On Saturday Maggie and Matthew and Andrew and I took the train into Chicago to go to the Art Institute.
The Metra is an electric train, but Maggie and Matthew insisted it wasn't nearly as nice as the [new] light rail transit in Minneapolis. I didn't care. I love a man in uniform.
I don't know if it is evident in these photos, but it was exquisitely cold, about zero degrees F. That's minus 18 degrees Celsius for you Canadians. Brrrr.
We split up as soon as we checked our coats and agreed to meet again at 5 pm when the museum closed. Ready, set, go!
I remembered this painting from my last visit to the Institute in 2003.
It is a land/seascape by Cezanne and was my favorite painting on that last visit. But I remember the vivid and unearthily beautiful blue sea as occupying a larger portion of the canvas and being a greener blue. And I remember the painting as being larger than it was this time. Either Cezanne did more than one version of the painting, which is entirely possible, or my memory has magnified its qualities, also entirely possible.
I stood, transfixed, in front of it for several minutes last time. It is difficult to see it in my photograph, but the blue of the sea is a sort of heathery teal color (is that a knitterly description or what?). I fell in love with the color. Then I read the plaque next to the painting, which said that (paraphrasing from memory) the true subject of the painting is the color of the sea. I felt like had just gotten an A on an art history essay.
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is a famous painting by Georges Seurat that had never particularly appealed to me, but there was bench in front of it and my feet hurt, so I contemplated it for a few minutes.
I noticed a couple things. First, although the scene should be full of movement -- children playing, dogs leaping, people strolling -- it really isn't. Everything looks perfectly static and posed. Weird.
Second, for some reason known only to the artist and his muse, he painted a red and blue sort of pointillist frame around the edge of the canvas.
I say again. Weird.
I loved both of these...
...the one on the left for the way it works with its shadow and the one on the right for... I don't know why. Maybe I think he needs socks.
Does this look like a sheep's head to you? It doesn't look like a sheep's head to me; it looks more like a cow's head. Any sheep experts out there?
These guys looked straight out of a Monty Python sketch. Or maybe Labyrinth.
I was fascinated by the way these textures and shapes were depicted in marble.
Sometimes life imitates art. Andrew didn't know I was sitting quietly in the corner of the sculpture gallery, knitting and resting my feet.
I found that I seem to be captivated by early paintings by Piet Mondrian, an artist whose major works never caught my fancy. Who knew?
I like the funny tracery of the bare branches against the sky. One can see the beginnings of the artist's fascination with rectilinear geometry. I remember studying the colors in some of his early paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in NY and thinking how nice those colors would look in a sweater.
Back when I was an art history major in college I took a class in ancient Chinese art because I liked Oriental art and really enjoyed that professor. It turned out that ancient Chinese art is 100% about bronze ritual vessels, ding (tripod cauldron) and gui (bowl) and fanding (rectangular cauldron). The two best collections in the world are the Pillsbury collection in the Minneapolis Institute of Art and another collection in the Cleveland Museum of Art. That means that, by necessity, the collection in the Art Institute of Chicago is second-rate.
I concur. Although my eyes lit upon these once-so-familiar shapes as though they were long-lost family members, I gradually became disenchanted with the pieces. They just weren't as perfectly made, as intricately inscribed, as balanced, as the ones we studied. Second rate.
This was the best of the bunch.
These made me cringe. Especially the fourth one. Ewwww.
I could go on for several paragraphs pointing out what is good and classical about the first one and blech about the rest, but I suspect y'all are not real fascinated by ancient Chinese ritual vessels. So I shall spare you.
Sometimes the best art wasn't the art.
