Pretty Pictures

Yesterday I took a little trip to New York City to visit two wonderful exhibitions. My eyes still hurt and can't really focus well from all the pretty things and all the color they had to absorb yesterday. I have art whiplash. There's so much to say and not enough time to tell you everything right now but I can give you the highlights.

We saw: Cezanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant Garde at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Picasso and American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

I recommend: The show at the Met. So many amazing, important works of art in one place! We had a little discussion about the insurance policy they must have on the musuem for this show which ended with the thought, "Who cares about the money. What would you do with it? Build a time machine? You can't replace these paintings. If a bomb were dropped on the museum right now, we'd be screwed." For sure we would have been.

I didn't realize: How much I love Van Gogh. Not the typical Starry Night or Sunflowers, but his portraits and his patterns and backgrounds. My eyes were happy looking at them.

I learned: That there is truly such a thing as too much of a good thing. The show at the Whitney just had too much to look at. Too many comparisons of Picasso's work and the work of American artists he influenced. My eyes and my brain were tired by the end, which is a shame because there were some wonderful Jasper Johns paintings that I would have liked to spend more time with but I just couldn't focus anymore. I also learned that I love Stuart Davis (the painter, not the singing Buddhist monk, although he is pretty cute) and the sculptures of David Smith.

I was surprised: At how I felt standing in front of some of these works of art. I did jump a little when I saw Picasso's Three Musicians because I loved this painting in high school and painted a life-sized version on brown paper for an art class project. I was a little giddy seeing it in person. Some of the other pieces though, I wasn't all that impressed with and that surprised me. An amazing, rarely-seen Picasso or Jackson Pollock and I stood there thinking, "eeh... it's all right".

So that's it for the highlights. It was a great day, beautiful weather, pretty pictures, amazing things to see. You should go see for yourself!