Monet to Picasso

For my Birthday, I wanted to go to an art exhibit. I'm not particularly artsy, but figured it would be cool. Something you don't see every day. The U of U Art Museum was hosting this great exhibit from the Cleveland Museum of Art. So Ryan took me to see it. The paintings were fabulous! A lot of big names I recognized from humanities classes in college. It was so cool to see them up close and personal. I loved reading the tidbits and listening to the sound bites explaining the paintings and the artists. And of course time away with my honey and no distracting children is always nice : )

Claude Monet was well known for his beautiful landscapes and florals. This is a haunting portrayal of his wife hurriedly walking and glancing back. Viewed from the inside looking out, you sense the sadness of the artist who realizes his wife is going somewhere he is not. Camille, his wife died not long after the painting's completion. He kept it all his life.

Pierre Auguste Renoir painted this portrait of Romaine Lacaux in 1864, when he was just 23. The detail in the face is so subtle and beautiful, but it's very impressionistic due to the softness of the remainder of the painting. This was one of the first paintings characteristic of the period.

This portrait by James Tissot, was aboslutely breathtaking. It was huge and so detailed, but soft. The dress, the couch, the pillow and the model's delicate face are quite a work to behold.

Ah, bring on the Modern Art...Cubist painter Pablo Picasso. This still life is titled: Fan, Salt Box, Melon 1909. This was the most discernable piece in his section of the gallery. The still life, Bottle, Glass, Fork is well beyond me. And a few of the other paintings in Picasso's section (La Vie and The Harem) were PG-13 and therefore not suitable for a family friendly blog like this.

This unusual portrait is by Irish artist William Orpen. It shows him ready to wipe away his own image from a mirror. The museum sound bite said William overheard a conversation between his mother and father about how unfortunate is was that he did not have the same good looks as the rest of the family. Talk about scarring your kid for life! Fortunatley, he did have some real talent, and creativity. The dark boxes are actually papers glued to the painting to appear stuck into the mirror's frame. They include ferry tickets, a personal check, a page from the artist's diary, etc...

The Dream by Salvador Dali was a very bizarre painting. This is what the Cleveland Museum of Art has to say about this painting:

"One of Dalí's most powerful Surrealist paintings, The Dream gives visual form to the strange, often disturbing world of dreams and hallucinations. The central figure has ants clustered over its face where a mouth should be, and has sealed bulging eyelids, suggesting the sensory confusion and frustrations of a dream.The man at the far left-with a bleeding face and amputated left foot-may refer to the classical myth of Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. Freud interpreted this ancient tale as symbolic of a child's conflicting feelings toward his parents (the "Oedipus complex"). A column grows from the man's back, then sprouts into the bust of a bearded man, perhaps a reference to the Freudian father, the punishing super-ego who condemns the son's sexual fantasies about his mother. In the distance, two men embrace, one holding a golden key or scepter, which may symbolize access to the unconscious. Behind them, a naked man reaches into a permeable red form, as if trying to enter it."