A PLACE TO STOP, THINK AND WONDER, PART II

This week I got to do one of my favorite things--go to a museum. Three in fact. Oh how I love that! 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

We're in a furnished apartment in Princeton, NJ again, just an hour's train ride from New York (Posts: A Place to Stop, Think, and Wonder and Home, Not So Simple).  For many of us walking around a museum is not active enough, I understand that. But when you're in a museum you see every sort, college students, families with prams, couples, school children, lots of people on their own.  Everyone looks interested.  Phones are out but only for picture-taking. No one is rushing.  Everyone is taking their time.  Perhaps these are special occasions for everyone who is there.  None of us get that much time for museum-going. It's a luxury.  

One day we went to the Whitney (Whitney Museum of American Art) and the next day to the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art).  Another day the Met.  I had never been to the Whitney before.  It's located at the end of the High Line (www.thehighline.org), the beautiful public park created on an out-of-use elevated railroad trestle.  The High Line runs from W. 34th near Penn Station to between 10th and 12th streets.  All very clever and sustainable, built around the self-seeded landscape that sprang up during the 25 years the trestle was abandoned. 

The High Line, NYC

The top picture looks like a bucolic setting, doesn't it, but see the adjacent glass buildings in the next photo?  The walkway is filled with people strolling, eating, tipping the street musicians.  Dogs aren't allowed.  Like so much that we find in the famous big cities around the world, this is a fun, creative place.  A showcase really. It makes me wish I lived in one of the world's major cities.  There are so many--Toronto, Vancouver, Berlin, Lisbon, the capital cities in South America . . . .  I feel jealous!

The High Line, NYC

After our walk we went into the Whitney.  The views from every angle are wonderful.  The views in the two photos below are of the same distant roof-top garden and the even more distant 9/11 memorial piercing the sky.  Wouldn't city living be fun if one could afford an apartment with a roof-top garden?  The High Line is free to everyone, but much of the beauty of New York is very, very expensive.  I enjoy just looking at it.   

View from the Whitney

View from the Whitney

The Whitney was having a show on the artist Grant Wood (1891-1942).  He painted the famous American Gothic, 1930.  

Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930

I learned that his sister posed for the woman and his dentist, of all things, posed for the man.  There's lots of conflict about the artist's attitude toward the dour Iowans he painted.  But most everyone notices the pitchfork and how that shape is repeated in the man's overalls, facial lines and the windows of the house. The question is, what does that repetition mean?  What struck me is that he could also paint this painting: 

Grant Wood, Sunlit Studio, 1925-26

Of course I looked this up too.  It was his studio in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, above a carriage house where he lived with his mother and adult sister. It can still be visited! How interesting!  But the studio looks more French to me, with the shadows and checkered flooring.  Except for the stylized somewhat foreboding plant in the foreground, with the creepy tongue-like leaves. Maybe they're the equivalent of the pitchfork in the other picture.  Art historians must have sorted all this out.

Then we went to the MoMA. It's so wonderful how museums take us out of ourselves and put us somewhere else.  We can look at a room of paintings of 16th century Dutch peasants and feel what it might have been like to live then, to lift hay into a wagon, to wear a head scarf and apron and call in the goats, or spoon the soup into wooden bowls. That's the way I feel.  

At the MoMA we were thrust into a world of color. I lingered most in front of the Matisse (1869-1954) collection.  The colors are so beautiful! Look at this painting, the wall, the girl's hair, the tablecloth, the fruit.  This is Matisse's daughter.  I expect a child today would be hunched over a screen and the bright hues would be those of a video game.  A cartoon-type painting perhaps, or an illustration. 

Henri Matisse, Interior with a Young Girl, 1905-06

I may not get another day like this for a long, long time.  My own local kingdom (Post: This is Your Kingdom) does not have such famous treasures.  But that's the way life is, isn't it?  We have to find all different kinds of places to stop, think and wonder.  We can each do that.