{"id":243,"date":"2005-03-24T08:11:00","date_gmt":"2005-03-24T08:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=243"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T08:00:00","slug":"the-met-wednesday-march-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2005\/03\/24\/the-met-wednesday-march-23\/","title":{"rendered":"The Met (Wednesday, March 23)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d been saving the Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/a> for a rainy day, and Wednesday definitely qualified. It wasn’t just raining, it was snowing, and cold and miserable. A perfect day to spend inside. As usual, I got off to a late start, but it worked out fine. I got to the museum around 1:30pm, and spent the next four hours until the museum closed at 5:30 wandering around. Their collections are just too huge. I had to do some massive triage to even have a hope. So I ignored all sculpture and decorative arts, because I generally don’t find those interesting. I punted on most of the art of other cultures, although I did walk through the big Egyptian temple<\/a>, because that’s just neat. So I mostly concentrated on the American wing and European paintings, with visits to old favorites like Arms and Armor, and Musical Instruments.<\/p>\n

I had an insight into my own preferences while walking around the paintings. I realized that I didn’t care for bright primary colors, for simplistic shapes, and for “realistic” depictions. Anything that seems to say “this is the way it is”. I like having different perspectives, of having new ways of looking at things. I live in a world of grays, not in a world of black and white, right and wrong. So paintings that are slightly abstract, paintings that have a more muted palette with faded blues and greens and grays, those appeal to me. Not fully abstract. I still can’t get into the work of Rothko or Pollock or anything. Anyway. It was interesting to me.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nIt was also fun to realize my eye for art is slowly improving. I was able to recognize the work of most of the masters like van Gogh and Monet. When I was walking through the American wing, I saw a painting and thought “Wow, that looks like JMW Turner’s work<\/a>.” Then I read the little placard which said that the artist’s use of light “suggests the artist’s appreciation of the English master JMW Turner”. It turns out there was a whole school of American landscape artists, the Hudson River School, whose work was heavily influenced by Turner, so I spent some time browsing that section, because I love that particular use of light, the way it is almost impressionistic in the way it illuminates a scene, as illustrated by the work by Thomas Cole seen to the right.<\/p>\n

After getting kicked out of the museum at closing, I had to head crosstown to get to the dinner party I was going to attend. Rather than take the subway down, across and back up, I decided to brave the elements and walk across Central Park. It was a reminder of things I don’t miss about the East Coast – by this point, the snow had accumulated enough on the warm ground to turn to slush. Yum! I made it across the park, found a cafe, and hung out there reading and warming up for a bit. Unfortunately, by the time I left, the snow was actually blowing sideways. I gave up on the umbrella as being useless in that strong a wind, and trudged through the slush off to my dinner party, where we ate good food and had interesting conversations until midnight, of which more in another post<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d been saving the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a rainy day, and Wednesday definitely qualified. It wasn’t just raining, it was snowing, and cold and miserable. A perfect day to spend inside. As usual, I got off to a late start, but it worked out fine. I got to the museum around 1:30pm, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}