The experience of visiting the Metropolitan Museum

            The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest museum in the United States, and many people visit the museum from all over the world. Even though I have been to The Metropolitan Museum many times, I haven’t seen all of the rooms yet. This time of visiting the museum, I saw the European painting section, the modern art section and the one of exhibitions. I looked different rooms by using the map and reading labels. I noticed each room has different lightings, different wall colors, frames, atmospheres, and even temperature is different. The Metropolitan museum is the place that provides the opportunities to see and feel arts that are from different places and different times face to face for visitors. The rooms are designed to effectively show the each of art pieces.

           The entrance of museum is huge. I used the map and I decided what I want to see the day. I always ask the staffs the direction. They are very kind to tell me. In my experience, the maximum of the limit of the time for looking art is for two or three hours if I am alone. It also depends on how crowded or my health condition. While I was walking to the exhibition gallery, I noticed that each room has different wall colors, lightings. For example, the sculpture section has pinkish white wall color. The Medieval section has dim lighting. The decorative arts section has chandeliers for lighting.

First, I decided to go to see the exhibition “Vigee Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France”. The artist was Elizabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun (1755-1842). The wall color is warm gray. The frames is made by wood or painted gold. The room is a little dim, and the lighting illuminates the paintings directly. The paintings are extremely beautiful with oil painting and her refined brushwork. The color of skins is light color and smooth tones, the color for clothes is often used bright colors. Many models faced front. There are also paintings of Mary Antoinette, which is outstanding and stunning. I felt the atmosphere of these paintings that are depicted the life of aristocrats and they are charming like in a fairy-tale. Overall, her technics of painting is fabulous.

Second, I chose to go to the modern art section because I have never been there before. Many paintings are big and wide. The wall color is white, the frames are simple or some of them don’t even have frames. The white color has effect of making room wide, so the white walls effectively make big objects look bigger. I think I used biographical analysis and stylistic analysis for the modern art. For example, I spend more time to look if I found like Picasso’s art works. The natural light is used for the room for modern art. The windows made the room brighter which made the paintings more bright and natural. Modern art does not look very natural, so this helps to make the art look like a part of our life. Compare to the painting of portrays from Europe, I felt that modern art has more dynamic and distorted expression. However, some modern art is still difficult to understand and analyze to me even though I read the descriptions.

Then, I went to the section of European paintings 1250- 1800. The wall color is greenish gray. The lighting is indirect lighting and small spotlights for focusing people’s attention on each artwork. The frames are dark color wood or gold painted. Gray walls make the colors of the paintings neutral. This is good for the skin color of the portraits. There are many portraits, landscapes, gothic paintings from different place in Europe. Even though the painting is same object of the Christian “Virgin and Child,” each country has their original way of depicting, materials that artists used and the frames. Also, I like to see the Rembrandt’s paintings and Vermeer’s paintings, van Dyke’s painting and other well-known people’s paintings. I wander how they could paint like this realistic. These paintings make me feel like I am seeing them in the real world. I also try to learn how to paint from them.

I picked up the Rembrandt’s painting and did silent and close looking exercise for three minutes. The title is “Herman Doomer.” The painting was painted in 1940, by using oil painting. I felt that the expression of the model is gentle smile. The tone of painting is darker. He probably painted the front part sharply and the back part softly to push things back. The nose was depicted the most chromatic. Of course, it is just a painting but I felt that he still is alive in the painting. Even though I like this painting, I felt that looking for three to five minutes is really long.

As I have visited, I enjoyed visiting the Metropolitan Museum more than before by thinking about how the museum offers the opportunities to see and participate the different kinds of arts to visitors. Compare to the looking exercise I did in the class, I used more formal, stylistic, contextual and biographical analysis. I read the label but I personally would like to concentrate more looking arts in the museum, so I think pre-research or after research about artists or exhibitions is important point to me for more enjoying visiting museums. If I have a chance, I am interested in joining the tour of the museum.