Men With Beards
Jan. 29th, 2012 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aKimberly and I went into The City today to see the Masters of Venice exhibit of art at the de Young Museum.
Sadly, it was a disappointment. I knew from the start that the Renaissance art style wasn't one that particularly interested me. What I didn't know was that the exhibit was going to be almost entirely dull portraits. There was painting after painting of men sitting there, looking bored. Some of them had black beards, some had white beards, some had dark brown beards, and some had gray beards. From what we could see, there were no red beards nor blue beards. One man had a tiny head, atop a corpulent body. There were some women, though in lesser numbers. They mostly looked angry. A couple looked stoned.
I didn't feel like the exhibit was particularly well put together either. There were numerous large prints pasted up on the walls, taking up space where you'd have expected to see art. Kimberly though there was more text than usual, which I'm not convinced of; what I did find that there was considerably more boring text which did nothing to illuminate the artwork and little to illuminate the society.
I'm not sad I saw the exhibit, because that sort of thing is always somewhat enlightening. I just wish it'd been any good.
(Part of the problem, I see now, is how badly the de Young Museum misrepresents the exhibit on their page. Out of 12 pieces of art they preview there, 5 of them are non-portraits, 2 of the portraits were the rare more active ones, and the other 5 are all so cropped that you don't see the monotony of black backgrounds behind stiffly posed portraits that we saw in the first couple of halls of the exhibit, and scattered around afterward.)
We did see two other smaller exhibits while we were there.
One was one that Kimberly had wanted to see, which was photographs of creepy dolls and masks. I was pretty meh about it. Many of the photographs were indeed creepy (though artist Ralph Meatyard swore they weren't intended to be macabre), but I didn't find that they were that creative. It was more like, "Stand in front of a fence with this creepy mask on." (Unless he manufactured the masks himself; then there was indeed creativity in the process. I'm not convinced he did, however.) Kimberly and I did enjoy ourselves mocking the artwork, and I think she found it more interesting than I.
The other was one I wanted to see about mixed-medium small-edition sculptures put out by a workshop called Gemini G.E.L. starting in '69. Their first piece, a lithograph in molded plastic of a car was, I thought, breath-taking. Exactly the sort of pop art I was hoping to see. There were also a number of mixed medium faces by Roy Lichenstein, which were somewhat abstract and made of neat die cutting with various materials, that I though were very cool. And then there were some lead bas reliefs which I found less exciting because there was almost no contrast. But this exhibit was the highlight of the day for me (and fortunately the last thing we saw, after the disappointing "Masters of Venice").
The other highlight of the day was doubtless lunch in the Music Concourse between de Young and the Academy of Sciences, eating tasty Andronico's sandwiches (as there's an Andronico's still in business a few blocks from GG Park) and watching children constantly almost climb into a dry fountain that has, according to various sources, somewhere between 75 cents and five dollars in change within. Meanwhile, flocks of sea gulls watched us. Signs said not to feed the pigeons, but didn't mention the gulls at all. We opted not to feed them anyway.
And that was a day in San Francisco. Upon arriving home, we ate dinner and then were each so tired that we collapsed asleep for a few hours ...
Sadly, it was a disappointment. I knew from the start that the Renaissance art style wasn't one that particularly interested me. What I didn't know was that the exhibit was going to be almost entirely dull portraits. There was painting after painting of men sitting there, looking bored. Some of them had black beards, some had white beards, some had dark brown beards, and some had gray beards. From what we could see, there were no red beards nor blue beards. One man had a tiny head, atop a corpulent body. There were some women, though in lesser numbers. They mostly looked angry. A couple looked stoned.
I didn't feel like the exhibit was particularly well put together either. There were numerous large prints pasted up on the walls, taking up space where you'd have expected to see art. Kimberly though there was more text than usual, which I'm not convinced of; what I did find that there was considerably more boring text which did nothing to illuminate the artwork and little to illuminate the society.
I'm not sad I saw the exhibit, because that sort of thing is always somewhat enlightening. I just wish it'd been any good.
(Part of the problem, I see now, is how badly the de Young Museum misrepresents the exhibit on their page. Out of 12 pieces of art they preview there, 5 of them are non-portraits, 2 of the portraits were the rare more active ones, and the other 5 are all so cropped that you don't see the monotony of black backgrounds behind stiffly posed portraits that we saw in the first couple of halls of the exhibit, and scattered around afterward.)
We did see two other smaller exhibits while we were there.
One was one that Kimberly had wanted to see, which was photographs of creepy dolls and masks. I was pretty meh about it. Many of the photographs were indeed creepy (though artist Ralph Meatyard swore they weren't intended to be macabre), but I didn't find that they were that creative. It was more like, "Stand in front of a fence with this creepy mask on." (Unless he manufactured the masks himself; then there was indeed creativity in the process. I'm not convinced he did, however.) Kimberly and I did enjoy ourselves mocking the artwork, and I think she found it more interesting than I.
The other was one I wanted to see about mixed-medium small-edition sculptures put out by a workshop called Gemini G.E.L. starting in '69. Their first piece, a lithograph in molded plastic of a car was, I thought, breath-taking. Exactly the sort of pop art I was hoping to see. There were also a number of mixed medium faces by Roy Lichenstein, which were somewhat abstract and made of neat die cutting with various materials, that I though were very cool. And then there were some lead bas reliefs which I found less exciting because there was almost no contrast. But this exhibit was the highlight of the day for me (and fortunately the last thing we saw, after the disappointing "Masters of Venice").
The other highlight of the day was doubtless lunch in the Music Concourse between de Young and the Academy of Sciences, eating tasty Andronico's sandwiches (as there's an Andronico's still in business a few blocks from GG Park) and watching children constantly almost climb into a dry fountain that has, according to various sources, somewhere between 75 cents and five dollars in change within. Meanwhile, flocks of sea gulls watched us. Signs said not to feed the pigeons, but didn't mention the gulls at all. We opted not to feed them anyway.
And that was a day in San Francisco. Upon arriving home, we ate dinner and then were each so tired that we collapsed asleep for a few hours ...