Museum Hopper

I was in a suburb of New York City two weeks ago and had to get to the Morgan Library .  It has been a number of years since I have been able to make it there and it is probably my favorite place in New York.  This aptly was visit #10! It is peaceful and full of light in the museum.  It was busy in there, but still quiet.  I continue to love how elegantly the museum meshed contemporary with the traditional elements. Not sure if you can see it, but the grates are full of birds I focused on my visit on three major exhibits: John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal , Verdi: Creating Otello and Falstaff-Highlights from the Ricordi Archives , and the main library wing . I really like the John Singer Sargent oil painting portraits.  He is quite well known for these paintings that he completed in the early portion of the 1900s including many of the souls and their children.  He painted so many famous people of that time period.  He ended up swit...

I happened to be in New York for a quick minute and I ran into Museum of Modern Art .  I wanted to revisit some of the classics.  MoMA felt like I had never left it other than the entrance moving to a different spot due to construction on the main entrance.   I headed in, got my ticket and headed up to the permanent collection. These are a few of my favorites.  In particular, I love the Van Gogh!   The Matisse is gorgeous.  The Monet is beautiful.  I continue to think it's a bit of a shame that they squish this collection into such a small physical space within the museum.   Times visited: 9 Time in museum: 45 minutes Overall: B+

it has been a while since i have had a museum post!  over the past month, life has gotten in the way.  i have a slew of posts coming up for italy, but i figured i would get this one out of the way!   over the past weekend, i went to nyc with my husband, mom and father for a bar mitzvah.  we went to the whitney  for a quick pop-in before heading to the airport.   we went and saw the classics from the whitney.  i am excited to see that they are getting a new space.  i wish they dedicated more space to the " classics " and less to some of the more outrageous exhibits.  i loved seeing their georgia o'keefe paintings and the stellas.  i had not seen all the alexander calder's wire mobiles since the special exhibit with his circus mobiles! my mom loves edward hopper and they just opened a pretty fantastic new exhibit about him.  it is called hopper drawings .  when edward hopper died, his artistic estate was bequeathed to the ...

last week, i was in new york city for a job interview.  since my flight was scheduled before i knew what time my interview was, i did have some time to kill before leaving for the airport.  my interview was basically across the street from the museum of modern art (moma), so i decided to pop into it for old time's sake. not much has changed since last year.  i did notice that some of the paintings had been arranged like van gogh's starry night.  i think was a good move, since it did seem to help with people flow throughout the museum (my biggest moma gripe).  henri matisse's dance is on loan until mid next year.  its location has also been moved.  it is in a much more prominent spot than it had been before.  you can actually see it now whereas before you had to know where it was to go seek it out. i did pop out into the sculpture garden for the first time in a long time.  it was nice to get a little bit more peace and quiet.  i love tha...

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 ...

i tried to go to the whitney yesterday to see the new hopper exhibit .  i was quite disappointed to find out the whitney opens at 1 pm on fridays .  i did not even think to look given that i got to the whitney around 11.  i am not sure why given they had a guard at the door telling everyone that the whitney was not open yet.  just open the door!  while i was rethinking my plans for the late morning, at least 20 people went to the door trying to get in.  what a waste.  i was so disappointed.    times visited: 5.5 (i get 1/2 a visit since i showed up) time in museum: 2 hrs overall: A-

my last museum visit in new york city was the new york historical society with my parents. we were pretty much exhausted at this point after packing the mini van with my stuff, checking out the frick and then walking across central park (yes, it was 90 degrees outside). my dad loves the grateful dead , so i thought he would like this exhibit. most of the details of the museum are in this blog post: http://museumhopper.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-york-historical-society.html . my parents really enjoyed it; they liked the dead head merchandising and they said that they learned a few things about the grateful dead that they did not know before. times visited: 4 time spent in museum: 30 minutes overall: B+

wednesday was my last “real” day in new york city. i left on Thursday morning bright and early. My parents were in town and wanted to check out the frick before leaving (they were just in town for about a day). I think my parents really enjoyed it. They loved the concept of the house turned into a museum as well as the art that he collected plus the acquisitions. my mother mentioned that if she had to recommend just one art museum for someone to visit in new york city, she would recommend the frick collection. we saw the entire museum. we did miss the video since we got there soon before closing. i think my mother sums it up well, "the frick has a fantastic example of each classic artist and their quintessential piece of art." i am really happy that they moved the renoir mother and children to the oval room from the hallway. it now is framed and viewable from the garden which is quite beautiful. personally, i love the hans holbien the younger's sir thomas more...

i went to the fashion institute of technology museum as my last "by myself" museum in new york city. i needed a short break from the packing and figured that the fit museum would be the best size/location. i went and saw the eco-fashion: going green exhibit. it is created around the idea of what is "green" clothing as well as what can designers and producers do to make fashion more environmentally friendly. the exhibit started off focusing on current "green" fashion and clothing. then it switched gears and showed fashion from 1800-1949, 1950 through present and then again a few more pieces of eco-fashion. i really enjoyed how this exhibit looked at all aspects of what being green means. it especially impressed me the emphasis on creating lasting fashion with the exhibit having examples of throw away psychedelic 60s fashion. a major issue with fashion production is the creation of dyes. many of the newer green fashion houses are using the natural c...

i went to the morgan library today as a last hooray before i leave new york city. i love it there. as usual, it was a completely different museum this time. i did not see a single repeat item. first i checked out the upstairs gallery. it has an exhibit about palladio , a venetian renaissance architect. the exhibit was titled palladio and his legacy: a transatlantic journey . his architecture influenced many famous american buildings including the capitol building and the national gallery of art (just visited!) in washington, d.c. the next exhibit i watched was romantic gardens: nature, art and landscape design . this was broken up into a few different deeper digs into a few countries: france, england (the most detail), united states and germany. romantic gardens were supposedly more natural (although could be completely stylized to look natural) as opposed to structured formal gardens. one of the biggest examples of the planned "natural" gardens was central park i...

my birthday was last week and as a present, my boyfriend took me to the king tut exhibit at the discovery center in times square. we got discounted tickets through groupon.com , which reduced the ticket price down from $30 to $18. we went on a tuesday, so it was slower and less crowded than it probably would have been. we only had to wait a few minutes to exchange our vouchers into tickets and then were admitted right away. there was a short 90 second intro video and then we were let loose in the exhibit. the exhibit started out with a number of artifacts from king tut 's many relatives. near the end of the exhibit, we finally saw some of the many wonders from his tomb. it had about 150 artifacts total with nice descriptions about them. the advertisements are slightly misleading since the exhibit did NOT have king tut's mummy or tomb features in all the advertisements. there were some absolutely beautiful artifacts, but not his (i.e. one of father's wives' r...

as my company does every year, we get a day off to volunteer around the community. last year, i went to the bronx zoo to volunteer. this year, i volunteered for the rema hort mann foundation . the foundation supports undiscovered, starving artists and provides travel expenses to loved ones of cancer patients. they were hosting an art craw l for to raise money. the organizers had selected a 14 galleries around the lower east side to visit in small groups. we started off going to the gallery, canada. you would never know it was there if you did not already know! the artist, katherine bernhardt, was in residence with her exhibit, tombouctou 52 jours, which was heavily influenced by moroccan rugs. we went to another gallery that had sort of papier mache sculptures. the artist called it his jungle. a lot of them hung from ceiling and were influenced by chinese flowers. another artist takes objects that he finds around and call them found art (or other people's art). then he m...

i went to the new york historical society today to see their new exhibit, grateful dead: now playing at the new york historical society . i had to go see an exhibit put on by the museum whose last exhibit was lincoln: the most beloved president new york ever hated . this exhibit was smaller than the other two exhibits i have seen there. very concisely laid out and stepped you through how the grateful dead revolutionized the music industry with their interaction with fans and sound engineering, and control over their music. the memorabilia was really neat. most of it had never left the grateful dead archive at the university of california santa cruz. what i found most surprising were all the fan letters that the band had saved. these fan letters were quite elaborately decorated. the grateful dead did the best to eliminate unauthorized merchandise. what i found interesting though is that some of the authorized memorabilia was first recognized when it was unauthorized. they reco...

i went to the cloisters a few weeks ago with my friend from school. it was a beautiful day. the flowers were starting to peek up... the cloisters were a great trip...as usual! see the previous posts for more details! times visited: 3 time in museum: 1 1/2 hrs overall: A

100th blog entry. i knew this would have to be one heck of a museum. so i decided to go with a classic, the met . this is the museum i have been to the most (by far) over the last 3 years. it just seemed fitting for the 100th entry on my blog. (the picture is of the shrine on the 2nd floor of the met!) i went without a particular exhibit or area in mind. i just sort of wandered...and i ended up wandering into a wing i had never been to before! i wandered into the tutankhamun's funeral . this had different artifacts from his burial site although none of the real show stopper pieces. i loved the displays of the floral collars that some of the royalty was wearing. those were quite beautiful and unusual. i then walked into the exhibits which were upstairs from the egyptian exhibits. i am not quite sure how i had never ended up there before. it landed me right near the exhibit, five thousand years of japanese art: treasures from the packard collection . this exhibit was magn...

to take advantage of the beautiful day in new york city, i thought i would try to take the lower east side tenement museum walking tour. i hustled down there and got there right in the nick of time. i have been to the lower east side museum for their tenement tours, but wanted to try this 1 1/2 hr walking tour, immigrant soles: a neighborhood walking tour . i saw some areas of the lower east side which i had never seen before. the tour guide was very good; he did a great job pointing out the interesting architecture making us think about what certain architecture features might mean. for example, a building with only three windows, what does that mean? answer: that it was meant to have a single family live there as opposed to twenty, since there was no partition splitting the building in two. he also brought up some of the different political tensions running through the LES that had not been mentioned in some of the other tours. perfect for a beautiful summer day. times v...

i went to the jewish museum on a mission to see one thing: a small money named george . the exhibit, curious george saves the day: the art of margret and h.a. rey , was on the second floor, which is a different location than the other special exhibits i have seen at the museum. the layout was done chronologically throughout their life, starting in about 1938 through the rest of their life. the exhibit was a mixture of letters, illustrations, pictures and their custom holiday cards! i wish i could find some photographs of these holiday cards. they were fantastic! they were probably my favorite surprise in the exhibit. they also had illustrations from curious george goes to the hospital , which a favorite growing up. another interesting factoid from exhibit, curious george is not an actual species of monkey. who knew? note: the museum is always free on saturdays, but unfortunately, the gift shop is closed on saturdays. times visited: 3 time in museum: 45 minutes ov...

i went to the whitney museum of american art with a friend from college today. this is the first one i have been to in a while since i sprained my ankle and was somewhat immobilized for a while. i had dinner with my friend, mike, this week and we decided to go! neither has an extensive (aka: any) art background. the top floor currently displays art that had been previously shown in the biennials. this included some beautiful peaces of art including one of the hopper paintings that i like. it was interesting to see how often certain artists had been shown (hopper had been shown over 15 times). the rest of the museum showed the current biennial. i am not sure what the current rules were, but i believe it was that they could not have shown something previously. the art was...interesting. i was happy to have mike there with me; otherwise, i am not sure that i would have spent quite as long at the museum. some of it was just beautiful/enjoyable. i loved this huge room of pa...

i stopped by the asia society museum after my visit to the frick . if i had not been able to get in for free (through my corporate ID), i would not have stayed. the weekend i was there, they only had 25% of their exhibits open. the first exhibit was yoshihiro suda: in focus . the artist takes an ordinary object and intricately carves it out of wood making it look unbelievably lifelike. this exhibit had two flowers, a rose and and an orchid. it contrasted the new art with old 12th century pottery. this exhibit, devotion in south india: chola bronzes was a definite contrast to the first exhibit. these were ancient bronze statues of various hindu deities primarily created in the 12-14th centuries. times visited: 2 time spent in museum: 30 minutes overall: B+