Museum Hopper

i recently found this book, 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die by Stephen Farthing.  it contains a list of paintings from pre-1400s to current 2000s screened by experts in the field.  i love it!    i have converted all of the paintings in the book into an excel as i start to track which ones i have seen!  i have currently viewed 241 out of 1001, so i am riding right around 24%.   take a peek at which ones are on the list !

i went to the ford presidential library last week after having gone for some reason when i went to michigan for undergrad. as a little background, president ford went to the university of michigan for undergrad majoring in economics.  he played center on the michigan football team and was also named to the all-american team in 1935.  the library is quite lovely up north.  it is not very large, but what exists is quite well done.  there is a section covering the first lady ford, president ford's university of michigan involvement and his career in michigan politics leading up to his presidential career.  the library also has a few of the presents president ford received during his presidency.  the negative: it was tiny.  also, i was literally the only person in museum besides the museum employees.  while i was there, i was obviously looking at the exhibits and they were standing around one of the cases.  i definitely was not going to go to that case while they were gabbing

i went to the kelsey museum of archaeology today.  what a gem!  i was very pleasantly surprised and could not believe that i had never been there before!  it reminded me of a smaller scale british museum with perhaps a slightly lower caliber of items.  it also was purely focused on mediterranean items whereas the british museum does have asian and other areas as well.  when i was graduating undergrad, they were just starting a remodel on this museum, and it appears that the money was well spent!   i was impressed with the quality and variety of the items they had.  they had great descriptions of each item as well as nice overviews of each particular set of objects and their importance in the museum as a whole.  they had sections primarily on greece, egypt and rome.  i liked that they had a mixture of objects: bowls to funeral adornments to pieces of ancient columns.   i will definitely keep my eye on this museum to see if they have any special exhibits. times visited: 1 time in

i went to the museum of modern art (moma) in between sessions with one of my fellow MBA students, tyler!   we showed up coincidentally right as the museum was opening.  it was absolutely packed.  we were able to "sneak" in using a membership ID allowing us to skip the line that was forming outside.  i have no idea if this is the normal case...it was unseasonally warm, lightly raining and a wednesday.  we had to wait in a bit of a line to get a ticket. it was the usual.  we visited the main two floors with the picassos , and van goghs and matisses and the monets .  he was surprised to see the monets in the modern art museum!  they were super crowded as usual, my biggest complaint about the moma. happy i made it back...it sure has been a while.  it did remind me of what i like about it, but also what i do not like about it! times visited: at least 7 time in museum: 1 hr overall: B+

i checked out the morgan library last friday!   it was like coming home.  they had a trifecta of exhibits going on: degas: drawing and sketchbooks , roy lichtenstein: the black-and-white drawings, 1961-1968 , and mark twain: a skeptic's progress .  the degas drawings were pretty cool.  they were the originals and for the most part, not the final paintings.  i liked seeing how the crazy artist brought his masterpieces together.   this was in the small enclosed room.    the mark twain exhibit emphasized how contrary and skeptical he really was.  it also demonstrated to me how much of a presence mark twain ended up being near the end of his life.  he really seemed to be everywhere and have an opinion about everything. the lichtenstein early drawings were fascinating.  you could really see the evolution of his trademark style with the dots.  it seems that he was really always working on ordinary objects and turning them into art.  i particular enjoyed his comic strip drawing