More Museums YAY – where the Heck is mom

First stop, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston. There was a big show “Monet and Boston: Legacy Illuminated”. I think Monet’s pictures are easy to like and mostly I just want to be where he is, to see this sight for myself.

What was different and fun was how they often told the story of a picture’s connection to Boston, and hanging side by side would be an artist’s work that influenced the featured Monet. Also there were several pictures where they had available the same scene in different light. Here are examples.

This, for some reason, caught me by surprise and I liked it especially.

What’s more exciting than to find an artist you’ve never heard of whose work calls your name? (She does make pictures for children’s books so what does that says about me..Oh well.) This is how I felt about “Paper Stories, Layered Dreams: The Art of Ekua Holmes”.

How charming is the top photo of a major piece used for the entrance to the exhibition and below are a few cropped versions of her portraits. These are made from paper, paint, and objects.

Next stop, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

I feel lucky to get to catch this show of six Titian paintings gathered from five museums and being shown at the Gardner in Boston. Titian made the paintings as a set commissioned by King Phillip II of Spain based on a poem, “The Metamorphoses”, by Ovid.

The show is called “Titian: Women, Myth & Power” and subtitled by the NY Times “Can We Ever Look At Titian’s Paintings the Same Way Again?”.

This is the first and last of the six paintings. The first ““Danae,” 1551–1553, in which the god Jupiter, a serial abuser, finds his way into a young woman’s locked room, transforming himself into gold dust.”

And this is the last, “The Rape of Europa,” 1559-62.

And here are a few more as they are mounted for the exhibition.

I’m including a lot here because this is one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, to see all these Titians in one place. This NY Times article about the show (and where I got these pictures) helped me understand my feelings.

The Titian exhibit is in the new wing of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the original mansion created and built by Isabella in 1898-1901 to house her growing collection of world class art and plenty of other less respected works since she bought what she wanted. From wikipedia: “Well-known artworks in the museum’s collection include Titian’s The Rape of Europa, John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo and Portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Fra Angelico’s Death and Assumption of the Virgin, Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait, Aged 23, Cellini’s Bindo Altoviti, Piero della Francesca’s Hercules, and Botticelli’s The Story of Lucretia.”