St. Louis Part Two

We finished part one of our St. Louis series as a sort of defense of my masculinity in spite of my enjoyment of art museums.  In this installation, we will actually discuss what I saw while at the museum.

First off, one of my favorite mediums of artistic expression is architecture, and the St. Louis museum, while housing many fine works of art, is indeed an art piece in its own right.  The main building was built in anticipation of the 1904 world's fair, and in keeping with the times was inspired by Roman architecture.  I arrived about 15 minutes before the museum opened, so I spent that time admiring the columns and sculptures adoring the building's exterior.

The building is somewhat divided by floors and wings.  The bottom floor houses a large collection of artifacts from ancient or Non-Western cultures.  The collection was so extensive it housed rooms dedicated to artifacts from such specific places as Tibet, Papua New Guinea, Meso-American, and Micronesia.  There was a vast amount from the ancient Islamic world, which really had some fascinating ceramics and metalworking.  This floor also contains much of the fine furniture work I spoke of in the first part and had a section with medieval weaponry and armor; the detail that went into creating a suit of armor is fascinating to behold.  I have been told about how meticulous and painstaking the process of linking chainmail is, but I found that the metal plating along a knight's joint leave so little room for error that it is perhaps more impressive if not so painstaking.  A gauntlet (an armored glove) is truly something of mechanical marvel.

The main floor is divided into two wings with a massive domed center dividing them.  On one side is a collection of Far to Near East artifacts and a wonderful collection of Western art spanning from the medieval era into the Renaissance.  It is fascinating to contemplate the development of technology over time when you realize what so many of these other cultures were capable of well before what we usually consider the cutting-edge Europeans.  There was a bronze statue of the Buddha so massive it was cast in separate parts before being placed together, and I could not figure out where the pieces joined.  Throw in how his robe appeared to flow, and I don't think anyone in the west was doing anything like until da Vinci a millennia later.  It was also in this section that I started to recognize some artists, the first being El Greco.  It struck me as increasingly wondrous the more this happened, for not only was I imagining the careful workmanship of some unknown craftsman, I knew something about him.

There were some very well known artists represented in the collection.  Moving across the hallway, more and more cropped up, Rodin, Picasso, Cezanne, Monet, Degas (one of Degas's only sculptures, Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, is housed here).  Among the American artists were Stuart (including his portrait of Washington that inspires the image on the one dollar bill), Rockwell, Peale, and Remington, which was particularly exciting because his sculpture I saw has been reproduced and made lifesized.  That sculpture now resides outside the public library of my hometown.

I did not spend as much time on this side of the hallway because the bottom floor and one wing left roughly an hour and a half for the other wing, a few displays on the third floor (there was far fewer displays on that floor) and the annex where the more modern art was housed.  I really just ended up walking through the modern art quickly, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but there were many paintings I didn't get to read the placards to and appreciate that I would have otherwise spent more time admiring.  But alas, at the end of my time there I got to go pick up my one of God's own handiwork, the very crown of creation.  I am referring, of course, to my lovely wife.  By far, she was the most beautiful thing I saw all day.  Omnia Vincit Amour.