The Arts in New York City

On the search for an experience of the arts, I decided to attend a tour of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My tour guide was an elderly woman in her 60s named Phyllis Rodman. At the sight of having an old woman as a tour guide, I began to worry about the possibility of the event being as boring as a history lesson rather than as interesting and engaging as the theater performance of Spring Awakening. She even said to us before she began the tour, “You can leave at any time if I am not engaging.” To top things off, everyone else in the group was middle-aged or older. The tour was supposed to be only an hour long, so I decided to just go through with it.

Phyllis started off the tour by showing us a small copper artifact whose name involved “Phyllis.” The artifact was made during the Middle Ages to tell the story of how Phyllis made a fool out of Aristotle. Aristotle warned his student, Alexander the Great, to not get tempted by women. Phyllis, Alexander’s lover, heard this and decided to play a trick on him. She seduced him into getting on all fours and carrying her around the garden. While narrating the story, Phyllis pointed to herself every time she mentioned the name “Phyllis.” She looked adorable when she did that.

After observing the artifact, Phyllis led us to the Robert Lehman wing in the basement. She discussed about fifteen paintings spanning from the Renaissance to the Impressionist period. While some paintings were unpleasant to the eye and its descriptions dull to the ears, Phyllis did make some of the paintings sound interesting. One of the paintings, Condesa de Altamira and Her Daughter, Maria Augustina by Francisco Jose de Goya, was a rather simple portrait of a mother holding her toddler that was very dark around the edges. Phyllis revealed to us that Goya liked to paint at night in the dark. He always wore a top hat with candles stuck to the top to light his canvas and his subject(s) while he was painting. I found the image of a man wearing such a bizarre hat to be hilarious.

After attending this tour, I think that everyone who visits a museum ought to participate in a tour. I have been to the MET a couple of times before, and every time I had wandered aimlessly through the many different wings. I only looked at the paintings and sculptures that appeared interesting and read their descriptions if they were not long. Observing art alone did not increase my knowledge of the background or the technical aspects of the pieces. This tour taught me many things, for example, the difference between tempura and oil paint, the reason why blue turns very dark on paintings over time, and the style of painting in different time periods. From this point forward, I will try to attend a tour every time I visit the MET to make the most of my time there and to learn something new.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Wendy Huang, WRITING ASSIGNMENTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.