Essa #1 : MET Assignment

            Last Sunday, I went to the Metropolitan Museum which is one of the biggest museum in the United States. I have went there several times but whenever I go there, it seems new to me and I can’t never walk around without a map. Even if I have a map, it is very easy for me to get lost and find a way. In this way, I think it’s better to come to the museum when you have time and wander around without any purpose to see things.

This time when I went to the Metropolitan Museum, I went to the Egyptian section where it has an ancient monuments. I like to look at things like sculptures. I saw a tomb where they put mummies and the jewels that they made. These things were interesting to me because I learned about Egypt in the world history class. When you know the history of the background or the arts, or anything that is created, it’s much fun to explore things and relate to what I know or learned.

            After looking at many monuments not only from Egypt section but also from Asian sections, I was at the European sculptures and decorative arts section. I was at a room where it had European arts on the canvas. The environment of the room was quiet and there were some bench so that people can sit and look at the picture for a long time. The lights were not too bright but not dark and the walls were simple white color.

One of the work that attracted me was a portrait of a woman. Looking at this work, I focused on formal analysis by looking at the color and mass, stylistic analysis by looking at the quality, expressions in the art that makes the work distinctive, and the contextual analysis.  The mood of the portrait, her facial expression, and the way she dressed and sat made me attracted to the work. The back ground of the work was dark and it made a very heavy mood that makes her look luxury in some way. It wasn’t just black but it seemed as the artist used different dark tones of colors to make it look deliberate. Not only the background, but the contour of the woman’s face seemed also deliberate, especially the expression from her face made the art distinctive. The way the woman dressed and the way she sat showed her elegance and she didn’t look young but she wasn’t old as well. Also from the way she dressed, and her hair, it seemed to be around 1980s. The portrait of the women was labeled with the title of “Portrait of a woman” and the artist of this work was named Henri Fantin-Latour. This portrait was dated 1885 which can be noticed through the cloth that she wore. In the description of the picture, it said that she insisted to pay for her portrait and she was with some American gentle man named Becked who also insisted to pay for his portrait. Their identities is unknown.  

            Different from sculptures, when I look at the arts on canvas, I like to look at modern art, or abstract arts. It is more interesting to me in a way that artists express their emotions or convey the meaning through their art. Luckily, when I went to the Metropolitan Museum, there was a special modern exhibition.

            At the special modern exhibition, the biggest drawing on the canvas attracted me before looking at the label of the picture. I like it this way because I can guess what the title might be and what I noticed in the picture might be in the description of the art. I looked at this art in the formal analysis focusing on line, shape, mass and space. The art that I looked at was a picture of a living room. The interior of the room like the walls and the floor was drawn by lines. It seemed as if the lines have the point where they seemed to be facing at which is a vanishing point.  When you also look at the floor, you can see that the artist used a darker brown color and a light brown color to differentiate the floor with the shadow of an objects and the floor where it doesn’t have a shadow. You can see that from the shadow of a couch as an example.  Also, I noticed a relative size by looking at the object like piano and a couch. It shows how far the piano is from the couch by drawing the piano small.  This work is titled Large Interior in 1988, by David Hockney who was born in British in 1937.