“The only way to understand painting is to go and look at it. And if out of a million visitors, there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.”
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
A couple of art history courses in college whetted my appetite for viewing great artworks in person. Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to travel to many places outside the U.S. and enjoy their museum offerings.
Europe has provided many memorable art experiences. I still remember my first entrance into the Louvre in Paris, France and the breathtaking white marble sculpture, The Winged Victory of Samothrace, seeming ready to take flight at the top of a grand staircase. That same year, I fell in love with the many rooms of Impressionist paintings when they were still exhibited in the tiny, former indoor center for court tennis built by Napoleon III, the Musée du Jeu de Paume. Many years later, I got to enjoy them again in their new and much larger setting, the Musée d'Orsay, a former train station built for the 1900 World’s Fair on the Left Bank of the Seine. One of the best Parisian exhibits I attended was a gigantic retrospective of Picasso’s wide-ranging styles of various periods at the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées.
Italy remains the number one art mecca for me, and Le Gallerie degli Uffizi, set on a bank of the Arno River in Florence, contain a treasure trove of gigantic proportions. The sixteenth-century building itself is a work of art designed by Giorgio Vasari, and Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” one of my favorite paintings, hangs there. The Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze is a small museum with a whole room dedicated to Michelangelo’s Carrara marble sculptures, including his seventeen-foot-tall work celebrating youthful male beauty—the David.
During my first visit to the Vatican Museums (in the Vatican City State, an enclave of Rome), I was distracted from the beauty of the art by the fact that the male genitals on the statues were either covered with fig leaves or broken off. It was modesty in the name of religion. In other years, I wasn’t surprised anymore, so I focused more on the masterworks of the frescos in the Raphael rooms and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.
As a writer, one small museum in Rome I enjoyed was the Keats–Shelley Memorial House at the side of the Spanish Steps at Piazza di Spagna 26. It’s where the English poet John Keats (“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”) died from tuberculosis at the age of 25. The museum houses one of the world's most extensive collections of memorabilia, letters, manuscripts, and paintings relating to Keats and Shelley, as well as Byron, Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oscar Wilde, and others.
Venice was the location of a unique exhibition of Salvador Dali’s work that I attended. It was in a palazzo, the name of which I’ve forgotten. There were giant red lips at the entrance, and one large section was dedicated to his black and white graphic depictions of the Holocaust.
The Museo Cappella Sansevero in Naples serves as the private mausoleum of the Sansevero family and is filled with Baroque art. The centerpiece marble, “The Veiled Christ,” by Giuseppe Sammartino is one of the most amazing sculptures I’ve ever seen. The contours of Christ’s lifeless body after it was removed from the cross are revealed though the exquisitely rendered marble shroud that drapes his wounded form.
The Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain is renowned for its many paintings by Rubens, Velasquez, Murillo, Goya, El Greco, and others. One of the most interesting for me was a Rubens that pictured Hercules as an infant, illustrating a Greek legend and the story behind it. (His father held him to his mother's breast and the milk that squirted out created the Milky Way!)
The Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, Germany houses the largest collection of paintings from “The Blue Rider” school, one of the most important groups of avantgarde artists in the early twentieth century. I remember enjoying exhibits by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and others, followed by lunch at the museum’s lovely outdoor café. Another museum in Munich (which one I can’t recall) had a great exhibit that was an immersion into another culture.. It allowed one to walk through a life-size reproduction of a village in Yemen.
I love the National Portrait Gallery in London, England. The portraits in the collections span centuries and continents. They include paintings (e.g. Henry VIII, Winston Churchill, Ed Sheeran, Elton John), photography (e.g. Princess Diana, the Beatles, Audrey Hepburn, David Bowie), and sculptured busts (e.g. Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, Cecil Beaton). Another of my favorite museum experiences in London is a walk-through of the Churchill War Rooms. This is a multi-media experience in the top-secret corridors of the underground nerve center where Winston Churchill and his inner circle directed the Second World War.
The Archaeological Museum on the island of Rhodes in Greece is housed in a medieval hospital built around 600 A.D. The sculptures and artifacts date back even further in time since Rhodes has been inhabited for about 24 centuries. One particularly lovely statue I remember is a white marble kneeling Aphrodite, often referred to as the Venus of Rhodes.
Art lifts me up and is always thought-provoking and inspirational. Although amazing creations can be found all around us, the main strength of museums is that they are reliable sources for finding and enjoying masterworks.