Frick

I've been thinking about this post all day, and weighing confidentiality against storytelling, I've come up with this:

I was doing something I shouldn't have been doing, and now I won't anymore.  Sort of by choice, but sort of cutting off my nose to spite my face.  I woke up on this sunny Sunday morning, and thought to myself, "Frick!"

It's not just a primetime-friendly expression of frustration; it's a museum on the upper east side.  It's 'pay what you wish' on sundays between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m, which is just the kind of narrow window with such a limited benefit that I found it irresistible this morning.

While the assembly line entrance, coat check, and ticketing procedure left me feeling like a freshly denuded chicken off to the abattoir, it was the first gallery that really alarmed me.  The museum is all Mr. & Mrs. Frick's hoard of pre-19th century art and furniture, as far as I could tell.  There are all kinds of allusions to myth and a pastoral fantasy world with fleshy, gallivanting shepherds that art people at that time just liked to have around.  

But I do not understand the cherub characters.  I walk into the first gallery and am surrounded by fat, weirdly sexual, google-eyed babies.  They are far too mature for their age, wielding guns and axes and fire and groping each others' fleshy haunches.  I can make excuses and talk about artistic license into the night, but this just overwhelmed me.  Vulgar babies!  It sounds like a band or a sour novelty candy!  I was turned off for the rest of my exploration.  Here are some of my bilious comments regarding the rest of the collection:

These bodies do not fit. Renoir, Degas, I thought you were masters! *I* can tell that those legs are not connected to a normal pelvis. What the hell. Go back to painting school, amateurs.

Illogical hairstyles.

Apparently the sun neither rose nor set for about 300 years, because every portrait has the same diffuse glow no matter who did it or where they were.

Lady Innes looks a lot like anna paquin.

And the unfortunate Lady Hatchett looks like the lead singer from The Darkness.

High foreheads, flushed cheeks, glassy eyes...they all look like La Lohan after a rough night out.

Massive, rippling waves of flesh while lounging nude, but wasp-waisted pin-ankled lollipop heads when dressed.  Dude painters, make up your mind.   If I'm going to develop body dysmorphia I want it to be in the right direction.

A lot of the collection is furniture, specifically chairs, which have heavy, tasseled cords draped across the seat so you know not to sit on them.  This annoys me.  Can't tolerate the waste of a perfectly good tasseled cord.

At the conclusion of my not-quite-hourlong visit, I want to sip my juice.  Considering they don't allow pens in the galleries, I doubt I should quench anything there.  There's a lovely marble atrium with a fountain and little bronze frogs spouting water, but that seems like a no-eating place.  Do they have a cafe?  No, m'dear.  The answer, as usual, is no.

So then I spent some gift card dollars on a new cardigan and skirt.  And drank my juice on the way.