MoMA

MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929 and since that time has been totally dedicated to helping people understand and enjoy the visual arts of our time. The galleries of the Museum range from Architecture and Design, Film and Video, and Photography to Painting and Sculpture, Drawings, and Prints and Illustrated Books. The varied and eclectic collections of The Museum of Modern Art cover a full spectrum view into modern art. The Museum of Modern Art's collection includes over 150,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and drawings, and design objects. The Museum offers modern and contemporary art exhibitions from a wide area of subject matter, mediums, and time periods including visual arts and new interpretations of major artists and art historical movements.

What a great way to start a museum experience: enter in the wrong door. Not, but a very nice guard pointed me in the right direction. So now entering in the right entrance I walk into a huge lobby with people everywhere going in every direction. Finding my way to the information desk I purchase my ticket and walk through the turnstiles and look through a wall of glass up to the ceiling into a magical view of The Sculpture Garden. At the top of the stairs a large viewing area branches off into the different galleries. Of course I turn into the Contemporary gallery and was greeted by Rosenquist’s Marilyn Monroe and Warhol’s Elvis. Of course Albers, Rothko, and Klee were ever present. Moving up the escalator I take a peak in the Architecture and Design Drawings but move quickly up the stairs so I can view the Painting and Sculptures.

I was delighted to see Salvador Dali’s Illumined Pleasures as I contemplated the difference between his reality and illusion. Then Henri Matisse’s, The Blue Window and Goldfish and Sculpture paintings, Munch’s The Storm quickly catches my eye with the dramatic figure of the women wearing white against the blue background and luminous yellow lights coming through the windows of the house in contrast to Van Gogh’s, The Starry Night with its luminous white stars and yellow moon in the dark blue sky. As entered a hallway on the wall was a series of paintings by Jacob Lawrence called, The Migration Series. I spent a lot of time with these series of paintings. Lawrence as a black American painter whose style of flat angular figures and the use of shapes, strong color and the balance of light and darkness to portray with bold social realism the history and struggles of African Americans.

What I found most beautiful was Georges-Pierre Seurat’s, Evening, painting. Upon a closer look I realized there were thousands of dots painted on the canvas. Using this style he applied at least twenty-five colors in this painting accenting and illuminating the long bands of clouds, horizon and breakwaters on the beach. Where the sky and sea meet there is a sense of airiness and light to the painting when you view the painting from far away but up close you see the heaviness of the many dots. Later Seurat added the wooden frame continuing in the style of the painting he hand-painted it with the same dots to add a greater glow and extended the image of the painting beyond the borders of the frame.

Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859-1891) was a French post-impressionist painter who pioneered the painting technique known as Pointillism. Seurat was born into a wealthy family in Paris and attended the École des Beaux-Arts. It was Seurat’s belief that a painter could use color to create emotion and harmony in art the same way that musicians use counterpoint and variation to create this in music. He used the knowledge of perception and optical laws to create a new language of art. In his letter to Maurice Beaubourg in 1890 we capture Seurat’s ideas about the scientific approach to emotion and harmony. It reads, "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of the contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of line, considered according to their dominance and under the influence of light, in gay, calm or sad combinations".

He was the founder of the 19th-century French school of Neo-Impressionism. In using his technique of showing the play of light using tiny brushstrokes of dots in contrasting colors he created huge paintings with these tiny dots that were too small to be seen when looking at the entire work but made his paintings shimmer with luminosity and brilliance. He used this to show how emotion in a painting can be achieved. Gaiety by the domination of luminous hues, by the predominance of warm colors, and by the use of lines directed upward. Calm through an equivalence/balance of the use of the light and the dark, by the balance of warm and cold colors, and by lines that are horizontal. Sadness by using dark and cold colors and by lines pointing downward. Seurat died in Paris on 29 March 1891.

Looking down at my watch that I seemed to forget all about, I realized that time had passed very quickly and I had to catch the 7:07 train back to New Haven. With regret, I would have to continue my visit another time. As I left the gallery and went back down the escalators I noticed from the second floor balcony a helicopter hanging on the ceiling of the stairwell and snapped a quick picture. As my own contribution of art to this visit I share with you my picture that I call, Stairway inflight. Is wasn’t until I was on the train reliving my museum visits that I noticed a person going down the stairway below with their arms spread out like they were to flying like the helicopter. I can only hope that this was a result of them enjoying the visit as much as I had and not because they were now late for the train back home.

By Kim Zarra

Pictures Link: http://www1.snapfish.com/snapfish/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=4179794015/a=141417625_141417625/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish/

References:
http://www.moma.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Seurat
http://www.biography.com/articles/Georges-Seurat-9479599