“Let’s GO watch the Caravaggio!” at LACMA

Photo reproduced with permission © Maria Rose Crane, 2013

The place was packed and I was on my own this time.  The first time was a week before when visited the museum with 2013 MUSE for www.talkinggrid.com Maria Rose Crane.  The plan was to hit the “Bodies and Shadows, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) and his Legacy,” exhibition for a second time.  This time I was going to look longer and deeper.

\Ms. Maria Rose Crane did not intend to distract me, on the last visit.  She is beautiful, of course.  Yet, she is really more than mere beauty… She is also an authentic TALENT!  Funny, Fun, fashionable, witty, and with-it: Maria Rose Crane is an all out STAR!

We have so much fun together.  She is one of my favorite people to go out a play with.  Sometimes we hit the beach, other days we go for lunch.  Our first lunch was a legendary one at Barney Green Grass my absolutely favorite lunch place in Los Angeles.  But, that is another story….

Finally, we un-glued our selves from our nest-like lobby-bar bliss and faced the reality of why we had made this date at the museum: to SEE the Caravaggio!  Indeed, we were not there just to drink, eat, and delight in being on a mini-retreat, a vacation from the mundane.

The exhibition was expertly mounted, of course. and all the usual suspects (Georges de la Tour, for example) were rounded up and shown as influenced by the painter’s characteristic dark grounds and dramatic lighting, bold figures, in big intense poses.  The Caravaggio-esque canvases are like stage sets populated by all-too-human characters in full costume.  The feeling of the paintings is urban and urgent.  The spaces depicted are jammed with depth and mystery.  There is more to the story…  one wants to take a closer LOOK!

The cinematographic quality of the work was the topic of a talk given at LACMA by Museum educator and art historian Mary Lenihan.

Without to much resistance, I succumb to the tendency drift on the lovely surface of Caravaggio for a second pausing at the shore of his personal history and death from a knife-fight wound.  This only adds to the sensation of being cast-away, a drift, at sea… ???

ON VACATION!  LACMA is a true destination with so much to do that one can get lost, playing in the outdoor sculpture.  WE, the Muse, Maria ROSE Crane and I, Frau Kolb, did, along with many others; there were tourists from Tokyo.  A set of tall blond stick-thin Nordic models twin sisters posed for pictures with the grateful Japanese tourists.  A lady in glittering red high heals…  Ah!

ALL climbing around on  Chris Burden’s Urban Light (2008).

A public monument which works so well as border between the museum as record keeper and the museum as playground for developing imaginations and supporting…

The city’s spirit.

Much Love,

Frau Kolb

FK