The Metropolitan Museum of Art is most certainly not a museum that a person can visit only once. Due to the large amount of works and its extravagance, it calls for further exploration and thinking. The MET is different than most museums because its entire collection is personally owned. This means that all of the works found in the exhibits are the MET’s. It is contrary to what other museums do, which is borrow art works for their exhibits. The exhibit that I recently attended was one that showcased the work of Frans Hals.
Frans Hals (1582/83 – 1666) was a 17th century Dutch Painter who specialized in portraiture and genre painting. Genre painting, which depicts every day scenes, was revolutionary in his era. Hals primarily created individual portraits using oil on canvas and, in fact, he stopped painting every day scenes after 1630 and created only portraits for the rest of his career. Many of these portraits were displayed in this exhibit.
My three favorite paintings created by Hals are: Merrymakers at Shrovetide (1616), Boy with a Lute (1625), and Portrait of a Bearded Man with a Ruff (1625).
Each painting has its distinguishing characteristics that add to their value. Merrymakers at Shrovetide is actually one of the few paintings that have more than one figure illustrated. It is humorous and symbolic. It expresses lost potential regarding amorous relationships, jokes against religion, and the enjoyment of life and celebrations. Hals does a great job of showing his liking of “in the moment” art. Boy with a Lute shows continuous enjoyment by portraying a boy that is calling for another drink and playing his instrument. Last but not least, Portrait of a Bearded Man with a Ruff was my all-time favorite painting done by Hals. It was very realistic, sincere, detailed, textured, and emotion evoking. The figure seems very apologetic and as an observer, you can’t help but wonder what the story behind the painting is.
Hals shows off his skills of layering in this painting, as well as others, by exposing the mid layer of the painting. He also uses soft backlight on all of his portraits in order to emphasize and focus on the model of the painting. After this exhibit, I came to appreciate Hals and recognize him as a talented artist.
After exploring Hals and his work, I decided to visit another exhibit that displayed art from the same century. This enabled me to observe the differences and similarities between different artists and their work from the same time period. The exhibit I chose to visit was a collection from the artist Chih Lo Lou (17th century: China). The focus of this exhibit was calligraphy art and hanging scrolls that were done with ink and vases and sculptures. Comparing the two exhibits, I noticed that both are extremely detailed and they both show the artist’s perspective of beauty. Frans found celebrations to show life’s greatness while Lou thought life’s greatness was found in nature. Differences were found in their focuses, their media, and their philosophies. Both artists created works that were phenomenal and representational of the world around them. This experience gave me some valuable insight, but essentially it raised more questions that I will need to pursue in future visits to the museum and I look forward to doing so.