HIgh museum...what a terrific way to spend Thanksgiving weekend...
my youngest son and his roomies and their girls cooked a great sit down dinner for more than twenty...it was like eating in a restaurant since they have all done their time as servers or cooks or both...plates were whisked away when empty and glasses magically refilled...the food was fabulous... This is my son Drew and his Emily...two of the fabulous cooks
THis is MJ and his nephew Jonas...also two of the cooks...MJ loves to make Mac and Cheese:>
And this is the last cook Tim with Jonas...trying to make him smile for the camera!!
These are shots from their roof top deck...they live one block from the Martin Luther King Center in a huge duplex with a rooftop deck...I was fascinated with the HUGE cranes everywhere...we counted at least 8 in downtown atlanta alone...so buy some property there if you can before no one can afford it!!
Can you find the cranes in this shot of downtown Atlanta???As if we needed reminding the first thing we passed was a huge inflatable Eiffel Tower...people had fun posing under it for pictures.
Friday we went to the High Museum on Peachtree to see the Louvre Exhibit...we went on the busiest day of the year...duh...what were we thinking ??? BUT It was worth it...we stood in line on a lovely fall day for a half an hour to get in...then in line to get tickets to the museum and then inline to get into the show(that one went fast thank goodness:>)
The line into the museum...well at least we had eye candy to look at...this is a Raphael I think...too busy talking to remember....another shot of the Velasquez...evidently there were thirty of these paintings of relatives done for hmm was it Louis the XIV's queen or was it Louis the XV?? What a treasure to actually see it...a small painting only about 30x36.
...BUT there were so many people there that we had to wait till 4 PM to get in line for the show...:> One advantage to this was that we had plenty of time to explore the permanent collections and some of the traveling ones..well ...which one of these permanent exhibits was my favorite??? HMMM the African exhibits...I think...huge mask heads that must have weighed 100 pd that dancers would wear....and of course the impressionists...and the renaissance sections. Their permanent collection really has a wide selection...oh yes and the romantics sketches on level one...I am really into sketches now...
what was great about the sketches is that you could get up close to them and see everything..they even had some that were double sided and showed them...
We could have taken pics of the permanent exhibits except as USUAL the camera battery died...and the few that were taken ...not by moi ....were jiggly....must show middle son how to brace the camera....NEXT TIME i will go prepared to take photos...with two batteries...this is a monet but is blurry but since it was foggy I didnt think that mattered alot:>
OK So would i go to exhibit again ??? This exhibit is called the Royal CollectionYES...there will be two more shows in the next two years and four out of five us...the first show was of the art collected by Louis 14, 15 and 16...and was divided into sculpture, sketches and oil paintings....thru about oh 1793 which is when the Louvre became a public museum...recognize the date??? French Revolution...off with Louis the 16th head!!
The sculptures were monumental and I really wondered how someone with a hammer and a chisel could cut those delicate garlands out of marble...all kinds of marble buts of famous dead white men...then upstairs to more sculpture...some antique such as a colassal statue of Isis and some small...the bronze ostrich was my favorite.
Sketches came next...and they were my favorite...many had never been shown before...they were so powerful-Durer, Rembrandt, Raphael, Le Brun, Rubens, Poussin...most dated from the 1600s....These guys could really sketch...they used male models and would redraw them as women...who knew??? One of them...think it was either Rembrandt or Rubens had bought roles of older sketches by italians and drawn over them...
I think the most interesting thing about the sketches was that they drew on anything...some seemed to be mere scraps of paper and they made mistakes and corrected them...FOUR HUNDRED years later you could see the corrections....so if it was good enough for LeBrun and Raphael...hey its good enough for me right???
another comment on the high...it was established about 30 years ago after a plane crash of Atlanta socialites at Orly...i think they were going to the Louvre ...everyone on the plane died and this museum is dedicated to them...the collection is not as old as say the National Museum in DC but it is a broad and varied collection and the museum builing itself is just gorgeous. They were having family day the day we went with alot of interactive exhibits for kids, a sketch the model...wear your jammies and spend the nite...I HOPE they had beds.:>>>>>
This is a shot down Peachtree Rd toward downtown from the High...the High is actually in what is called Midtown.
The last art exhibit I saw was some awesome graffitti down in Cabbage town under an overpass...I hope none of it is offensive...but these guys can really paint...dont you think???
2 comments:
Maggie, I loved reading about your visit to Atlanta and now I am so looking forward to our stop there. Maybe we should order tickets ahead...looks pretty busy. What a great opportunity.
Yes, the graffiti is cool, but I really wish they would paint on their own canvases. If the graffiti is uninvited, then they are essentially painting on someone else's "work", be it a garage door or brick wall. And I say this as a mom of a tagger who is just getting himself into more and more trouble and debt for his "art."
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