Art museums

~ MaryG

My husband and I are very different. In fact, we’re almost complete opposites. He likes a lot of things that I will never ever be into like weightlifting in gyms, football and other contact sports like rugby, and hardcore (punk) music. I like a lot of things that he will never ever be into like singing in choirs, going to musicals, and swimming.

For many years, we just kind of did our own thing. I went to the beach with friends, while he stayed home and went to the gym…

But if you’re going to stay married to one person for your entire adult life, you must come up with at least a few shared activities, especially after your kids fly the coop, or you will have absolutely nothing interesting to talk about!

One of the things we both like to do is go to art museums. We have memberships at a few local museums and we go to their major exhibitions. Yesterday was the Georgia O’Keefe and Henry Moore exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

It was an interesting idea. They took two artists who worked in different mediums (a painter and a sculptor) in the same time period (early 20th century) and put them side by side. The idea was to see how they were grappling with similar themes in their work, especially nature and tension/balance between shapes, and appreciate how they influenced each other.

The galleries were quite crowded (a great sign for art museums!), but that made it a bit difficult to fully consider the interplay between the two artists. Still, I think I got the idea.

This gallery, with a large Moore sculpture in the foreground and O’Keefe paintings on the walls, shows what the curators were going for with this exhibit.

My husband liked the Moore sculptures best. Me? I just love those famous Georgia O’Keefe flower paintings. As many times as I’ve seen them reproduced as prints and posters, the originals are so nuanced and gorgeous. What can I say? I like flowers and pretty colors. (They sort of reminded me of the Northern Lights.)

And then, for something completely different, we took a stroll through a Salvador Dalí exhibit. The famous Spanish surrealist was truly an extraordinary painter. Interestingly, he was a contemporary of Moore and O’Keefe. All three lived through World War II—an event so monumental no artist was unaffected by it.

The Three Ages (Old Age, Adolescence and Infancy) by Dalí, 1940. If you look closely, each section of the painting is a double image (i.e. the left side is a standing, stooped figure and also an old man’s face).
“This painting revisits Dalí’s most famous composition, The Persistence of Memory, which by the early 1950s had become emblematic not only of Dalí, but also of the Surrealism movement.
Here Dali once again places melting watches in a barren landscape, but now the context is the post-war atomic age. An elaborate grid of bricks recedes toward the distant horizon, the boxy shapes becoming missile-like forms. Typical of the artist, the picture’s meaning is ambiguous, though very much of the nuclear era.”

22 thoughts on “Art museums”

  2. Very interesting pieces indeed!
    Interesting thing about Dali, too – or at least to me lol
    He used to take what he called micro naps, where he would sit in a chair, hold a key in one hand and put a plate on the floor. When he started to drift to sleep, he’d drop the key and suddenly awaken. He believed this was how he tapped into the creativity that is often seen in dreams. Interesting concept to me!

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    1. Fascinating! I hadn’t heard that! It’s interesting that he got kicked out of the “surrealist movement” by other artists—even though he’s the best known of all of them.

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      1. Once a movement becomes a thing, it’s interesting to see where the original innovators end up.
        Yes, I found his napping theory interesting to say the least.

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  3. Nice that you both like art and art museums. And you live close to a very fine one. Three great artists, but somehow Dali is the one who always catches my attention. Even among surrealists, he had a unique perspective. Those melting clocks! I had the good fortune to see that painting in New York when my daughter was living there.

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    1. Oh cool that you got to see it in NY! Dalí was such a great painter…all that creativity, plus total mastery of technique! The MFA exhibit highlighted his complicated relationship with Catholicism too. The exhibit is called “Disruption and Devotion.”

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  6. Really love Dali. Not sure how the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, FL fared from the storms, but it’s a real gem if you ever get the chance. ❤

    So good that you and your husband genuinely can enjoy museums together!

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  7. It’s great that you both have found a common interest because you are so right about growing older, the kids moving out, and then what? I love the flower paintings the best. Our love for hiking, camping, and backpacking is what we have in common, but thanks to my husband for introducing these to me that I fell in love with. 🌷

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  8. Mary, by the way I wasn’t able to read your post today. There was a message to subscribe, but I’ve been subscribed to your site a long time. I clicked anyway, then the message said I would be set up with a free WP account. Bizarre! I’m not sure what’s going on, but it’s only with your site.

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    1. Weird! Thanks for telling me. I did try to set that post as “subscribers only,” rather than fully public, but I did it on my PC. Now I see that the setting options on jetpack (which I usually use) don’t match. I guess I won’t try to do anything “advanced” again, lol

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