Reflections on MoMA, and next trip

Hi, all,
First of all: I'm sorry if I missed you yesterday in the monster line and the rain at the MoMA.  If we didn't meet up, I hope you got to tour the museum anyway.  I haven't really made plans for tomorrow, but I was thinking of heading for the United Nations, in response to popular demand.  Directions are available at the link above.  Let's try to meet at 1:00 PM again, and take the next available tour.

For those of you curious about the MoMA, read on for impressions.

First of all, it was CROWDED!  As you know if you were there, the line was around the block.  Next time, let's meet on 54th St. by the back entrance, and go in that way.  (And don't even think about the Tim Burton exhibit.  It was sold out for the entire day by the time I got there.)  Even inside the museum it was like pushing your way through a concert at intermission.  In the first thirty seconds going up the main stairs I overheard Spanish, Italian, French, German, and a couple of languages I couldn't think of.  Truly the tourist heart of the city.  But kind of cool that there was so much energy and so many people there.

After worrying that I'd picked a bad day to be there, I managed to make my way upstairs, and checked out the Picasso print exhibit on the second floor.  The prints range from 1905, when Picasso was just starting to play with etchings, to the 1970s, just before he died.  Picasso's really an annoying artist...to be so prolific and so talented and at the same time such a....word-I-won't-use with students.  Let's just put it this way: the prints were practically organized chronologically around portraits of "wives and lovers," and there is something weird about the fact that his last and longest-lasting relationship started when he was 74 and finished with his death twenty years later....and the woman in question was 27 when they met.  But separating out the man from his work, I rather liked the sequence of bull etchings (see above), that start with a super-realistic shaggy bull, and then move toward being more abstract, and finally end up with something that looks like one of the cave paintings of Lascaux.  There was also a sort of abstract Miro-like bull in red and yellow, that looked like a parody of a tourist thing for Spain from the mid-sixties.  It's odd how the "tourist" images of Spain echoed even through the work of people like Picasso who were in exile because they opposed the government.  (Look it up, guys.  It's extra credit.)  So the myths of a country get agreed on by all parties.

Speaking of myths, any 9th graders should definitely check out the exhibit on the fourth floor, The Modern Myth: Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times.  It has a few Picasso drawings too, but it's mostly more recent (living) artists, and it might be funny to compare them to your creation myth projects from September/October.  You might even write a new one (as extra credit, ahem), based on something you see there.

Returning for a moment to Picasso and myths, his "minotaur" prints are their usual upsetting selves.  But seeing them put me more in the mood for seeing the Monet water lily exhibit that is right next door.  Monet and the Impressionists have sort of fallen into being "pretty" art, without much emotional impact, but after looking at the violence done to the human form in Picasso, it's easier to see Monet's paintings as a sort of violence done to landscapes...his views are as twisted as Picasso's faces, it's just that we don't hear water lilies screaming.  (Aren't you glad I didn't see Tim Burton on top of this?  I'd be totally grim.)  I liked the last "Japanese foot bridge" painting (at left), which the museum tag said was done in a palette of colors very different from Monet's usual pastels.  I like to think they were autumn paintings because he felt he was in the autumn of his life.

After Picasso and Monet I worked my way up the stairs to check out the photography galleries.  These are much more for juniors, especially the Edward Steichen print "Laughing Boxes" of a pair of fire escapes in the sun (dated 1922, but very much in the style of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn).  Sophomores should also note all of the Dorothea Lange and similar pieces from the 1930s, and the Federal Farm Security Administration series.  The portraits of rural poverty, especially in the South, will be useful for Their Eyes Were Watching God, which we'll start next week.

When I was tired of moving through crowds, I headed out of the museum, back into the rain, and caught a subway at Rockefeller Center (not before stopping to eat at a "Subway's" in the subway station).  For those of you who missed it, it was a lovely tourist day, passing Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall, as well as the museum.  But feel free to leave comments, or be inspired to go on your own, and write your impressions (or refer to specific highlighted assignment type things).

Until tomorrow.....
Ms. Pawel