6/2/13 – Day 5 Metropolitan Museum of Art Infusion Week

I did a stretch class at the gym today. Damn these rubbery old people who make it look so easy. I put my mat next to this nice old lady who I thought would make me look good but she thrashed me at touch your toes and back bends – should have learnt my lesson when I played ‘G’ level competitive squash in 1978 and was thrashed 11-0, 11-0, 11-0 one night by some old lady with bad legs in a short shirt.

The day improved significantly when we got to the Met and I decided that if I was struggling to stretch physically then I would stretch myself intellectually, so I did the contemporary art collection. Found myself enjoying Lichtenstein’s ‘Stepping Out’, Jackson Pollock’s ‘Autumn Rhythm’ de Kooning’s ‘Attic’ and was mesmerised by Kapoor’s ‘Untitled’ – little stainless steel shapes that reflected everyone and everything in the room, including me!  

I then looped around the multiple galleries of C19th European painting and sculpture (including the Impressionists) and gorged myself on Renoir, Cezanne, Monet, Seurat, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Rousseau, Manet and Matisse.

I thoroughly enjoyed the alcoves littered with ballet dancer bronzes by Degas and my sincere thanks are extended to the artist Mary Cassatt for convincing Mrs Havermeyer to collect over 60 of Degas’ paintings and bronzes and donate them to the Met upon her death in 1929.

I also took in the George Bellows Exhibition and loved it. I didn’t know anything about him but soon found out that although he was from Ohio he went to the NY School of Art and followed the guidance of Henri and the so called ‘Ashcan School’.

At the turn of the 20^th century NYC was in a rush to be a big city and Bellows managed to capture many of the everyday (and often unpleasant) urban scenes that characterised the unchecked progress of pure capitalism that is so much a feature of the life of this city. His background as a reporter gave him an eye for the ‘hyperactive experience’ that lies at the heart of New York life – the factories, the railways, pugilism and street urchins, many of whom were ‘raised in dirt and darkness … and grew into vice and crime’.   

His work broadened to include subjects like the sea and in the end there were few techniques, titles or genres he didn’t experiment with, including significant success with lithography and cartooning. Unfortunately, like the boxer Jack Dempsey who he so powerfully portrayed in his last painting ‘Dempsey and Firpo’, he was stopped dead in his tracks by an unexpected punch. Bellows died of a burst appendix in 1925 aged 42.  

But although George himself is gone his art lives on. In December 1999, ‘Polo Crowd’, his 1910 painting, sold for a then U.S. record price of $27.5 million to Bill Gates. I couldn’t afford one of his paintings, so instead I purchased a watch and matching scarf at the Met Shop and went home a very happy girl indeed.