With open galleries

Magnet #743 - Alexander Calder, National Gallery

We've established over and over that I love art, and art museums. That it's not even like I'm particularly well-versed in any genre or any artist, that I just love looking at the stuff in whatever museum I visit.

With as many as 15 grueling days ahead of us, we took a bit of a break and went to the new Tampa Museum of Art. A very cool building of pierced aluminum (900,000 holes!!!) nestled along the waterfront park, and designed by Stanley Saitowitz, an SF-based architect with several structures to his name.

So then we walk in - free, by the way, because of the Gasparilla Festival of Arts - and have lunch at the still getting its bearings in a big way Sono Cafe, and take a gander at some art.

The funny thing was that you walk into this giant open space, and you see this staircase that leads you up to the collections. Then, you turn around, and as you start to go up the stairs, you look up, and bam!, you see a giant multistory Calder mobile, much like the one in this magnet from DC's National Gallery. And while I'd seen the pictures of the Calder on their site, I was still awed by it as I looked up into the atrium of a zillion holes. Very cool.

The whole visit (save for Sono) was very cool. Very small. I think we may have missed a few collections, because we did only see one floor full of galleries that intentionally flow into each other to show the openness of art.

But that's the thing now...instead of having wings devoted to one particularly course of art, the rooms and exhibitions all just flow into each other. While on the one hand, this openness explores how art is interrelated, and pushes you to figure out how they are connected, it also doesn't visually define what you're looking at.

In other words, one minute, you're looking at a nude Matisse, you cross an entryway, and all of a sudden, you're looking at a Greek Black-Figure Amphora, circa 510 B.C., and then into a set of black and white Garry Winogrand Women are Beautiful photographs. And left to draw conclusions as to how they're brought together under one roof.

In the end, we did the Matisse side and the Winogrand side, and I'll give it to the TMA curator, that was a good job of tying the two exhibitions together. The sketches, drawings and paintings of various women by Matisse during the early 1900s was a great juxtaposition and comparison against the black and white photography of the women that Winogrand captured in the later 1900s.

It's kind of what the curator of the Accademia in Florence was going for, when he combo'd an exhibition of Mapplethorpe imagery of the human form and...Michelangelo sculptures. Mind you...that one blew my mind completely. Mostly because I couldn't believe it had been done.

Yeah, that's a whole nother magnet.

eta:
After being open a month, their little gallery was stocked full of the easily orderable Matisse magnets from Pomegranate (my faves, as you know), but low on the actual museum logo magnets themselves. Probably good because besides the Sono beef, my other issue with them is their logo. But, I can't wait to come back and see how that museum magnet collection grows. I'm hoping they do an atrium shot like this one here.

Capitale d'arte del mondo

Magnet #648 - Botticelli's Birth of Venus

I've heard that Florence is the art capital of the world. This would not be a lie.

Today we did both the Galleria degli Uffizi and the Galleria dell'Accademia - seeing the masterworks of guys like Giotto, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Canaletto, Dürer, Caravaggio, and of course, Botticelli.

Here's the thing. I've been to a few museums around the world - it's what I do. But, today's visit to both museums pretty much blew me away. And I'm not an Italian artchick to save my life. But, it's one thing to see art from the later half of the 20th century in NY, Paris or London, but to see Medieval and Renaissance works of art in the country of its birth is another. They don't call these things masterpieces for nothing!

And, the Botticelli on this magnet, the rising of Venus from the sea surrounded by the Zephyrs and the Horai, was painted supposedly for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici around 1482. Dudes, that's a whole decade before Columbus decided to sail the ocean blue!

But, while the works of art were amazing, the palace itself was fantastic. It was built in the mid-1500s, originally designed by Giorgio Vasari for Cosimo de' Medici, who's hanging out in front of Palazzo Vecchio on his horse. It's original use was to house administrative offices (hence the name, Uffizi). The design is pretty fantastic, with two long, long fresco'd corridors, forming a rectangle, with interior mazes of rooms that will knock your socks off, with one impressive collection of artists' work after another.

My favorite part, was seeing when the works of art became part of the Uffizi collection. Like the paintings that joined the collection around 1793. They've been hanging out on the walls since 1793! That's about 20 years after the American Revolution! And the paintings were old back then!

It's supercool, though, to think of the people who passed those same halls looking at the same paintings we saw, and writing home to tell about it. I love that you can see the old plaques beside the paintings, and even some of the exhibit numbers on their frames - clearly remnants of museum designs past. So cool.

Ok, Florence. You got me. After a crappy first day, you managed to make it up to me today. And I haven't talked about seeing Michelangelo's David up close and personal, or the to-die-for profiteroles I had at Rivoire, the first chocolatier in Florence!

Mille grazie, Firenze.