Monet to Picasso

Even though last week was completely insane at work, I managed to fit a few cultural events in. Wednesday night, I spent a long, but worthwhile wait for the UMFA's Monet to Picasso Exhibit. It was incredible to see so many noteworthy artists in a Utah museum. I was really surprised, though, that my favorite was not a Picasso or Dali (usually my favorites), but Paul Gauguin, Woman in the Waves.
This picture doesn't do it justice. It is supposed to symbolize abandoning oneself to nature.

Other notable works included La Vie, Picasso
and The Dream, Dali.

It was incredible to see so many of my favorite modern artists in Utah. If you haven't seen the show already, it's gone. You will have to go to the Cleveland Art Museum to catch it. But from October 18-January 11, the UMFA will host the traveling exhibition Changing Identities: Recent Works by Women Artists from Vietnam. On Saturday October 18, the museum will host a mask-making seminar related to the themes in the paintings.

Also, on November 19, the museum will be hosting a lecture on the idealized femine figure as depicted in art. Here is what the UMFA website says about the lecture:
This lecture by Dr. Margaret Toscano, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Utah, searches for the identity and nature of the “Divine Feminine” by looking at images that represent her in art and literature. Whether a person believes in the concept of the divine feminine literally or metaphorically, goddess archetypes can serve as a powerful mechanism for women claiming power and exploring personal identity and spirituality, as the contemporary art of a woman like Shauna Cook Clinger illustrates so well. I highlight Clinger’s work in my visual essay because of the many ways she examines the relationship between the inner and outer self, light and shadow, death and rebirth, active and passive, and the masculine and feminine principles. Like Clinger, I use archetypes to validate the centrality of “embodiment” for women’s personal identity without reducing them to their physical bodies. I emphasize the importance of women making their own self-representations to counter their historical objectification; and I explore the question of whether we can put the “feminine” on an equal footing with the “masculine” without falling into the very stereotypes that have restricted women to narrow gender roles in the past. While my emphasis is on female images, my slide presentation ends with a plea for balance, with the hope that men too can find metaphors for self-exploration in the nearly three hundred art works I examine.