Met Art Museum Report

Met Art Museum Report

November 20, 2016

Rewritten December 2, 2016

These are Claude Monet’s pieces, Four Trees and Manneporte (Etretat). The Manneport surprises me because there are a lot more details than you expect from the father of Impressionism. Still, there’s a lot of shadow and motion, from the curve of the rock and the movement of the water, which you expect from Impressionism. It had a lot more detail than the Four Trees. Manneport has a lot of feeling, such as my Mask piece. My Mask piece gives you a feeling of horror. Manneport gives you a feeling of loneliness, like a leaving. I liked the fact thatthe inside of the arch in Manneport was very bright on the yellow/orange side, which contrasted with the dark blue water and light blue sky. Four Trees has very little contrast. Just a bit of yellow sky. There was also a lot of hard edges in the arch, unlike Four Trees, which has very few hard edges. It helped Manneport in that it was very close, allowing for a lot of the detail that made it so good. Four Trees is more distant and has less detail and, being an Impressionist piece, suggests a lot, like my Doll House.

I also saw Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheat Field With Cypresses. I was impressed with the way he used color, mostly blue skies and very green plants, contrasted with the very yellow wheat field. His contrasts and composition were effective like Manneport, though it was much more distant, like Four Trees.  He used a lot of bright color, the way I did with my Fruit On The Table piece, but he was a lot more organized with his complimentary colors and composition. Van Gogh's yellow in Wheat Field contrasted the blue and the green the way the yellow/orange contrasted against the blue in Manneport. Even the blue and green were interesting in the way they were separated, though they're not contrasting colors, they were contrasted in their shape. the green plants have a lot of short lines, while the sky has a lot of broad, blue space. Another point of contrast in Wheat Fields is that it is mostly vertical, except for the tree on the right going upward, not centered, giving us a surprise. Four Trees has four, evenly space trees that don't contrast with the rest of the picture.

Finally, there was Siesta, by Paul Gauguin. Frankly, I wasn’t impressed. It was a very peaceful piece, no where near as erotic as we’ve come to expect from him. I saw little else that impressed me. There was bright and dark colors in some of the shirts, which contrasted with the green glass, but it wasn't as impressive as Monet's and Van Gogh's color, contrast and composition. No really hard or soft edges. No emphasis on any space. It's just a painting of a family photo.