We finally found a decent diner in Hell's Kitchen and got ourselves a big feed of flapjacks. Thus fortified, we began our day of touring the museums and galleries, starting with the Natural History Museum. I had fond childhood memories of their dinosaur collection, and I wasn't disappointed.
It also fits into a world class display relating to bio diversity, and covers similarly exotic periods of evloutionary history as the Cenozoic. Likewise incredible was their stunning gemstone collection, surely worth a pretty penny.It was a large and exhausting museum, but we put in a few good hours before crossing into the idyllic Central Park for some R&R with a can of coke and some classic American hotdogs. (The Coke tastes better in NYC - for real!)
We wanted to a series of sights down the Upper East Side, so we walked to the north end of Central Park in order to double back and knock them off one by one. This also enabled us to have a walk around Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Of course we went the wrong way, against the constant stream of lunchtime joggers...
First stop, the celebrated Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum building, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. We didn't bother with the actual exhibition (any place that 'showcases' Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian gets a thumbs down in my book) but did enjoy the interior.
Second stop, the magnificent Frick collection. Housed in the former residence of steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, it's a Roman style villa crammed with beautiful works by major artists. The rooms themselves are as delightful as the art. Artists include: Bellini, François Boucher, John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, El Greco, Francisco Goya, Holbein, Rembrandt, Titian, Turner, Velázquez, Whistler, van Dyck and Van Eyck.Third stop, the mind-blowingly monstrous Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a collection of antiques to rival the British Museum AND an art gallery that contains more noted works than I've seen in one place before. "The Met" has a permanent collection containing more than two million works of art, divided into nineteen curatorial departments, measures almost a quarter mile long and occupies more than two million square feet. Yes, this is an entire Egyptian temple:
Enjoying an art/study session...
We were in the Met so long that we ended up eating dinner there, and then having to catch a cab to our fourth and final stop, the MoMA. (Catching cabs is an interesting observation too - as soon as you stick out your arm, they descend on you like an eagle after a rabbit.)It was free night at the MoMA, so the place was a freaking madhouse. It terms of significant works, however, it even outdid the Met. In fact, I believe it is considered by many to have the best collection of modern Western masterpieces in the world, including: The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso, The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí (maddeningly on loan while we were there!), Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol, Water Lilies triptych by Claude Monet and much, much more!
Found my favourite Max Ernst painting, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale:
And Damien Hirst's famous shark-in-formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living:
No comments:
Post a Comment