When I was at the Guggenheim in NYC last week, I stupidly did not write down the name of an artist I liked, thinking, oh, I’ll remember that. So now, for the last week, I’ve been trying to figure out who it was. I know that it was in the category of abstract expressionism, grouped with in the museum’s “founding collection” in a gallery alongside Braque, Rudolf Bauer, and lots of Kandinskys.
So I went to the MIA [Minneapolis Institute of Arts], thinking I’ll look for the artist there, on the off chance they had one – but they didn’t.
Having learned my lesson, however, I did write down the names of some of the artists I saw there that I liked: I’m going to go to museums, I need to resurrect my old habit of journaling the visits extensively, so I can access the artists and works I liked later.
Here are some of the works I found striking at MIA:
Leonora Carrington’s “Never since we left Prague”
Yves Tanguy’s “Reply to Red” (daliesque)
Joan Miro’s “Head of Woman”
Dali’s “Portrait of Juan de Pareja”
Grant Wood’s “Birthplace of Herbert Hoover”
Luigi Lucioni’s “Village of Stowe Vermont”
Robert Koehler’s “Rainy Evening on Hennepin Avenue”
Morris Kantar’s “Untitled (portrait of mother)” (and I remember Tadeusz Kantor’s work that I saw at the national museum in Warsaw in 2005 – or was this in Krakow?)
I have a definite leaning toward modern and abstract art – I’m not sufficiently sophisticated in the field to explain what it is I find compelling about this type of work, but I do.
I have been putting some work into getting my personal website up and running again, and have finally re-posted some of my own drawings and paintings. I make no claim to be an artist – at the least, I lack the discipline to make it a go of it. But I harbor vague ambitions, I suppose, and I’m fairly certain that if I did pursue it in a disciplined manner I’d have “something to say” – so to speak.
