Half an Hour at the Met

Half an Hour at the Met

Wednesday, 30^th of January was the day we had scheduled a visit to the Met for the course “Life on the Square”. I was looking forward to see the Met again.

My first experience was 2 years ago when I had to accompany a friend who had to visit the Met for an assignment for college also. It was an interesting experience and I remember we spent a few hours inside. That was also my first visit to a museum in US. What captured my attention was the Egyptian exposition, with the pyramids.

The second visit was on a Wednesday, day on which usually I have a busy schedule at school: 3 courses, “Life on the Square” being the middle one. That is why; I knew my visit to the Met would be relatively short due to the fact that I had to run back to NYU for my last course of the day. So, after I finished the first course, Statistics, I took the train uptown. I remember I had the flu that day and uptown the wind was blowing hard and it was so cold. It was a struggle to walk from the subway station to the museum, a real fight between me and the powerful wind. When I finally arrived in front of the museum, I met my classmates who were waiting for our professor. Soon professor Alycia Smith-Howard arrived and she told us to group so we could take a picture. That was a very nice idea which took me by surprise and I really enjoyed it; it made me realize that although that was my second visit I had no pictures taken there. So, we took a nice group picture in front of the Met, on the stairs. Then we rushed inside where we met a young nice girl, who was enrolled at the graduate school at NYU and who was going to be our guide for that visit. The target for us was the Abstract Expressionism collection of paintings. I always liked to admire paintings, but the abstract ones gave me a new, unknown, deep feeling, wonderful and in the same time a confusing one. The abstract shapes seemed to have no organization but in the same time they could express so many things at ones; they astonished me and open my heart to a new interest in art. It seemed to me that the Abstract Expressionists' goal was a raw and impulsive art. What mattered were the qualities of the paint itself and the act of painting itself.

As American poet-critic Harold Rosenberg said in a famous Art News article of 1952:
"...the canvas was not a picture, but an event."

You can see more details about the collection visiting: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/abex/hd_abex.htm

One day I will certainly go back and spend more time in the Met, to explore all the expositions and absorb as much art and culture as I can.