david meissner

Museum Memories

Date: []
Categories: [Blog]
Tags: [IndieWeb Carnival], [Challenges]

James’ Coffee Blog published an IndieWeb Carnival topic: Museum Memories. I haven’t tried one of the Carnival topics before, but this one appeals to me because I have always loved museums.

I love the grand art museums, like the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum. I like scientific and technical museums, like the American Museum of Natural History or the Air and Space Museum. I enjoy small museums, like rural historical museums or collections tucked into an old general store. I can spend hours and hours wandering through all kinds of museums.

James provides several questions for inspiration. I’ll try a few, slightly modified.

Is there a museum you loved as a youth?

The Detroit Institute of Arts, because it was the first world-class museum I got to see. I visited it often through junior high school and college, and I’m sure it’s why I began to love museums. I remember the entrance with the Diego Rivera murals, the suits of armor lining the gallery near the entrance, the antiquities collections, the courtyard cafe with the enormous white silk parachute roof. Touring exhibits brought Van Gogh and others, and there were often special exhibits of contemporary art. I remember a exhibit in the 1970s of Nam June Paik and other futuristic video artists.

I learned early on that there is no substitute for seeing actual works of art whenever possible. It’s a wonderful experience to finally see a painting that you are familiar with through reproductions. A painting is alive in a way that even a high quality reproduction is not. The colors are true, but it’s more than that. It’s the life, the physicality, the hand of the artist, sometimes obscured but always present. A reproduction can show you how something looks, but it can’t capture any of that life.

And seeing the work at its true scale, sometimes smaller but frequently much larger than expected, is often a revelation.

What is your favorite museum?

I couldn’t pick a favorite but I can say that I love the grand art museums the most. I can name some favorite exhibits: Odilon Redon’s beautiful pastels at the D’Orsay in Paris; Joseph Cornell’s surreal constructions at the Art Institute of Chicago; the musical instrument collection at The Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Do you remember when you first came upon a new kind of art that you hadn’t known about before?

What comes to mind is seeing a cadaver monument in the Louvre, the sculpture of Jeanne de Bourbon. I had never heard of cadaver monuments, and I recall looking at the sculpture, trying to understand the details, and then realizing, this is a sculpture of a decaying corpse!

My memory is faulty here; I thought I remembered other similar sculptures nearby, but the only one I could locate while writing this was La Mort Saint-Innocent which I also remember seeing. I found an article on The Funeral Louvre with more images and information on these two sculptures and a few others.

Do you recall a time when an object in a museum or an art gallery made you feel something?

It’s often an emotional experience to finally see a work that I know from reproductions, but one vivid memory is seeing Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna at the Uffizi.

We studied this work in art history class. It’s said to be the first painting of the Italian Renaissance, showing the transition from the Medieval. At the time I understood the instructor’s lecture, in the abstract: the contrast with stylized medieval art, the use of lighting and form, the realism of the figure. I took my notes, passed my class, and completely forgot about the painting for the next 20 years.

I didn’t know it was at the Uffizi, but I remembered it right away when I came upon it. The piece is large, over 10 feet high, and the slides we studied in school did not do it one bit of justice. The work was so alive, and the significance of its place in history was clear. I enjoyed the experience of rediscovering a forgotten artwork and relearning something I had only superficially understood.

My Life List of Museums

These are most of the larger museums I’ve had the opportunity to visit.

Art Museums

Historical, Natural History and Science Museums