met magic

We accidentally ended up at the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art) because the Whitney was closed on Tuesday unlike other major museums and galleries in the area. But oh, what a wonderful accident that turned out to be! The Met is an enormously beautiful treasure trove of art and I got to walk around in it for 7 hours. And the location (wow!) on 5th Ave, sitting on the edge of Central Park, is breathtaking from the rooftop garden (see image below).

One of our motivations for going there was to get out of the heat. It nearly killed me to take this photo on the roof. It was almost too hot to focus through the camera.

But back to inside the Met. What astounds me about this place, and the big galleries in Manhattan generally, is how they ended up with a huge slice of the world's most famous pieces of art. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about being able to see them at places like the Met, but it does seem a little unfair to the rest of the world that so many famous, big name pieces (there were whole rooms of Degas and Van Gogh) ended up in one city. It was like being on a tour of all the paintings from my art history class. And that's just part of the Met. Right now there's this huge installation of a real Egyptian tomb that was going to be flooded so the US bought it and put it in the met (see image below).

And there are many, many other wonderful installations, and exhibits of sculpture and photography to see. And the building itself is just pure joy - we sat and ate our lunch under these huge domes in the great hall.
One thing that seems to be lacking is the works on paper section of the museum. There are some big name pop art screen prints, but generally this section is quite small, which is the case in most major museums I've visited. Having said that I almost forgot to say that the first image in this post was a lovely discovery for me: a 1964 etching by Jim Dine, Bathrobe.