The Guggenheim

Justin took the camera to work the other day, and it came back with these photos.  I like them.

Ancient Jewelry

Some of my favorite pieces of at the Met are in the Roman, Etruscan, and Greek jewelry collections.  The simple, hand forged earrings and rings with rock crystal (I love all the rock crystal!), agate and other polished stones always make me want to go straight home and hammer some metal.  Everything is technologically simple, but also has a  beautiful sophistication, and of course, I'm always enamored with the immense volume of gold in the collections! 

Here's that elegant and simple construction

Look at all the gold!

I love these earrings. 

There are a lot of earrings and rings with animal heads: rams, dogs, dolphins, lions.   

Weekend Treasures

Last weekend we went camping upstate and floated down the Delaware River--it was so much fun, but the best part were the junk store and yard sales we stopped at on the way home--

There was a store where the house and entire front yard was literally filled with all kinds of old things.  I bought a blue ball jar (with a glass lid!) and a turkish coffee pot for $3 total.  I should have bought more things.

But then we stopped at a yard sale that had a great book collection.  I was very excited to find the weaving instruction book, but then I saw the Meret Oppenheim book.  This is the most information I've ever seen about her in one place; even her wikipedia article is only a couple of paragraphs long.  The book was put together for a traveling retrospective in the 90's.

The Weaving book is great--but the art book is amazing!  Just look at the cover!
Below are some photographs of the inside of the book.  You can clock on them to see them larger.

"Strangling Angel" 1931 and "For Irene Zurkinden" 1932
I love the plate of food and the pear with bacon--And the angel?  There are ladies feet behind her, and I love that the pine trees are growing out of her wings.  And what's with the baby?

"The Couple" 1956 and "Summer Night" 1957
The Shoes are attached at the toes. I really love this piece.

"Pair of Gloves" 1985

She made this piece the year she died; she was 72.  This piece is my favorite.  The gloves are blue suede with red stitching on the bottom and painted veins as they get smaller. Brilliant.

Of course, you couldn't have a Meret Oppenheim book without the Fur Cup.  But I had never seen the other piece: "My Nurse" 1936.  She was so good.  I'm sad that I missed the Exhibition by about 15 years.

3 Painters

Las week I got called into work and was busy busy busy, so I didn't get a chance to finish museum week.  I've had a really hard time cutting down my favorites from the Met (it's just so big!) so this is as culled as it's going to get.  It's only three painters: Velasquez, Goya, and Manet.

Valesquez:

Portrait of Juan de Pareja
c. 1650

Don Gaspar de Guzmán, count of Olivares
c. 1635

Goya:

Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga
c. 1790

I love this painting.  The cats are just about to pounce on the mockingbird, but they never will.  And the poor bird is tethered to the little boy.  Here's your dark and sinister!

Majas on a Balcony
attributed to Goya

Manet:

A Matador, likely Cayetano Sanz y Pozas
1866 

Young Lady
1866

So I've been thinking a lot about Spanish painters, apparently.  The Manet portraits were painted after he had gone to spain and seen Velasquez and Goya.  Every one of these painters knew how to lay it on like nothing else.  Oh this makes me want to paint.

Day Two: the Museum of Fine Arts Boston

This room was amazing; it was a very large hall filled with paintings salon style, and it was a bit overwhelming (in a good way), and the light was just right for looking at paintings.

But the best painting in the hall was the Boar Hunting Scene by Franz Snyders.  He apparently specialized in hunting dog portraits, and apparently Reubens would call on him to detail the animals in his own paintings.

Painted by Whistler in about 1879.  I like this painting, and it's too bad I couldn't avoid the glare.

Vilhelm Hammershøi painted this in the early 20th century.  I like it.  But I'm also a sucker for low contrast interior scenes.  I also like that this painting is the same room, with no furniture, at a different time of day (or perhaps a different season)

Oh Cezanne:

This painting was one of my favorites:

It's a very small piece, hung in a hallway with other paintings all around it.  This one stood out, though, and then when I read the placard, I was like "duh" It was painted by Goya.  And I know it's hard to tell in the mildly crappy photograph, but it's a very beautiful painting.  I was very much attracted to the angel's dress.

My current infatuation with Tiepolo also started here:

And then, there was this painting:

The cow (bull?) is huge! And the dog! lapping up the blood? oh my,  But it really works as a still life: there is so much to look at, and everything about it draws your attention.   It was painted by David Teniers the Younger in 1642.  The classification on the Museum website is interesting: genre, interior, still life, food.  I guess I don't really look at this painting and think "food"

But this painting was my favorite:

The Execution of the Emperor Maximillion, by Manet
He was another artist I (re)fell in love with this weekend. He painted multiple compositions of this scene, and this one is technically unfinished.  But it's still the best one.  The MOMA had a show of Manet's paintings of the execution a few years ago: you can view them here.


While in Boston, we also visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which is the site of what could very well be the greatest unsolved art heists in history.  The museum itself (other than the empty frames) is wonderful.  In her will, she left the museum to the people of Boston, stipulating that nothing was to be removed or added (or even moved from her original placement).  So you have a very eclectically organized museum that is still the same as it was when it was a house nearly 100 years ago.  She also, obviously, had very good taste in artwork. It reminds me of the Frick, which is quite possibly my favorite museum ever.

A week of Museums

We're going to have Art week here on Lock and Spoon.  My mom was visiting last week, and, when she visits life tends to be a whirlwind of art museums.  She also has a really nice little digital camera that's a bit easier to cart around than our larger canon. Last Monday we went to the MOMA, and here is the recap:

One of my favorites: Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965

They also had a exhibit of Picasso's prints:

This print was made after this painting by Lucas Cranach the younger.  The original was painted in 1654 and hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Picasso's version was made in 1958. 

The Bull Series were my favorite prints in this exhibit:

From this:

to this:

 But the best part of the museum was the Fluxus room:

The chromed objects might be the best of the best:

A head of cabbage, a straw, lollipop, earthworms, and a worm box

If you don't know about Fluxus, you definitely should look it up.  It's kind of become my life philosophy.  I also have a thing for keeping art in boxes.