Dec 28, 2006

You can just add this onto the last post:

6. The exhibit titles From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Paintings from Dresden should have included an artist from Dresden that wasnt Friedrich or Richter or changed the title. The "From...to..." makes things seem like they have a whole plethora of paintings from Dresden, but it is just the two artists.

7. It's nice to look at the paintings and sculptures of naked women and know that I look approximately like that naked. I don't think anyone has seen me completely unclothed since I hit puberty and I don't see that many naked women in my world, so there's always that little bit of insecurity that I'm abnormal and don't even know it. An art museum is one of the few places I can stare at pictures of naked women and feel comfortable with it.

8. I often spell the word "museum" as "musuem". It's unfortunate.

P.S. I found Friedrich (like most artists who do primarily landscapes) rather useless, but like Richter quite a lot. Of course the people I was with laughed at Richter's paintings, and made jokes about how they could do the same thing in an hour and it's amazing what they'll put in a museum these days.

Meditation by Gehrard Richter (1986)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

See, I always kind of liked Friedrich. That one at the Getty where the person is standing in the moonlight by that big pile of stones (tomb?) is kind of eerie and cool (I think I'm thinking of the right one. But that's in the permanent collection. I haven't seen the special exhibit. When I was there in September it was nature photographs and Italian futurist word poems. By the way, did you see the St. Catherine's Monastery icons? I was thinking of going to see them. Okay, end tangent).

Of course, I do tend to like landscapes. And I don't get abstract art. I've spent a considerable time thinking about it, and some time reading and writing about it for my humanities class last semester, and I still don't get it. Although they're not my favorite, I kind of see where things like cubism and surrealism are coming from, at least I can tell that it has a point, even if I can't always decipher it. But the really abstract stuff - like the one you posted, or the ones that are just geometric shapes, I just don't understand at all. I suppose this makes me a Philistine or something.

Impressionism is my favorite. Especially Monet. And then some post-impressionism, like Van Gogh and Pointellism. But not Cezanne or Gauguin. I get tired of the endless Tahitian women.

Laura

Andrea said...

I'm not going to pretend to "get" abstract art. All I know is it invokes more emotion in me than say, a painting of a tree. I couldn't tell you why, because I don't know. I'm (in general) more one to appreciate art for what it makes me feel than what the intellectual meaning behind what is on the canvas (or wood or whatever...it's just an expression, okay?), so I like abstract art. I wish I had a smarter answer to that, but that's all I've got.

Also, upon further investigation of Friedrich, I like him better than my exposure at the Getty led me to. Most of what they had on display was...paintings of trees. And the like. That does very little for me. But he has some goodies out there. Like the one you mentioned.

Oh, and I saw the St. Catherine's Monastery icons and thought it was a great exhibit.