Well, truth be told, we have a bit of an aversion to people.
So, we chose the Chrysler Museum. We always like a good museum.
As the name says, it’s the Chrysler museum, and upon arrival, there was a huge banner on the front of austere, understated building that said: Enter To Win a New Chrysler.
Oh, my.
However, aside from that and the prize parked out in front of the entrance, there wasn’t much more blatant evidence of the corporate nature of the museum. In fact, it’s a very nice museum. Small, but nice.
We started on the first floor, skipping the glass galleries. I have seen too much Louis Comfort Tiffany glass in my life to even be slightly interested in seeing more. R is a huge fan of Tiffany and for every art class we had in college was another trip to the Metropolitan Museum in the city and another trip to the Tiffany glass galleries. Now, talk to me about Frank Lloyd Wright glass, and we’ve got a conversation going.
Back to the museum at hand. We decided to start downstairs with the Greek and Egyptian and Pre-Columbian galleries. There were a few very nice amphora and broaches in the Greek. There was an amazing sarcophagus, in granite, in the Egyptian display*, and I am apparently watching too much about Pharaohs and ancient Egypt because I’m able to quickly identify cartouches and some of the hieroglyphs.
The Pre-Columbian*** room was a bit of a confusing room. It was rather an expansive collection of some excellent examples of the different cultures, but they didn’t label the cultures that the object came from. Since there was a long time when I was kid that I wanted to be an archeologist, I love studying objects from ancient cultures. I have recently started learning more about the South American cultures and I thought that if I could tell where they were from, why couldn’t they find an archeology student to identify and label them? Ah, well. We still liked it. They did have some very nice Maya artifacts.
We walked out to a hallway and found the stairs to the second floor. We were discharged from the stairs at the Hall of Statues. This is another joy and delight to Tom and I -—we like Rodin. I have been to the Musee Rodin in Paris; we found a fantastic Rodin (et Claudel) display in Switzerland+ and we’ve been to the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, where the original Le Penseur resides.
Our friend Rodin, however, was clearly French and this museum preferred American artists. So there was no Rodin. There were however three busts at the end of the room of George, Abe and… Stonewall Jackson?
…oh that’s right. We’re in the south. They love him down here. There’s even the Stonewall Jackson Shrine.
Ah, yes. Ahem. Time to move along? Indubitably.
There was a wonderful room of photography, including an original Ansel Adams, but you can’t really take a picture of a picture. So we were onward again into the modern art.
I hate modern art.
Our first example. It was huge. Not only huge, but if you look on the floor you can seen a piece of black tape. Do Not Cross the Tape. It makes the museum gods angry and rings a bell. Loudly. I get up to this huge piece of art and there was some explanation of existential bullpoop, but all I kept thinking was, it looks like someone didn’t Shout out the grape juice.
Next to it we had:
Ugh!! I hate when museums hang these! Hate it! This is a Painting I exercise that every art student in the world does. Someone else’s vertical homework is no better than mine, just bigger.
So, moving on… we come across this:
I call it Foot With Pancake. And all of sudden I wanted IHOP for dinner. It was suppoed to evoke erotic feelings, but it only invoked Pancakes in my mind. We turned into the room and found the only really cool piece of modern art that I think I have ever seen.
I think it was called “Dress I” or something along that order. But I thought that it was really neat, how you could see the motion in the dress. It was carved out of glass, and I just really liked it.
There was another display, excuse me, installation called Hamlet. It was made of televisions which flashed scenes from several different versions of the Shakespeare play. It was about 15 feet tall and had a crown and scepter.
FAIL! This display, which was supposed to be an homage to the Shakespeare play, was El Wrong-o. Naturally the two English degrees would notice this -—at the end of the play Hamlet is never king. “Adieu, wreched queen! Horatio, I die”++ and all that jazz. He’s not the king and so he shouldn’t have a crown.
After listening to me blather on about inaccurate literary representation, Tom started walking out of the room, which I took as the signal to start moving on.
We moved onto the portraits room. There were plenty of them, none of them particularly stood out as ground breaking works of art, however there were a few notables. One was George Washington+++.
It was early American painting, without the refined edges of European painters of the time, but it wasn't bad.
We walked into another gallery and there were some students standing there looking at a portrait:
And the one kid was looking at it and looking at and looking at. He walked one way, then walked the other, then stood directly infront of it, and finally said to his classmates, "You know, if we did that to her face, we'd get in trouble but this one is hanging in a museum."
His classmates laughed, and said, "She's wearing a veil, dude. That's from her hat."
"Oh." I couldn't help giggling. Because so many times I've thought the same thing about a painting. (Please see three mentioned above.)
Naturally, there is no museum trip that is complete without the wonders of an Indiana Jones quote. "Yes, this is castle, and there are many tapestries, and if you are a Scottish Lord, then I am Mickey Mouse!"
At this point we were just about through the whole museum and it was nearly time to go. But we found a very interesting small gallery on the way out. They just a few small socialist paintings from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. It was really quite interesting that they even controlled the art that their people could produce. These were all paintings of people, faceless and nameless, toiling in the fields or factories for the good of the people. They were all happy and they were all annoymous. You weren't allowed to do any kind of individuality in the painting-- everyone had to work for the good the people and the good of the country. I really wish they had more of them, I would have liked to see how far they took this control of the arts.
We were were treated to sunny skies when we walked out and there was a nice little garden next to the museum, and we stopped for a minute to check it out. And T needed a smoke after all that art.
_____________________
*please see Alpenzoo and Scheizer! for more information.
**Nothing though, short of Egypt itself, will ever out do the amazing King Tut display that we were able to see at the Franklin Institute. Simply amazing.
***‘Pre-Columbian’ is the general term for any of the cultures that exist in the Americas before Columbus landed. It’s a bit of an unfair misnomer. These were huge and powerful Empires, such as the Inca, the Aztec and Maya, or they were enduring, ancient cultures such as the Inuit, Lakota, and Cherokee nations. But then, I’m sure we have our wonderful Victorian predecessors**** to thank for such a Euro-centric name.
****I blame the Victorians for a lot of ills our modern society. They were a little uptight and backwards.
+Blog to be linked.
++ Actually:
HAMLET
O, I die, Horatio;
The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit:
I cannot live to hear the news from England;
But I do prophesy the election lights
On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice;
So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited. The rest is silence.
+++We can't seem to get away from this guy. Whereever we live, Washington Slept Here. We currently live on the Washington/Rochambeau Route.
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