedral to the equally magnificent trees in the foreground, creating a statement about religion and nature. In this case, the two go hand in hand. The brightness of the cathedral framed by the darker colors of the trees draws the viewer’s eye. The grandness of the cathedral and the garden dwarf the figures in the left foreground, the bishop and his family. This painting shows a world of harmony and order, but the scene’s peaceful ease is perhaps undermined by the storm clouds in the distance. It’s a great example of English Romanticism.

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While we were in Paris two months ago — was it already two months ago?! — PJ, James, and I visited the Musee d’Orsay, which is now one of my favorite museums. The museum is housed in a renovated train station, a fabulously renovated train station, that is. I tried to get a good picture of the inside of the museum, but I was still learning how to use my camera. Here’s the best one I took:

Besides this main area, there are two floors of rooms off of this main hall and an additional floor that doesn’t branch off of this main area. Architecturally, it’s a magnificent space for art. It really succeeds in a way that I think the Tate Modern, another great museum, doesn’t.

There are too many works here that I loved to write about them all, so I’ll just have to hit the highlights. One of my favorites is Jason et Médée by Gustave Moreau:

I love everything about this painting. First, I love the golden colors of the painting, mimicking the golden fleece. Second, I love that Jason and Medea’s nudity evokes (to me, at least) Adam and Eve. I love the youthful masculinity of Jason’s body in this work. He’s young, but he’s a man. And finally, I really, really love that his nudity is covered by a scarf tied to evoke genitalia. It’s suffused with youthful energy and eroticism. I love it!

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It goes without saying that the Louvre is one of the great museums of the world. We therefore put it high on our list of sights to see while we were in Paris. Somewhat surprisingly to us, this was against the advice and comments made by some of our friends and acquaintances. One told us that the lines were too long and that we’d have to wait six hours to get in. Another told us that it was too big a collection to really see any of it and that we’d better use our time if we went to other museums. And our friend and traveling companion James informed us that he’d already seen the Louvre and therefore wasn’t particularly interested in seeing it this time. (He’d been in Paris before, of course, though he was a little confused about whether that had been in the mid-1980s or in 1912!)

Tossing all advice out the proverbial window, we insisted on going. I’m certainly glad we did.

The Louvre holds some 35,000 works of art, everything from “Oriental antiquities” to European paintings to sculptures and objets d’art. Originally a palace, the museum opened in 1793, just a year after the first Republic was established, and its exhibits were taken from the royal collections. Over time, the collections have expanded to take over the entire palace, and in 1989 it acquired the now distinctive glass pyramid designed by I. M. Pei. Here’s a picture of the museum that I took as we were leaving:

This isn’t a great view, but it’s the best of the ones I took. If you right click to view the image in its own window, it looks a little better. I took this picture with the outdoor light lens on, which allows you to see the buildings as more than just shadows against the bright sky. Even so, you can see how cloudy it was that day. It was actually starting to sprinkle as I took this picture, though the rain never lasted long.

The Louvre houses many famous paintings, perhaps most famously the “Mona Lisa” (right). This painting is the star attraction and practically has its own room. Being the ignorant American that I am, I had no idea that “Mona Lisa” is not actually this painting’s name. Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece is actually titled Portrait of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo. It is believed that this woman is the subject of the painting, though no one knows why or by whom the work was commissioned. Historians do know that Da Vinci brought the completed portrait to France rather than to the subject herself. If you click on the image, it will open a window to the Louvre’s discussion of the work.

This portrait is one of the works from the Louvre’s original collection. If you click here, you can learn more about this painting through the Louvre’s “closer look” feature. When you find the room in which the Mona Lisa hangs, you can stand in line to get a closer look at the painting. Or, like me, you can just stand to one side and get a fair enough view. It’s a beautiful painting, but my main reaction to it was that it’s much smaller than I had imagined it being.

My favorite painting that I saw in the Louvre was Titian’s Man with a Glove, painted sometime around 1520-1523 (left). If you click on the image, it will open a window to the Louvre’s discussion of the work.

I like this painting for four reasons. First, the subject is kind of cute. Second, it utilizes a similar color pallet to that used two centuries later by my favorite painter, Velazquez. I like the browns of this style of portraiture and its dark shadings. Third, I like the detail of the man’s gloves and that he has one glove on and one off. This gives the painting the feeling of a snapshot taken just after he’s removed one glove and just before he can remove the other. For me, this detail emphasizes both time — the momentary feeling — and the nonchalance of the sitter. Which leads me to my fourth item: the painting’s psychological quality. The subject of this painting seems simultaneously confident and casual. He appears to be a man of position but also a man of independence. I think it’s a fascinating portrait.

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In the past month, I’ve been to three museums that I haven’t posted about yet, so I’m trying to catch up. Over Memorial Day weekend, PJ and I were in Boston for the conference of the American Literature Association. While we were there we visited the Museum of Fine Arts. Our visit was a little hurried, since PJ had to get back to the conference and we also wanted to fit in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which I’ve already blogged about. As we rushed through the museum, I kept track of which works I liked the best. Here’s a few of the highlights:

I’m not usually into Renaissance religious paintings, but I really liked Rosso Fiorentino’s The Dead Christ with Angels from the mid-1520s. I really like this painting’s color pallet, the contrast between the two most visible angels’ robes with the skin tones of the dead Christ, which helps to contrast his fleshiness with their alabaster skin. The whiteness of their skin reflects their heavenly purity and innocence, while his humanity is represented in the almost sepia tones of his body (rather than in the deathly pallor of whites).

I also couldn’t help but notice that this Christ has pubic hair. This touch reinforces Christ’s humanity: he is a man, in contrast to the cherubs around him, an important quality in Christian myth. Without Christ’s full humanity, his being made of carnal flesh, the salvation story doesn’t work. For me, this painting captures that duality: Christ’s divinity within his humanity. It’s a wonderful illustration of the myth.

Another painting I admired was Giovanni Paolo Pannini’s Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome, painted in 1757. Perhaps because I’m a literature professor, I like works of art about being works of art. This painting’s dazzling array of paintings- within-a-painting is gorgeous when seen in person. The level of detail in the painting is remarkable. The words that stand out in the description of the painting on the museum’s website are “extravagant” and “meticulous.” If you go to the website, you can click on the image of the painting to enlarge it; you can then zoom in one individual portions of the work to see just how meticulous it is.

Another amazing work, but in a completely different way, is Joseph Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), painted in 1840. In contrast to Pannini’s work, Turner eschews meticulous detail for broad impressionistic blurs and colors. One certainly can’t help but see the emotional content of this work, which depicts a scene from a poem about a slave ship caught in a typhoon. As the museum’s website explains, the poem is about a real event, in which “the slave ship Zong whose captain, in 1783, had thrown overboard sick and dying slaves so that he could collect insurance money available only for slaves ‘lost at sea.'” The painting definitely captures the horror of this inhuman act.

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Last Thursday, PJ and I visited three museums in Dallas. We knew beforehand that we were going to visit two of the museums, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center, but we were killing time until our friend Greg got off work so we decided to throw in a third one for good measure.

We started at the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, a museum dedicated to remembering the events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. It’s a fairly simple museum consisting mostly of time-lines and, of course, the actual site of the assassination, which is certainly no small potatoes.

Three things struck me about the museum. First, it’s really weird feeling to be able to stand almost in the same spot that Lee Harvey Oswald stood when he shot the president. I really felt torn about being there. On the one hand, I couldn’t help but imagine looking through a rifle scope and aiming it at the street below. I both can and can’t imagine someone really doing that. On the other hand, I kept thinking about Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Topdog/Underdog and Lincoln’s job letting people pretend to shoot him in a recreated Ford Theater. How would people respond if they set up a rifle scope and let people pretend to shoot the president below? To make sure that people don’t do anything like that, they have the actual spot enclosed behind a clear partition.

Second, I was struck by one part of the museum’s time-lines. One of them shows the hours after the shooting, emphasizing the transition to the new presidency and the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson. The time-line centered on this picture of LBJ being sworn in:

This picture was taken on Air Force One as it was returning to Washington. You might notice that Jackie Kennedy is present. LBJ refused to leave Dallas without her, and she refused to leave without her husband’s body. The secret service therefore took possession of the body before the local authorities could conduct an autopsy, and they all flew back to D.C.

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