Imbolc Waxing Wild Moon
Kate and I didn’t get a chance to check our work before getting on line with Greg, the Latin tutor. It showed. Turns out doing this together has a great learning benefit for both of us. Makes me think retirement with this gal’s gonna be fun.
The continuing ed at the MIA has left something to be desired lately. It used to feature art historians, visiting curators, folks like that, now it’s often education staff or something related to process not content. There’s nothing wrong with the education staff, but they did the docent training. At the continuing ed events I like to hear outside perspectives, other modes of scholarship, punchy ideas.
Matthew Welch, the Japanese curator and the head of a curators at the museum, has those scholarly credentials and he takes great care to make his material useful for docents. He was to give a lecture today on a piece of Japanese armor the museum purchased. I drove in to hear him because I respect his work. A lot. Problem is, they canceled the event by e-mail at 10:45. I used that time to prep for my tours tomorrow, got on the phone with Greg, then took off for the museum.
No lecture. Turns out they had some leakage in the admin wing. Not such a big deal in some ways, but the leaked happened onto Matthew’s computer. He’s such a meticulous speaker and uses so many good slides that it wasn’t possible to do the lecture. A shame. We’ll pick it up some other time.
Spent three hours getting ready for my first tours since mid-December. A group from St. Francis high school, just up Round Lake Boulevard about 7 or 8 miles from home. They want Spanish art. As it happens, I got assigned to start on the third floor on the east side of the building which means our Goya is the first painting I can use. That means I move from Goya to the cubists and from the cubists to the surrealists, then onto the mannerists and, if I get that far, end in the baroque.
(El Greco’s Burial of Lord Orgaz)
Going that direction I discovered (for me) an interesting relationship between cubism and surrealism, major art movements at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th, and the mannerists, a style situated between the high renaissance and the baroque. The two more modern movements used Cezanne and African masks to jump away from illusionistic realism, that is, realism with perspective that attempts to fool the eye into thinking a 2-d image is 3-d. Cubists took reality apart and put it back together from different perspectives, often using geometric shapes. Surrealists wanted to peak inside the unconscious and splay it out on the canvas. Turns out the mannerists pushed off against the high polish and perspective of the High Renaissance, such masters as Raphael, Michelangelo and Da Vinci. They turned away from vanishing point perspective, went for spiritual intensity (the unconscious?) and used elongated figures and asymmetrical composition to distinguish their work from the preceding period.
Someone else noticed this a long time ago, I’m sure, but it was fun to put it together.