Art Museum
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as the old trope goes, and that phrase holds true even when encountering some of the world's "great" art, as I saw in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The Museum itself is massive. It holds more than 450,000 works of art and a recent expansion added 28% more space with an expansion of 133,000 square feet (Dwyer). Within its walls there are naturally pieces of art that fall outside of specific people's taste. For me, there were three works of art in the museum that struck a chord -- two that I loved and one that I disliked intensely.
Unfortunately, the piece of art I liked the least in the museum is also one of the most prominent. The sculpture is a massive green glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly that sits in the entrance of the Boston MFA. The sculpture is nearly 42 feet tall and is made from almost 2,400 pieces of glass hand-blown in the artist's Seattle studio (Shea). While the sculpture is impressive for its size and Chihuly's technical skill is obvious, the piece is simplistic in its composition and is reminiscent of either a giant fern or a trendy modern lamp fixture available at Ikea, in a much smaller size, of course. The placement of the piece in the new foyer of the MFA is jarring, as from most angles it is juxtaposed against the original brick facade. Most important, this piece of art doesn't "say" anything to me, either about the artist or about a story he wishes to tell. Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee was quoted as calling the piece "tasteless in the way that a 15-course meal might be tasteless,...
Too many of them derive their raison d'etre from numbers and scale, rather than from any kind of inner purpose" (Barlow). The piece feels like a celebutaunte stuck in the middle of white-glove royal dinner.
The MFA in Boston is also host to some amazing pieces of art which have no question surrounding them as to their quality as first-rate art, and many of them appealed to me personally. Two of my favorites reside in the Impressionist room, in which I spent many hours. The first is Renoir's "Dance at Bougival," which dominates the Impressionist room. The painting is oil on canvas, 182 cm x 98 cm, and was painted in 1882-1883. The painting is more realistic and less impressionistic than other Renoir works, and the faces of the people in the picture -- with the exception of the central figure of the male dancer -- are clear. The picture is not symmetrically balanced, and the dancers are off-center. Rather than distracting from the quality of the art, however, this off-centered approach, plus the flaming red of the woman's bonnet, draw the viewer's eye inextricably to her face. Here, Renoir tells his story. In addition, the forced perspective makes the couple appear larger than the rest of their garden party, For although she is holding her partner close around the neck, she is looking away from him, "gazing off into infinity," and her lips show her uneasiness ("Dance"). The players in the background are clearly enjoying the soiree, but the male dancer, with his eyes hidden…
