Day Five: Whitney Museum and the Met

This morning I ventured over to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Honestly, after having been to the Museum of Natural History, The MOMA, and looking forward to going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was not to thrilled about the Whitney. Upon entering the museum, I walked to the top floor where the museum holds its personal collection, and I was just in awe of several works. First, John Sloan's "6th Avenue Elevated at 3rd Street" and Joseph Stella's "Brooklyn Bridge" were two paintings that I really fell in love with. I love paintings that just capture scenes in a unique way from a city, and these paintings did just that. The Brooklyn Bridge piece showed the bridge abstractly from all sorts of angles and used many colors, and this revealed just how awesome the real Brooklyn Bridge is with its height, length, and design. The 6th avenue painting just showed a busy, night-time scene in New York city with much detail, and I just sat there for maybe ten minutes looking at it. I was not in awe of the special exhibits they had there, but my favorite part of the museum came when I noticed a collection of five or six paintings from one of my favorite artists: Jacob Lawrence. I have been a huge fan ever since I did a master copy of one of his paintings in high school. I love his colors, his subjects, his compositions, and his themes. The series here in the Whitney was his "Wartime Series." Each painting seemed to show a different scene from world war one with both black and white soldiers. From elaborate greens, yellows, browns, and blues as the main colors, Lawrence really reveals powerful and moving scenes in this series from soldiers charging a trench to five men sleeping in their bunks at night on a boat across sea. Seeing these paintings basically made my day. Too bad the Whitney would not let me take pictures or I would have taken one of each painting and put them all on here. 

I have been to the Met before, but today I got to explore a little more of it. The roof garden was just amazing with its views of the city and its design of the silver branch/tree that snakes its way around the rooftop. As you can see in my pictures above, I loved the American landscape paintings. The colors, the scenes, and the light appear to be so real just like a photograph. I am glad I discovered those. 

As far as museums go, today has been my favorite day to visit them.