Tag: museum

Musée d’Orsay

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

This was the queue we were asked to join for people who had tickets for the same time as our tickets. My tourist foreboding was rising. It was only about a 10-minute wait as they regulated how many people could squeeze through the revolving door at a time. Inside we started at the top with the ever popular Impressionists. It was wall to wall people and almost impossible to look at the paintings. One young woman had fainted and was lying on the floor with her family insisting she was fine. We quickly escaped to less crowded floors. Click any image below to see them bigger.

National Museum of Scotland

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh

Our last morning we toured the National Museum of Scotland. Naturally, most of my photographs were about the geometry of the space and less about the exhibits themselves. As ever, click on any of the pictures below to see them at full size (clicking the post title first if that doesn’t work for you in email or on social media).

Museum Spaces

Stairwell, Scotish National Museum of Modern Art

No visit to a museum would be complete without a review of the geometry of the spaces. Click any of the pictures below to see them full sized (you may need to click the post title first if you’re not seeing this directly on the web-site).

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Our next stop, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Click into the images for captions on the works (you may need to click the post title first if you’re not seeing this directly on the website). No doubt I’ll look like Duane Hansen’s tourist in a few years.

KMSKA

Our final morning in Antwerp was spent at the KMSKA (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen), which underwent a massive refurbishment for many years. It’s a stunning museum and as you can see I continue to be interested in capturing the spaces, the geometry, the whiteness (and blackness), the symmetry and awe of this cathedral to the beauty of the capitalist art world. Please do click into the images below to see them all full-sized (you may need to click on the post title above first if you’re seeing this in email).

FOMU, FOto MUseum, Antwerp

Once again, I’m struck by the architecture, the geometry, and the use (or absence) of colour in contemporary museums, almost more than by the photography I went to see.

Click on any of the images above to see them all bigger (if seeing this in email you may need to click on the post title above, first).

Groeningemuseum

Bruges’ Groeninge Museum was excellent. Laid out in a somewhat traditional chronological fashion, century by century, it offered laminated placards in every room with explanations for most of the artworks so you didn’t need to bend over to read ill-placed, scantily illuminated placards and block other visitors’ view. Of course, as I’ve been doing in almost every museum we’ve visited, I found the mirrors tto photograph myself in.

Click on the pictures to see them all full-sized (if you’re seeing this in email you may need to click the post title first to make this work).

Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent

SMAK – Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst

We visited the Museum of Contemporary Art. I photographed some items I found particularly compelling, particularly if I could find an artistic shot to take, rather than a simple deadpan documentation, continued my series on the geometric spaces in museums, found mirrors in which to photograph myself, and was introduced to Grace Ndiritu, who we would see again in Antwerp.

Click on any of the images to see them all full-sized and with captions (if you’re seeing this in an email you may have to click the post title, above, first to view on the website).

Exit

Since we finished viewing the Fin-de-Siècle on level -8 the way to exit is via an elevator that’s immense with couches like the one shown below on both sides of it. Then an escalator ride and some stairs to emerge again at level 0.

Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts
elevator

Fin-de-siècle

The Magritte show is on level -4. We then descended to levels -5 through -8 for the Fin-de-Siècle museum. Again I was struck by the geometry, space and architecture that museums always exhibit as much as the art they display.

More Plymouth

We also went through the Plymouth Museum. It tells the story of the English colonists in America and their depredations of the native people they found in North America. It was certainly interesting to see this story told both from a contemporary historical perspective and also from an English one, since, contrary to how we think of it in the States, for the couple of hundred years before the revolution, these were indeed Englishmen and not Americans. Outside the museum, meanwhile, plaques commemorated the great voyages of colonialism with no regard for the revised history told inside. If viewing in email, click the post title to click into the images and see them larger.

Dartmoor Prison

The notorious Dartmoor Prison maintains a museum!

Dueling missions

HM Prison uniforms. Note that women are not issued shoes.

The prison camera and the sitter’s chair for keeping bums in seats, requires the patience of the Buddha. If viewing in email, click the post title to click into the images and see them larger.

Turner Contemporary

Billed as the largest art space outside London, The Turner Contemporary (named for JMW Turner, the English landscape painter) was somewhat disappointing from the point of view of how much art there was to see. Here I’ve shown images that are mostly more about the space and the light than the exhibits. Click any image to see them all enlarged.

Photo, Sculpture and Painting

Victor Brauner, Conglomeros, 1945. Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris

In Plato’s cave allegory we are bound and can only see images of the shadows cast by statues of real things. As we free our minds, we first discover that we are looking at mere images, shadows. Next we discover that the shadows are cast not by the real but by statues, imitations of the ideals which they represent. Only when we emerge from the cave do we discover the world of real things.