Tag Archives: metropolitan museum of art

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: I Saw The Figure Five in Gold By Charles Demuth

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I Saw the Figure Five in Gold
All Photos By Gail

I Saw the Figure Five in Gold (1928) is one of my favorite modern paintings; one that I have loved since I was in my teens. To be honest, I am a little bit obsessed with it. That might have something to do with the fact that the painting’s title is a complete sentence. “I Saw the Figure Five in Gold” sounds like something you would say in a dream. I bet you didn’t even know that this painting is actually a Portrait that was loosely inspired by a Fire Engine, but it is.
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Arts and Culture

Nautilus Cup

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Nautilus Cup
All Photos By Gail

If you enjoy seeing how very obscenely rich people lived 400 years ago or longer, go hang out at The Met for a few hours and have your mind blown. This fancy cup, made from a gilt-plated-silver shell of a Nautilus is a thing that you can see at this gargantuan museum, and it emphasizes the point that some rich people like to have really fancy things to look at and, maybe, use. At the very top of the cup you can see a tiny figure of Poseidon (King of the Ocean) holding a trident. How badass.

Display Vitrine
Other Items Sharing the Display Vitrine with the Nautilus Cup Include a Shoe-Shaped Flask

The Nautilus Cup comes from the Dutch capital city of Utrecht, circa 1602, and was gifted to the museum in 1917 by the estate of J. Pierpont Morgan, who is most famous today for having a global investment bank named after him.

Photographed in Gallery 502 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Design and Innovation

Hand Table

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Hand Table
All Photos By Gail

Little is known about Costo Archillopoulo, the designer of this table (circa 1934), which is both a functional piece of furniture and a fantastical Surrealist sculpture. The glass tabletop rests improbably atop small balls balanced on the tips of three delicately tapering fingers, generating a sensation of tension and unease.

Hand Table 2

Disembodied hands and gloves are recurrent motifs in Surrealist art, with the left hand, in particular, symbolizing the irrational. The cloudlike element from which the hand emerges also suggests a transition from the conscious to the subconscious world.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

Hand Table
Installation Views

Hand Table

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Salvador Dali, The Accommodations of Desire

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Salvador Dail The Accommodations of Desire
Photo By Gail (Click Image to Enlarge for Detail)

Painted in the summer of 1929, The Accommodations of Desire is a small gem that deals with the twenty-five-year-old Dalí’s sexual anxieties over a love affair with an older, married woman. The woman, Gala, then the wife of Surrealist poet Paul Éluard, became Dalí’s lifelong muse and mate. In this picture, which Dalí painted after taking a walk alone with Gala, he included seven enlarged pebbles on which he envisioned what lay ahead for him:
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Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Balthus’ Lelia Caetani

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Lelia Caetani
Photo By Gail

By 1935, when Marguerite Caetani, Princess Bassiano, commissioned this portrait of her daughter Lelia, Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) had grown tired and resentful of the painting commissions that were his only source of income. Depicted in the elegant Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées in Paris, Lelia is unfashionably dressed and appears considerately older than her twenty-two years. Her limbs are elongated and she dwarfs her surroundings, awkwardly towering over the trees and lamp posts, just as Lew Carroll’s Alice would do from time to time. Balthus later called his stylized, unflattering, and even bizarre portraits his “monsters.”

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.