Art, for art's sake!

Nice to see my brother’s unorthodox pragmatism at work. (See here for details.)

I followed another suggestion by a former Massachusetts resident and went to the Museum of Fine Arts on Saturday. Owing much to quiz bowl I’m sure, I have always loved art museums (so long as it isn’t modern art; ugh) and so it didn’t take much prodding for me to want to go to this one.

I managed to get there the second-to-last day they had a visiting exhibit detailing Spanish art during the reign of Philip IV (or was it III? I don’t remember, but I think it was IV; this is why I wasn’t the art person on the QB team). Basically, this was from El Greco to Velasquez. There were a lot of great pictures by them and other artists that I had never seen, but I didn’t need quite so many side-commetaries on the audio guide that discussed Catholicism (the Inquisition, Counter-Reformation, and sometimes even the impact these things had on art commission!). Then again maybe not everyone knows enough about my faith, so who am I to complain?

In all the other sections visitors are allowed to take personal photographs so long as the flash is disabled. So I did. Some highlights are below. The best piece permanently in the collection, though, was a John Singer Sargent piece called The Daughters of Edward D. Boit. An online image of it can be found here.
(By the way, if you like art and have never spent even one whole evening searching through Mark Harden’s Artchive , then you are lying about liking art. If you can’t waste an evening looking through there, no one can help you appreciate art.) Imagine this painting about 6 feet on a side and you’ll understand what it was like to see it in person. The audio commentary on it was pretty good, but rather than ruin the MFA’s racket I’ll just say one of the commenters said it was among the 6 most emotionally complex paintings in American art history in his opinion. I have to agree.

After the museum I went to a restaurant, the Barking Crab, that had been recommended to me by my friend Laura. I sat at the bar next to a group of five that just ordered tons of food and a few of them were willing to chat with me about the city, giving me advice on things to do (namely, places to take a girl to impress her. That’s valuable coin for a 24 year old.). They also shared a crab leg with me, giving me my first real taste of crab meat. Had they done this before I ordered my chicken sandwich, I might have gotten the crab bucket instead. Then again at $30+ for 5 legs, I might not have gotten it. My sandwich was really good too, though, so a big plus to Laura for the suggestion.

That’s mostly it for me. Other than Saturday, the only sunny days in the past week and a half were Friday and today, so of course after work I went jogging to enjoy the weather. I don’t know why I feel the need to jog, seeing as (for example) I walked a total of somewhere between 11 and 13 miles on Saturday while visiting these places (cheaper than the subway and good exercise, though the subway is a great deal here).

Everyone please keep my friends Blake and Travis in their thoughts/prayers this week. They both just finished law school at the UofA and are taking the Arkansas Bar exam tomorrow through I think Thursday or Friday. Man, am I glad I don’t have a professional exam after I’m done with grad school. Other than that whole dissertation thing, I suppose. And comps. Damn, maybe I’m not getting off so easily.


Without further ado, the images and my thoughts. I put the famous artists (or at least the ones I remember from quiz bowl; isn't that enough?) on this post, plus one sculpture I liked.



Claude Monet, La Japonaise. The plaque said he was making fun of a contemporary French fetish for Japanese things. Having friends who have something similar, I couldn't help but love this picture.



Preston Singletary, Raven Steals the Moon. I don't usually like anything made after maybe 1940, but this is from 1963 so go figure. I just love the smooth, finished look; the detail on the moon portion; and the contrast between the heavy, dark presence (via the red and black) of the raven, and the ephemeral, light presence of the moon. The long, sleek raven's head gives a sense of motion, much like Constantin Brancusi's Bird in Space, but I dislike Brancusi's work because it only tries to suggest motion. Brancusi's work lacks the form of a bird, whereas Singletary suggests motion without sacrificing form. Form is a very important part of art.



Jean-Antoine Watteau, La Perspective. I always remember not remembering Watteau in quiz bowl, and true to form I couldn't remember what I couldn't remember him for having done (in the words of Sports Night, that was a truly spectacular sentence). True to form, I had to look up that he was a (French) Rococo artist. This isn't one of his most famous works, but I saw the name, remembered the past, and took the shot.



Rembrandt van Rijn, Reverend Johannes Elison. Rembrandt painted this. There's your exposition.



Gilbert Stuart, John Adams. Stuart is considered one of the foremost portrait artists in American history, and he can be considered without American peer in the Revolutionary War era. Given that this is Boston, the Adams family should be expected to be found here, and so it is. A former president and founding father painted by one of the best American portrait painters? Yeah, I needed a copy.