Some surprises in the Met on Thursday Oct 13

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the last word on museums with hundreds of rooms full of art and artefacts. Its stately Neoclassical facade could be foreboding except for the scores and scores of people sitting on the stairs, the buskers, the food stalls, the souvenir stalls all the people meeting others and filing in and out of the big doors. From our place it's easy to get a bus across to 5th Avenue and then get off almost outside.

 Looking south to the entrance

EB

 Second level looking towards the southern wing

 Down to the entrance

 The huge entrance hall is a popular meeting spot

One of the huge floral arrangements

Our last painting lesson is tomorrow and it's a shame we won't be painting but the class is going to the Met to draw from a figurative composition for the four hours. This should be good. The idea is to study the construction of the composition. The first work was about building the figure which took up most of the composition with colour. In the second work the figure will be a small part within the composition. I'll bring the first work home I hope if it's dry.

Yesterday I saw the new show - Stieglitz and his artists. He introduced Picasso and Matisse and other artists to NY in his gallery which came to be known as '291'. He bought a Picasso charcoal drawing for $65 and the Met turned down a package of the 80 or so unsold drawings by Picasso that he offered them for $2000. So the AGNSW wasn't the only conservative gallery that looked a gift horse in the mouth when it turned down John Peter Russell's gift of 8 drawings by Vincent Van Gogh!There was work by Picasso, Matisse, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and the room full of work by Georgia O'Keefe looked very delicate but insipid. Marin's watercolours are full of life and the small punchy works of Hartley are fantastic. It was great to see his 'Portrait of a German Officer' which is nearly 6' long.

I revisited the wonderful works of Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse. The room full of Van Gogh is always crowded with people having their photo taken in front of one of the works. They are incredibly intense as are the Gauguin works.

Then I went to the rooms full of earlier work. The collection of late Medieval altarpieces and devotional works on wooden panels is just wonderful. I saw some terrific painting from over a broad spectrum of time - the Neoclassical smoothness was just a glitch really - David and Ingres, very French. But that's what was enshrined in the Academies. The painted drapery by Gainsborough, Fragonard is wonderful. What was absolutely out of this world was the paintings of El Greco! Wow no wonder he was a hero to so many artists many years later.

 Detail from Gainsborough's Portrait of a Scottish beauty who had a very long name

 Gainsborough again

 This Fragonard was almost psychedelic

 Detail of work from above

 Detail from another Fragonard

 Paintwork from El Greco's Portrait of the Pope, the one who is wearing the spectacles,

 El Greco's Nativity

 Detail

 Detail

 Detail from The Vision of Saint someone

 The complete painting

Detail of the beautiful yellow flowing drapery

I reckon many late C19th early C20th artists were hugely inspired by El Greco. Not to forget Goya!

Unfortunately a bit out of focus but this was such a beautiful piece of painting with warm pink and cool blue.

The way these hands have been constructed with cools and warms is amazing

 Love this work

 Lovely painting impasto and then thin washes

 Detail 

 Wonderful study of sunflowers - a small intense work

Bonnard, such intense colour

 Bonnard

 This is wonderful

 Bonnard

 This is a very large work

 Willian Nicholson, father of Ben Nicholson

 A beautiful work by Egon Schiele

 The James Ensor is terrific

A detail by Ensor

Other highlights include the works by Caravaggio, Veronese, Titian, Fra Lippo Lippi, Fra Angelica, Lorenzini and all the amazing painters from the Early Renaissance, just amazing!!