studio notes

Joslyn Art Museum

Saturday I spent the morning wandering through the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. There were several special exhibits that I wanted to see, and Saturday seemed like a good day for a break from the studio. The photos above are Moravian floor tiles that are incorporated in the floor and fountains of the Storz Fountain Court in the museum. The symbols for literature, music, architecture and painting are in several of the floor tiles as shown in the top photo.

The main exhibit was "DIEGO RIVERA: Masterworks from the Museo de Arte del Estado de Veracruz". From the Joslyn publicity ---

"Drawn from the collection of the Museum of Art of the State of Veracruz in Orizaba, Mexico, the 36 works in this exhibition survey the entire career of Diego Rivera, including his earliest work in Mexico, where he was nurtured in the classical tradition as a student of the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City. In the first two decades of the 1900s. Rivera was part of the international avant-garde movement that gathered in Paris. There, his paintings took on the influence of Impressionism, and later, when he was a colleague ofPicasso, Cubism. The exhibition culminates with examples of Rivera's monumental paintings of Mexican rural subjects for which he is best known. This exhibition, shown only at Joslyn, is the first time that this collection of Rivera works has traveled as a group outside of Mexico."

I enjoyed this exhibition, and I felt it was important as an artist to see an exhibition of this caliber, plus it was historical in that it is the first time that the collection has been displayed outside of Mexico. For me, the most interesting aspect of the exhibition was to see his progression of style, and especially the influences of his surroundings on his art. There was a docent tour in the gallery while I was there, and that added to my understanding of his art.

I also really enjoyed the CoBrA exhibit, which I will blog about tomorrow.