An Afternoon of Art

I am back in Baltimore, and loving it! After a great night's sleep, I spent the morning doing homework, then ate lunch with Shaun and his Johns Hopkins co-workers. Since he had to return to work, I decided to enjoy the 66-degree day and walk around campus. Hopkins is an incredibly beautiful campus, and backs right up to the Baltimore Museum of Art.

I am ashamed to say that prior to today, I had never been to the BMA, but spent a delicious two and a half hours there, meandering alone through the corridors of modern and contemporary works by the likes of Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, Warhol, Pollack (click on the artists to see some of the works I saw), and many more. For six bucks, I got a student ticket and an audio tour guide that, through the voices of curators, Baltimore authors, poets, and storytellers, brought to life many of the pieces I observed.

I grew up in art museums. My aunt and uncle lived in Arlington, Virginia when I was young, and every visit meant a trip to DC to wander the halls of the National Gallery. I remember then that my favorite artist was Auguste Renoir, and I emulated his Girl With a Hoop painting (which hung on the wall of my childhood room) every Easter with pastels and big hats. While strolling through the BMA I felt like a 10-year-old again, marveling at the works of some of the most revered figures in the art world.

The BMA boasts a large collection of Matisse paintings, thanks to the Cone sisters of Baltimore, who were avid supporters and collectors of his work. My favorite Matisse is the Woman in the Yellow Dress, seen to the right. Matisse's work was never really appealed to me before, but I really liked the Cone collection, which featured a lot of his floral stills, and posed women- I am enamored with his use of bright colors. I also spent a lot of time marveling at Picasso's Mother and Child (left), which evoked Italian paintings of the Madonna and Christ child that I saw in Italy. I find the colors soothing and pleasing to the eye. I had also never seen Andy Warhol originals, so it was great to get a chance to marvel at his rendition of The Last Supper, the BMA's largest piece, measuring 6 feet high and 25 feet long, which Warhol completed just a brief time before he died.

There was a piece that I had to return to several times because I found it very powerful and intricate, but also painful to observe. In 1939, Billie Holiday wrote and performed a song called Strange Fruit, which you can listen to here. The fruit referred to was the bodies of lynched African Americans hanging from trees in the South. The BMA piece by the same name features a female figure in bronze, hanging upside down from the ceiling of the gallery against stark white walls. I had to stand very close, but the figure swayed ever so slightly in the air of the room, its face modeled to mimic some of Holiday's features, including parted red lips, in recognition of the song that inspired the piece. It was haunting, particularly as I have been reading so much about racism both for class and on my own this semester.

Though I didn't plan it, I am so happy that I went. If you are in town, either living like I did having never visited, or just passing through, the BMA is definitely worth a few hours of your time and reflection.