Cambridge Art Day

While Jen and Oni were Powelling out in Portland, Felicity and I were feeding my art habit at the Harvard Art Museums. These include the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger and Arthur M. Sackler Museums. Until 2014 the three collections were housed in separate buildings. Because I’m inherently lazy (and laser focused on German Expressionism), I'd only ever gone to the Busch-Reisinger.

Whoa babies, I missed out on a metric fuck ton of brill work! I still skipped over the ancient artifacts and I think I missed the Arthur M. Sackler entirely BUT I lamped some pretty damned amazing stuff.

William Holbrook Beard – Power of Death. Clearly this is an early pic of Trump’s sons destroying beautiful lives for no other reason than they’ve got money to burn and microscopic dicks.

Bierstadt – Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak.  GodDAMN I love me some Hudson River School.

Gustave Moreau’s Infant Moses – I’m curious, why the fuck does he have spiky glowing horns. Was he just having a glow-in-the-dark bad hair day?

Frank Stella – Red River Valley.  I’ve never been a huge Stella fan. The hard lines and shaped canvases just did NOT speak to me. This however – YES! Gosh, all he had to do to capture my heart was be a little bit more Rothko-esque.

Winslow Homer’s Summer Night – I love the light but it’s the two women holding eachother close while they dance that really grabs me. Beautiful.

I’d never seen Max Klinger’s etching, The Dead Mother before. When I first spotted this, I thought it was a disembodied head with an infant sitting beside it. WAY creepy!

The work's composition focuses on the infant, poised over his mother in the manner of an incubus or an alp, the life crushed from her, vacantly staring at the viewer and lacking comprehension of his crime. (source)

Unsurprisingly, Klinger was a German Symbolist. I like them – they’re weird.

Another Symbolist – Franz von Stuck. Is his painting, Wounded Amazon, just an excuse to paint a naked woman clutching her boob? Would Wonder Woman approve?

Toulouse-Lautrec – The Hangover. Oof, I can relate all too fucking well.

There was a fab Pollack, a tremendous David Smith, my favorite Picasso, an unexpected little Seurat the breathlessly romantic Burne-Jones, La Farge's The Dawn and so damn much more.

Yes, I managed to visit my favorites, my old friends too. Of course! Max Beckmann’s Self Portrait and The Actors. Paul Klee – Hot Pursuit. Franz Marc – Red Horses. Modigliani’s Head VIII. And my beloved Käthe Kollwitz – Rest in the Peace of His Hands.

Next time, I'll have an extra cuppa joe and hit the Sackler too.
(wanna see the art bigger? Click on the image.)