Impressionistic Anniversaries
Aug. 12th, 2010 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aSo today is mine and Kimberly's 10th anniversary. As she says, getting married in 2000 means that we won't ever forget what anniversary it is.
We'd decided to spend the day together, so I took the time off work. Even better, we figured out something fun and memorable to do for the day. Parts of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris are being renovated, so they've told a lot of their paintings to hit the road. Thus we've got two shows occurring here in San Francisco, showing off stuff that you'd usually have to go to Paris to see. (Apparently, SF is the only city that they've sent both of the exhibitions to, so go us!)
A few months ago, we'd decided that this sounded cool all around and so Kimberly & I got SF museum memberships a while ago. Or tried to. Due to considerable problems with the museums actually processing memberships, we didn't get the memberships processed until a couple of weeks ago (and only after Kimberly called). But, that meant that we had brand-new membership cards to use today.
So, today we went over to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park to see the first of the shows, "The Birth of Impressionism".
It was a very interesting array of paintings because it started out with some pre-impressionist works from the same period. They included a number of attractive paintings, mostly on mythic themes and it seemed like a pretty typical museum experience. And then you hit the impressionists, and the difference is like night and day. Suddenly there's color and light and shadow and other natural changes and the material goes from the mythic to the everyday. I've never before seen the impressionists in their own context, which really highlighted how stunning the work was.
The early impressionist art that we saw was generally quite nice. Monet was my favorite at this exhibit, possibly because we'd seen an amazing all-Money exhibit several years ago and I'd grown quite fond of his work then. The most amazing was a Monet piece called "The Magpie", which is a snow-covered scene. We've had a print of it sitting around the house forever (because we've never figured out a good wall for it). Though it's not hanging, we can still appreciate it. But seeing the original, which that print and so many others had been made from, an original that's something like 130 years old was just breathtaking.
I also saw a number of Renoirs that I liked. There was also an artist that I'd never heard of called Bazille, and he did a few that I really admired: a very casual picture of Renoir and a really neat picture of his studio, which showed many of the impressionists there and also many of his paintings. And why didn't I know him? He died in the Franco-Prussian War at the age of 29 after painting full-time for just six years. He could have been a Monet or a Van Gogh if he hadn't been killed in one of this world's too-too-common pointless wars.
We looked around the rest of the museum a bit. We'd actually been there two and a half years ago, if I recall right, on Mother's Day. There were nonetheless a few exhibitions that were new: one on dyed cloth and another on photographs. Neither of them particularly thrilled me. It also looked like they'd changed out a few things here and there. The impressionists were really the reason to go, though.
We headed back from Golden Gate Park pretty early, around 3 or so, as we were both tired out from walking around and fighting our way through crowds of old ladies who didn't look when they backed up (again and again).
This evening Kimberly and I headed out to a relatively new nice restaurant in Berkeley called Gather. It was very good. We had a vegan appetizer plate in which everything tasted excellent. Then Kimberly and I each ended up having pizzas for our main course. Mine was a vegan pizza that had all kinds of great veggies on it that I actually like and was happily cheese free.
A little on the pricey side, but not absurdly so, even when we splurged and each ended up with an extra meal's worth of food, at least.
A good day. A good anniverser-day.
We'd decided to spend the day together, so I took the time off work. Even better, we figured out something fun and memorable to do for the day. Parts of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris are being renovated, so they've told a lot of their paintings to hit the road. Thus we've got two shows occurring here in San Francisco, showing off stuff that you'd usually have to go to Paris to see. (Apparently, SF is the only city that they've sent both of the exhibitions to, so go us!)
A few months ago, we'd decided that this sounded cool all around and so Kimberly & I got SF museum memberships a while ago. Or tried to. Due to considerable problems with the museums actually processing memberships, we didn't get the memberships processed until a couple of weeks ago (and only after Kimberly called). But, that meant that we had brand-new membership cards to use today.
So, today we went over to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park to see the first of the shows, "The Birth of Impressionism".
It was a very interesting array of paintings because it started out with some pre-impressionist works from the same period. They included a number of attractive paintings, mostly on mythic themes and it seemed like a pretty typical museum experience. And then you hit the impressionists, and the difference is like night and day. Suddenly there's color and light and shadow and other natural changes and the material goes from the mythic to the everyday. I've never before seen the impressionists in their own context, which really highlighted how stunning the work was.
The early impressionist art that we saw was generally quite nice. Monet was my favorite at this exhibit, possibly because we'd seen an amazing all-Money exhibit several years ago and I'd grown quite fond of his work then. The most amazing was a Monet piece called "The Magpie", which is a snow-covered scene. We've had a print of it sitting around the house forever (because we've never figured out a good wall for it). Though it's not hanging, we can still appreciate it. But seeing the original, which that print and so many others had been made from, an original that's something like 130 years old was just breathtaking.
I also saw a number of Renoirs that I liked. There was also an artist that I'd never heard of called Bazille, and he did a few that I really admired: a very casual picture of Renoir and a really neat picture of his studio, which showed many of the impressionists there and also many of his paintings. And why didn't I know him? He died in the Franco-Prussian War at the age of 29 after painting full-time for just six years. He could have been a Monet or a Van Gogh if he hadn't been killed in one of this world's too-too-common pointless wars.
We looked around the rest of the museum a bit. We'd actually been there two and a half years ago, if I recall right, on Mother's Day. There were nonetheless a few exhibitions that were new: one on dyed cloth and another on photographs. Neither of them particularly thrilled me. It also looked like they'd changed out a few things here and there. The impressionists were really the reason to go, though.
We headed back from Golden Gate Park pretty early, around 3 or so, as we were both tired out from walking around and fighting our way through crowds of old ladies who didn't look when they backed up (again and again).
This evening Kimberly and I headed out to a relatively new nice restaurant in Berkeley called Gather. It was very good. We had a vegan appetizer plate in which everything tasted excellent. Then Kimberly and I each ended up having pizzas for our main course. Mine was a vegan pizza that had all kinds of great veggies on it that I actually like and was happily cheese free.
A little on the pricey side, but not absurdly so, even when we splurged and each ended up with an extra meal's worth of food, at least.
A good day. A good anniverser-day.
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Date: 2010-08-13 01:58 pm (UTC)