munch at the moma

dglass and i went to the museum of modern art a few weekends ago and saw a couple of good shows.

on site: new architecture in spain offers an extensive overview of the explosion of interesting, innovative architectural design coming out that country in recent years. this is a big room, with lots of those cool, intricate models, which is why i'm definitely going back with boco at some point. and though i wished more of these projects had actually been built, and so could you compare the final result with the creativity and thinking on display, it's definitely worth checking out to see where the art of achitecture is heading.

we spent most of our time that day at the huge edvard munch exhibit, which includes over 130 pieces and spans his entire career. his early stuff is absolutely brilliant at capturing life's most unpleasant feelings: fear, despair, depression, discomfort, anxiety. he has this way of imbuing far-away, blank-faced figures with an enormous amount of expression. his landcapes/backgrounds are totally captivating: the roads shoot straight back into the horizon, the sky is filled with menace. his colors are pretty much perfect. i loved every painting in the first few rooms--maybe my favorite was (possibly) called "the kiss", of two lovers faces melting into each other... and it STILL seemed incredibly passionate--and could have spent much longer taking it all in. a show not to be missed, in my opinion.

what's bizarre, we thought, was that as his career progressed, his work got less and less interesting. more traditional. questionable color palettes. mundane subjects. with few execeptions, nothing in the exhibit's second half even approached the power of the work in the first half. in the humble opinion of me and dglass, the guy totally lost it.