A Day of Museums...

One good thing about summer masquerading as spring is the wonderful sunny weather one gets to appreciate the colorful riot of spring blossoms. Visited the Cloisters on Tuesday and the bountiful flowering gardens are a wonderful sight, set against the glittering East River and green lawns. The peaceful terrace gardens and monasteric exhibits give a sense of calmness… Cloisters is a branch of the Met, a museum that contains bits and pieces of various medieval monasteries and chapels, including 4 different cloisters, private monastery gardens surrounded by covered walkways. The gardens are meticulously kept, the gardeners actually tries to use only medieval plants! After visiting 4 museums on Friday, I rather enjoyed the gardens, flowers in every shade of the rainbow and the textures and scents…

And yes, I did 4 museums on Friday, in one day… Museum of Sex in the morning which was quite an attack of the senses, the Frick Collection in the afternoon, and the Guggenheim, which I visited more for the architecture, and lastly, the Asia Society which was quite a non-entity.

The best stop of the day was the Frick Collection, the collection of one very wealthy man with very good taste set in a beautiful house. The whole style is similar to the Gardner in Boston but even better. Gardner had a cluttered feel to the place somehow, but Frick's collection is extremely well arranged, every room is artfully done in a way that all the paintings and sculptures and design meshed together for a very cohesive feel. I love all the rooms, from the stately living room to the very male library. Esp love the drawing room with the Fragonard paintings, The Progress of Love (very sensual and very sweet) and the Boucher room ( the cherubs are sooo cute!) and his 4 season paintings. The audio guide adds a special personal touch to the paintings.

Other museums visited include the Noguchi with its intimate and Zen garden filled with stone sculptures in various calming shapes and shadows. Also did the Queens Museum of Art for the breathtaking panorama of New York and the Tiffany collection which was small but did include quite a detailed explanations of the various glass used in the Tiffany productions.

Overall, that’s quite a varied museum list… and says a bit of my weird tastes...