Monet and Realism
Tae-hyun B. Chung
exhibition. So the Gang of Five dragged our tired old butt out
to the Museum. After loitering a bit in the Korean gallery and
the Egyptian gallery, Michael and I moved upstairs to see the Monet
paintings.
It was a quite interesting exhibit. There was a long corridor and
on one side of the wall were the paintings by Monet. On the other
side were the paintings by the Monet's contemporaries, the realists.
The idea is that we can see the both sides of the artistic community
at the time of Monet. On one hand, we have paintings that detail every
little thing in the scene, as if they were photographs. On the other
side, we have the impressionist painting of blurred details, full of lights
and darkness, and pretty much an antithesis of the paintings by, say,
Jean-someone Gerome. (Okay, you could go much farther from realists,
but those paintings were downstairs in the cubist gallery.)
Michael told me he actually liked the realists better, especially one
by Gerome with a bunch of aristocrats greeting a cardinal. Me, I didn't
have much of an opinion on either, except, I really liked the Water
Lillies by Monet.
The quote of the day: Michael - "Hey, when they said realists, I thought
there would be Kenneth Walz standing in the corridor introducing the
paintings."
Taehyun Chung
tb...@columbia.edu
http://www.columbia.edu/~tbc4
124 LaSalle St. 5C, New York, NY 10027, (212) 316-0412
Ducks Unlimited
>It was a quite interesting exhibit. There was a long corridor and
>on one side of the wall were the paintings by Monet. On the other
>side were the paintings by the Monet's contemporaries, the realists.
>The idea is that we can see the both sides of the artistic community
>at the time of Monet. On one hand, we have paintings that detail every
>little thing in the scene, as if they were photographs. On the other
>side, we have the impressionist painting of blurred details, full of lights
>and darkness, and pretty much an antithesis of the paintings by, say,
>Jean-someone Gerome. (Okay, you could go much farther from realists,
>but those paintings were downstairs in the cubist gallery.)
That's an interesting juxtaposition. Actually, you should check out the
Bruce Neuman exhibit at MoMA. It had possibly some of the most odd
placements I've seen in a long time. A neon sign denoting, "Run From
Fear/Fun From Rear" was placed next to a highly effective carousel-like
display of leaden animals.
As to the Impressionism exhibition, I suppose part of the intent of the curator
was to show the diverse styles of various Impressionists within the
general context of an Impressionist; i.e. the predominance of the city
and its environs as a subject and the emphasis upon light as a stylistic
subject. Not all Impressionists dwelt on blurred details, though, as
Pissaro experimented with pointillism.
Sincerely,
Ducks Unlimited
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