Excuse the blog titles, I have a strange sense of humor and have had no rest!
Finally we went to MoMA! I had been waiting for this day the entire trip! I LOVE modern art. I am not sure what draws me into it. I think I like the fact that it is not all cut and dried like art from other periods. In one painting ten different people can look at it and all see and interpret ten different things. I love it. I love the discussions that can be sparked because of art like this. It is all very stimulating to me and so I was glad to get the opportunity to come face to face with the works that I have admired since I was a little girl.
I knew what I really wanted to see the second I walked in the door. My favorite paintings are usually by French painters from the time period of mid to late 1800s to early to mid 1900s. Finally I get to use the few art history skills I have acquired at the University of Mississippi! These favorites of mine include but are not limited to the likes of Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh (he is Dutch but of the period and I love him), Pablo Picasso (even though he is a Spaniard, I know), Degas, Paul Cezanne, Pissaro and I could go on and on!
I loved all the obvious works. There seemed to be something there for everyone that likes the impressionism period and current modern art. However, I was pleasantly surprised by one artist whom I had almost cast aside as someone whose work I did not appreciate enough (or in the correct way at least). This artist that I was so surprised by was Piet Mondrian.
I always thought that all of Mondrian's work was very simple and clean lines. Before my visit to MoMA I would not have described his work with any gusto. I always thought it was cool that he was most noted for creating the style of work that he is most noted for.....his grids and lines and boxes and mostly three colors being red, blue and yellow.
As I'm writing this now I am ashamed to say that in the back of my mind I always wondered if Mondrian was capable of producing more realistic work rather than his sparse lines and boxes. Luckily, at MoMA I loved the fact that I saw other work by Mondrian that was beautiful and lifelike. I especially enjoyed his sketches of plants. They looked real and beautiful and I never knew he did any work like this!
The MoMA totally blew all of what I thought I knew about Piet Mondrian out of whack! I'm glad that I had this experience, because now I want to learn more about Mondrian and his other work that I do not know anything about. Not only do I want to learn more about him, but as an Art History student my visit to the MoMA was just what I needed to push myself farther into my studies. From having my preconceived notions about one artist totally change in a matter of seconds now I want to go farther than just learning about an artist's most famous work....I want to know more about art and the people that created it!
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