Three Ancestral Jugs and a Tlingit Comb

My friend Lucy had the very clever idea of making up a Bingo card consisting of works to be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What a treasure hunt it was, taking me to corners of the Met where I’d never ventured.

Buildings, Inside and Out

“Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish Art” at the Met Museum is entrancing in ways I did not expect. The Met writes of the exhibit:

Early Mondrian, with Sheep

As I suppose is true of many, I knew Mondrian’s oeuvre only through later works like Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43). I knew I was supposed to grasp their brilliance, but I couldn’t pretend. They sorta left me cold.

A Bowl of Potatoes and More Old Shoes

The Kröller-Müller Museum’s website comments on van Gogh’s Still Life with Potatoes (1889) that “In Arles, Van Gogh is far away from the artistic milieu in Paris. He embarks, once and for all, on a quest for his own style and is unbound by realism. Thus, the colours in this still life are not ‘after nature.” I might say, rather, “van Gogh captures the essence of potatoes” or “van Gogh could make art out of anything.” Whatever the case, I couldn’t let well enough alone, so set the bowl of potatoes against a backdrop of the moon rising over a field of wheat sheaves.

A Teapot, Heads of Garlic, and Old Shoes

One of the things I enjoy doing these days is wandering through galleries at the Metropolitan Museum. Before I go, I scope out a painting or two (or three) that I want to make sure and see. Inevitably, and also delightfully, I end up standing in front of one I’d not seen before, like Gaughin’s Still Life with Teapot and Fruit (1896), or revisiting one of the many pairs of shoes van Gogh painted that I’d forgotten was at the Met.