Back from NYC

Unfortunately was very sick during my visit to MoMa (and wasn't able to appreciate much of what I saw although I was ecstatic to see Picasso's Boy Leading a Horse, one of my favorite paintings by him). Then I got better and we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where they had a special exhibition retrospective on JW Turner, my favorite seascape/landscape painter. However, I was largely unaware of his groundbreaking 1840s work late in his life which blew me off my feet. Armed with an insane obsession with color and inspiration from the early color theory of Goethe's writing, Turner flirted with impressionism and abstraction in the 1840s decades before the movements would begin. These canvases hit me as perfect examples of emotive hard hitting art and blew my mind:

"Shade and Darkness - The Evening before the Deluge", 1843

"Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) - The Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis", 1843

I overheard numerous people complaining with lines such as "see, now, I can't tell what that is" at the exhibit... if there are still people that can't appreciate this as art today, imagine how controversial and risky it must have been in the 1840s?

I also saw a few other favorite works at the Met such as Sargent's "Madame X" and two Warhols I actually liked (!?!?).

Later we visited the Guggenheim where they had a retrospective on a Louise Burgeois which gave me a great introduction to her work which I had only stumbled on occasionally previously.