Ideas from Notebook, IX

"Heart of the Andes" by Frederic Edwin Church

I went to both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and American Museum of Natural History while I was in New York City today. Limited time makes everything here seem to be of even greater proportion than the reality. The weekend outing was rewarding and frustrating in equal measure because of this, and meanwhile my notebook filled at a furious rate. I saw the modern art, neoclassical sculpture, and American landscape painting at the Met; the halls of biodiversity and ocean life, and the temporary exhibition on frogs – perfectly timed to open today and provide further material for my paper on extinction and preservation – at AMNH. Overall spectacular. The day was, as a whole, a boon to the senior project (which ended yesterday, I suppose) and general independent study (which will continue hereon). I just wish the promised WiFi on this Megabus were working so that I could watch TED talks on the way home. Without further ado:

Kermit the (oft-singing) Frog; iconography and iconoclasm; religious spaces in modern and classical imaginings; Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s “Ugolino and his Sons”; nationalist art; Edward Hopper; Georgia O’Keeffe, “From the Faraway, Nearby”; Charles Sheeler, “Americana,” and “Water”; The Wyeths; the Brandywine Museum; Norman Rockwell’s “Town Meeting”; Stephen Hannock; Pablo Picasso, “Dying Bull,” “Man with Lollipop”; Georges Braque, “Woman Carrying a Basket of Fruit”; Prestel, Skira, Abrams; Thomas Cole; Albert Bierstadt, “The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak”; Frederic Edwin Church, “The Heart of the Andes” (i.e. the most impressive painting I have ever seen); Asmat ‘bis’ and death mythology; museums and the urge to touch – physical interaction with art or ancient works; Elephant ecology – a complicated web; luciferin; aestivation; North American wood frog; diamond mining; DeBeer’s; sustainable new growth forests and fisheries; coelacanth; Phyllobates frogs; Phantasma frog and epibatidine; Project Golden Frog; “Rough Guide to Climate Change”; “The Complete Walker”.