This past weekend my little cousins were in town and I decided to take care of five birds with one stone by taking them to the Met. This worked for this assignment, one for History class and 2 other extra credits, so you know I made those kids look at some paintings and sculptures form years they didn’t know even existed.
Anyway, while going around the museum completing my assignments I learned some very interesting things, specifically the methods of naval transportation for ancient Egyptians. Did you know that ancient Egyptians had a different boat for just about everything done on the water? There were specific boats for fishing, transport, sport, leisure and much more. The Met had scale recreations of these boats on display in their ancient Egyptian wing, as well as the papyrus scrolls which described and portrayed the boats themselves to make any recreation possible.
Along with the Egyptian wing we visited an exhibit on the very best of the Modernist movement, which featured such famous painters as Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso. Many well known paintings were featured in the exhibit, but my favorite was the View from the Williamsburg Bridge by my favorite painter, Edward Hopper. I loved the way Hopper captured the lighting of the east side of Manhattan. Ever since I was a kid I was a big fan of the Modernist movement in the 1950s. Seeing many of the paintings I had grown up looking at in my picture books was a pleasant coincidence on a day where I was just supposed to look at ancient art for a school assignment.