Museum Paper
In this week’s class, we all made a visit to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Actually, this was my first time to take a tour to a museum in U.S. Museum is a place worth visiting, and it really was a better experience for me. I saw so many artworks in this big museum. Now, I select three of these artworks to share with you. They completely shocked me and gave a deep expression at first sight.
First of all, I want to show my favorite one to you. It is called “bridge”, and it was painted by Joseph Stella. He was an American but born in Italy, Stella immigrated to the United States at the age of eighteen, and his paintings always express the shock and admiration he felt as a European who came to Manhattan from an older, more traditional culture. Stella moved to Brooklyn in 1916, and crossed this bridge regularly. He did several paintings of the bridge, all from the same viewpoint. His perspective captures the impression you get when you walk over the bridge. In my opinion, Bridge combines Futurist elements with American subjects, and it was showed me strong technology and modern feeling. From the brief introduction of this artwork, I also saw Joseph Stella's own words about the bridge: "Seen for the first time, as a weird metallic Apparition under a metallic sky…supported by the massive dark towers dominating the surrounding tumult of the surging skyscrapers with their gothic majesty sealed in the purity of their arches, the cables, like divine messages from above, transmitted to the vibrating coils, cutting and dividing into innumerable musical spaces the nude immensity of the sky, it impressed me as the shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of AMRICA."

Secondly, I want to share the second one with you. It was an artwork which called “The Flower Carrier” by Diego Rivera. For me, the Flower Carrier is a rhythmic, powerful image of peasants at work. From this artwork, we can easily compare the size of the man to the size of the woman. The man is carrying the heavy load, but he appears to be a smaller person than the woman putting the load on his back. Through the workers are heavily burdened, they are painted with a sculptural solidity that lends them a monumental dignity. One may interpret them as idealized representatives of their class, in harmony with each other and with the natural world.

Last but not the least, I will show you the final one. It is called “Woman at Her Toilette with Red and White Lilies” by Max Beckmann. This dense image of a woman behind a large spray of red and white lilies was painted by Beckmann the year after the Nazis forced him to flee Germany for Amsterdam. In this painting, Beckmann chose to depict private pleasures. From this painting, we can see a woman wearing a black corset, washes her hands, apparently unaware of the artist’s gaze. Her jewelry and costume, along with the lavish flowers in the foreground, suggest that she is a woman of certain privilege. Yet Beckmann has structured the composition to create a compact arrangement of pictorial forms that reflects the closeted isolation of the world she inhabits.

All in all, all of these three artworks let me feeling the truth of art. It let me understand when we appreciating artworks, it is most important that you know what is the true meaning which hide from the artworks. Through the artworks, you can discover something different and special.