This is a large buildng..Huge even. Pretty easy to navigate yourself around if you have a map and just use your “common gallery sense”. We looked mostly at just the paintings. I have to say that a lot of it does not bode well with me…I can appreciate that it must do something for someone out there. There were quite a few works that did really stand out.. Meredith Frampton’s “Portrait of a Young Woman” (1935)(above) really did it for me. An almost life size, full body portrait of a lady. She is wearing a long silk dress, fashionable of the times. She stands next to a small modest table with a vase of flowers and on her other side, a cello..All things that beauty is considered to be. The style is fairly modernist, but the treatment of the skin tones and the hands, especially the fingernails, is incredible (for lack of a more sophisticated term).
There were several other pieces that I enjoyed, and an installation that I found pleasing to the eye, but little much else, “30 pieces of silver” by and artist named Cornila Parker.
And there were a few works by Joseph Beuys that I just do not appreciate personally, but there was one work that I can say I can’t appreciate to the point of I down right think it’s silly. Yes, silly artwork.
A video projection of about 5 or 6 different ‘works’ by Paul McCarthy, titled simply “Projection Room 1971-06″. There were works of people doing certain; I guess you could say, grotesque things, or just looking gross…I think they are meant to shock or whatever.. Someone in a nun costume, a man dancing and grabbing his penis, a man in a bath, a woman with shit all over her face, etc. I found it so silly. I think work like this is made for the sake of just making it rather than having anything to really say or showing any technical skill. It’s disappointing but sadly what you expect when you go into a building that has “modern” or “Contemporary” in it’s title..Or subtitle.

But I enjoyed seeing some works by Salvador Dali, Leonor Fini, Dod Proctor and a few Francis Bacon’s. And Claude Monet’s “Waterlillies after 1916” was hanging in there…An amazing painting, but, what is with the gold frame?? It threw me a little, it looked like someone had sponge gold paint on to it to make it look authentic…I hope they take it out of it one day.

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