RootsRain

During my vacation time this holiday season, Em and I went to the Louvre Atlanta exhibition at the High Museum (courtesy of Michael Adamson, my boss at Turner). Our High adventure began when I took off a Monday and Em and I travelled all the way downtown, found parking, rode the elevator up to the museum, and realized they were closed on Mondays. I can’t say I’ve ever heard of anything being closed on a Monday unless it was a barber. Maybe the museum also doubles as a salon.

Well, not to be deterred, we returned the next day and went through the galleries with the requisite glut of 9 year olds just happy to be out of the classroom. I was surprised at how small the exhibition was. Granted, the exhibition is only in year one of three years (each year will bring different pieces to the High from the Louvre), but it still felt like it was only a small taste of the Louvre. I kept hurrying Emily along because I figured it would take us several hours to get through the exhibition. It only took one (and we did all the audio tours). Maybe my perception of the size of an exhibition has been somewhat distorted since I’ve only been to the Andrew Wyeth and Picasso Retrospectives at the High. Both felt much larger than the Louvre exhibition.

But bad news over. The exhibition is very enjoyable. The collection of busts in the inital glass room is wonderful. I’m a big sculpture fan (like, totally) and they didn’t have many full-body sculptures there, but they did have a number of gorgeous busts (I keep blushing when I write that word). The whole show is themed around the history of the Louvre, starting with Louis the XIV. This year’s exhibition ends at the French revolution. Next year’s exhibition will cover the French Revolution up to the modern period. The third year’s exhibition will be the modern period and therefore a brain-liquifying exhibition I may or may not drag myself to (feel my love of modern art?). There’s a nice range of pieces in this exhibition, though, from sculpture, to paintings, to a large number of drawings. Many of the drawings have never been publicly displayed before, including my favorite piece from the whole show (pictured at right). It’s a portrait of (probably) Annibale Carracci done by his brother Agostino. It’s amazing how you can tell from this sketch that Agostino loved his brother. The portrait is so gentle… you can just see Annibale working on his own artwork while Agostino quietly drew him. Annibale probably didn’t even know what Agostino was doing, the studio and Agostino were so quiet. The light comes in the window, setting a light glow on Annibale’s forehead… the soft rasping of pencils on paper… maybe the ticking of a clock… It’s a piece about family, about love, about craftsmanship, about quiet. I bought several copies on postcards and gave the first one to Will.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Art.