The Mersys Go to MOMA and Visit Lautrec's Ladies

Hello lovely peeps!  Although the Thanksgiving blogfest isn't over yet (the best is yet to come on Thanksgiving Day!), I just wanted to share an awesome evening out that Mr. Mersy and I had last week.  We were fortunate that Mr. Mersy's work allows us to visit some of the Manhattan museums for free, and we were psyched to go and visit MOMA on its late-night, autumn open house.  There were musicians, cocktails, not too many people, and six floors of "art" for us to explore.

Honestly, the first three floors didn't grab us.  It seemed like the museum had cleared out the garages of a whole bunch of repressed, depressed, angry people and stuffed there "stuff" into galleries.  

So, we continued onward to the fourth floor, and things started to look up.  In fact, beginning on the fourth floor, some of what we saw could even be considered art:

And then, we got to the fifth and sixth floor, and our minds were officially blown!  Thank heavens (I had started to worry)!  Personally, I enjoyed the exhibit on Lautrec's lithographs as it really challenged my concept of "authenticity".  I've walked through the neighborhoods he haunted, I've seen reproductions of his posters a thousand times, so it made me wonder what the point of seeing his work in a museum was?  When something has become a part of homogenized cultural norms around the world, does the original even "exist" in it's own right, separated from the copies?

But what I absolutely adored was the chance to spend time with Lautrec's ladies face-to-face.  If you think about it, there are probably depths of his perceptions of these women that fairly well-adjusted folk are unable to plumb.  Of course, I'm assuming a complexity to the representation of Pigalle women of the night by a midget artist living with his devout mother that may not actually exist, but I'm confident enough to put the theory out there.  I wanted to stare into the eyes of these women through the eyes of the artist:

 (her eyes are voids)

 (her eyes are worried)

 (her eyes are cold)

 (here eyes are so old)

 (her eyes are blind)

There was a remarkable variety of representations of the female form throughout the rest of the fifth floor, and I couldn't help but wonder- do I look like this?  Where do these artists get off painting a gall like a lump of clay or a pile of sticks?

Oddly enough, the Demoiselles d'Avignon seem to be following.  I think it was in Barcelona where I last met up with them, in cut-paper form, in a Picasso gallery somewhere close to the sea.

We got to go in to the Matisse cut outs special exhibit, but pictures were forbidden, and all I could secretly snap was this one:

Can you imagine walls and walls filled with this exaltation of color!  It was so happy, so very, very, happy :)

There was one more revelation waiting for me that evening, and I had my creaky bones to thank for it, in a way.  I was feeling very creaky and having a hard time walking about, so I had really slowed down my pace and decided to participate fully in the Slow Art movement.  

Oddly, spinal arthritis and Mondrian turned out to be a good match, and here are some things I noticed.  These lines are so clean and orderly, I imagined that there was a severity to the canvases, but as I slowly moved among them, I noticed secret little bits of non-conformity that kept the paintings from being constraining. Take a look at the upper left hand corner in the photo above.  Isn't that the perfect bit of not-so-perfect?

And this one- as if the idea of the painting couldn't quite be stretched to the edge of the canvas.

Can you spot the missing outlines in these?

Taking my time, moving and breathing among the art, I discovered their hidden charms.  Thank goodness for these little bits of non-perfection.  And, oddly enough, thank goodness for my creaky bones :)

Lots of love,
~Mersydotes