On my way to this meeting I stopped in Los Angeles where I always visit the LACMA museum where German Expressionism, a personal favorite genre is featured
For years, the LACMA has been undergoing expansion and it’s not finished yet. Eventually, this will be a new wing where the museum will be able to exhibit more of the works it already owns but can’t exhibit on account of space limitations. Fortunately, the campus is large, with plenty of space for expansion.
This is one of those spaces they have developed, this one, as an open courtyard and, they have decorated it with a very large bolder balanced over a sunken walk-way. Very dramatic! It’s worth visiting the museum just to walk under this rock!
An especially beautiful tree on the campus. It seems to be a variety of Sycamore.
Moving to the gallery – “Cows in the Lowland”, by Emil Nolde. The caption next to the painting talks about Nolde “turning away from this impressionistic style (illustrate in this painting) toward a more spiritual, (even) religious imagery”. If we are seeing these cows as if they were humans, Nolde has conveyed a mood of peaceful contentedness within them. The impressionistic style is perfect for conveying moods in this realm. It makes me especially appreciate Nolde’s talent in his ability to convey a variety of moods. In “Sunflowers in the Windstorm” he uses sunflower ‘faces’ to convey human emotions of downtroddenness, long-suffereing and anxiety. You can see it in the faces, you don’t need the title or the ominous purple and black clouds to give it away, yet,certainly, even those evoke the mood of the painting.
“Landscape”, by Jean Metzinger. According to Wikipedia, Metzinger experimented with the faceting of form, a style that would soon become known as Cubism. Now that it’s pointed out, I realize it’s what grabbed my attention when I spotted this painting. For me, portraying scenes in this fashion has the effect of compressing the significance and erasing any perplexity of what is going on, though the open door signifies mystery.
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