Natural wonders, MoMA masterpieces

Those who know me - or at least those who read the right hand side of my blog - will be aware that I love a good museum.  London's British Museum, Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, and the Tropen Museum in Amsterdam are all up there in my opinion, and New York's American Museum of Natural History is one more to really savour.  We're wise enough now to know how to tackle these cultural leviathans, and success comes with knowing which galleries are your personal "must-sees," and which ones you'll accept having to miss.  The American Museum of Natural History spans several floors packed with artefacts of everything nature, with an additional focus on people of the world.  Lizzie, the Geography graduate, picks out the Earth and Planetary Sciences galleries, whilst the archaeologist in me immediately selects human origins and the Hall of South American Peoples.  Here lies a collection greater than anything amassed in Europe, creating a journey through the world of the Incas, the Nazca people, the Mayans, Oaxaca, Olmecs, Tolects and Aztec.  I'm in heaven at this point, the only downside being that there is simply so much, it's impossible to dwell on everything.  Some favourites, though, include some fabulous pieces of Nazca pottery and an Aztec sunstone.  

Aztec sunstone

Nazca pottery

There's something especially intriguing and mysterious about the civilisations that emerged in Mesoamerica - how did they first get there?  How did they develop such complex society?  And what do their remaining artefacts tell us about their ways of life?  My undergraduate dissertation examined the rise of polities in Mayan culture, possibly the most mysterious civilisation ever known, for their emergence appeared to come straight out of an inhospitable jungle environment.  Even now, nobody is really sure how Mayan society began, nor how it suddenly disappeared again - it seems that the rainforest swallowed these secrets, and is unlikely to ever give them up again.  Nonetheless, Mayan ceramics do survive, and give us a taste of the complex artistic and cultural complexity of these most interesting people.

Mayan ceramic sculpture

Beyond the world of human history, we of course explored the dinosaur gallery, where there are some wonderfully complete skeletons of the tyrant lizards that once roamed and ruled on Planet Earth.  Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops are the kings of these galleries, which are divided into two parts - ornithischian dinosaurs, characterised by backward-pointing extension of the pubis bone, thought to have helped support enormous stomachs that these dinosaurs needed to digest tough vegetation - and saurischian dinosaurs, characterised by grasping hands, in which a thumb is offset from other fingers.

Stegosaurus

Tyrannosaurus

The following morning saw us take the subway up to Midtown, to one of the world's foremost art galleries, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA.)  Now, this one I've wanted to visit for years, for within its walls are some of my most favourite paintings.  If I'm being honest, there's a lot of modern art that I simply don't connect with, and so we make a plan to be fairly brief, seeking out what we most want to see - the 1880s-1950s collection - which is conveniently all located on one floor.  Hot picks for me include my most favourite work of all, I and the Village by the Russian-French, Belarusian artist, Marc Chagall.  The painting was finished in 1911, and seems to evoke thoughts of the 'old country,' a place of simplicity and folklore.  As with much of Chagall's work, there are religious undertones - the green face wears a St Andrew's cross and holds the tree of life, whilst in the background an Orthodox church sits amongst other dwellings.  To me, it's as if the artist is painting a dream - one of his village, perhaps of his childhood, and a subconscious fondness or longing for the natural pleasures of home.  I connect to this - and even felt a little emotional approaching the canvas - for this is a painting I have admired for a long time, and seeing it face-to-face (there's an artistic pun in there, if you look at the painting!) is inspirational - definitely a big one to tick off my list.

Marc Chagall's I and the Village

Beyond Chagall's wondrous painting, there is a host of other brilliant works, including Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy, Picasso's Three Musicians, Dali's The Persistence of Memory, Monet's Water Lilies, Matisse's Dance, Cezanne's The Bather, Munch's The Storm, Gauguin's The Seed of the Areoi, and Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans.  Perhaps most famous of all, the museum is also home to the Van Gogh painting, The Starry Night, complete with its very own security guard and crowd of admirers soaking up its undeniable beauty.  All in all, this is a heavyweight in the world of art galleries, with a giant of a collection that puts it firmly amongst the greatest collections in existence.  We come away in an uplifted and buoyant mood, honoured to have been in the presence of such iconic and enduring masterpieces.

The Sleeping Gypsy

The Three Musicians