Two Museums in Two Days is Too Much!

Friday, July 30, 2010 Day 30
Happy Birthday to Wanda! Here’s to my sister!

Ah – there’s nothing like a half a mango to perk up a bowl of bland breakfast cereal! Alas, it is the last of the mangos.

This afternoon we walked to the Antoine Bourdelle Museum. Antoine Bourdelle was a contemporary of Rodin and taught with him at one point. Excellent sculptor. He was a painter as well but is best known for his sculptures. He did a huge one of General Alvear, one of the leaders of Argentina's independence movement. A model of the horse from the General Alvear statue stands in the courtyard, and one could be forgiven for supposing that P.F. Chang’s Restaurant used his horse as their model. As part of the tour of the museum, we went into an art exhibit called Treasure Island by Claude Lévêque, a modern French artist. It consisted of a vast number of casts used to create sculptures in several semi-dark rooms in the basement of the museum. At first we weren’t sure it was an art exhibit – it as if it might have been Bourdelle’s basement, filled with plaster casts of his works. In addition, there were parts of sculptures – an arm here, a leg there. The exhibit was lighted by pink lighting, and occasional pieces of cast or sculpture were lighted by tiny spotlights. At the far end of the exhibit was the constant, clockwork-like clanging of a bell at approximately one-second intervals – very loud, so that it permeated the entire basement (and crept up the walls to upstairs, accenting some of the works up there!). Near the middle of the exhibit we were treated to an occasional sound as if someone had dropped a large platform of metal just behind the wall, and it struck the floor with a mighty crash. The whole thing was rather bizarre by the standards of Roger and myself, but I have to admit that we are not much into contemporary or avant-garde art.

I was pretty much museumed-out by the time we left to walk back home. I had a pretty bad case of museum legs, and Roger’s back was still bothering him a good deal, so we crashed and burned that evening.