Monet/Rubens
May. 11th, 2019 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mme_n_bThis weekend I went to see two exhibitions, Late Monet (Giverny) and early Rubens. I thought I didn't like either, but I was wrong.
I don't think I ever appreciated the Giverny paintings enough. Having been to Japan helped - they are enormous, on the wall-painting-in-Japanese-castles scale and the angles are sometimes similar. The bridge series is just as horrifying in real life as in reproductions, but the water lilies and the irises are unexpectedly three-dimensional and luminous (and can only be seen properly from a distance, which the crowd made difficult).
I also never realized that Monet painted them in 1914-1926. I keep thinking of Impressionism as XIX century, but, of course, that's not so. And the same water lilies take on a different meaning if one consider WWI (закройте голые лица газет), bombs falling near the house, servants evacuating, one son dead, the other fighting, and cataracts. It's a strange image to go with that particular time in history. In fact, now that I think of it, turns out that in my head 1914-1918 is always winter, and even 1920s are pretty much winter with a few droughty summers thrown in. Yes, I am aware that each year had the proper four seasons.
Rubens was a revelation. Turns out I have been looking at the wrong things, partly because albums lack the proper scale. For instance, in Sleeping Silenus I've been looking at Silenus, but the things that kept me spellbound now are goblets and dishes. Scale is especially important for tears (e. g. in Lamentation) - they are very realistic and three-dimensional, which I never would have suspected. The portraits, too, gain a lot from being life-sized.
The museum store has stiff double-sided embroidered jackets in a Delft motif that made me think aboutdaphnep and her concept of museum stores as the window into art that far-away-from-museums-culturally people have. Still not going to pay $180 for a not-warm special-occasion jacket I've literally nowhere to wear, but will come back and look at them again near the end of the exhibition and see whether they go on sale. Need to see this exhibition again, anyway.
I don't think I ever appreciated the Giverny paintings enough. Having been to Japan helped - they are enormous, on the wall-painting-in-Japanese-castles scale and the angles are sometimes similar. The bridge series is just as horrifying in real life as in reproductions, but the water lilies and the irises are unexpectedly three-dimensional and luminous (and can only be seen properly from a distance, which the crowd made difficult).
I also never realized that Monet painted them in 1914-1926. I keep thinking of Impressionism as XIX century, but, of course, that's not so. And the same water lilies take on a different meaning if one consider WWI (закройте голые лица газет), bombs falling near the house, servants evacuating, one son dead, the other fighting, and cataracts. It's a strange image to go with that particular time in history. In fact, now that I think of it, turns out that in my head 1914-1918 is always winter, and even 1920s are pretty much winter with a few droughty summers thrown in. Yes, I am aware that each year had the proper four seasons.
Rubens was a revelation. Turns out I have been looking at the wrong things, partly because albums lack the proper scale. For instance, in Sleeping Silenus I've been looking at Silenus, but the things that kept me spellbound now are goblets and dishes. Scale is especially important for tears (e. g. in Lamentation) - they are very realistic and three-dimensional, which I never would have suspected. The portraits, too, gain a lot from being life-sized.
The museum store has stiff double-sided embroidered jackets in a Delft motif that made me think about
daphnep and her concept of museum stores as the window into art that far-away-from-museums-culturally people have. Still not going to pay $180 for a not-warm special-occasion jacket I've literally nowhere to wear, but will come back and look at them again near the end of the exhibition and see whether they go on sale. Need to see this exhibition again, anyway.
