Over Winter Break, I took a family outing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. During the ride, we planned out what we would visit. We decided that we should start by going to the Egyptian section, since we were all interested in seeing the Temple of Dendur exhibit. After that, we would just look at maps and decide where to go next.
If you’ve never been to the Met, I strongly recommend that you go just to see the Temple of Dendur, if nothing else. It is a magnificent and colossal temple that is set on a small podium in a huge room of the museum, and to recreate the actual temple, there is a stream of running water that flows in a moat around this podium. People can go into the actual temple, where enough of the edifice has been reconstructed so that you can walk around inside and see engravings and hieroglyphs on the walls. This exhibit, by far, is one of my favorites at the Met, and it is also near the other cool Egyptian artifacts that we looked at, such as the sarcophagi.
Splitting off from the others, my sister, my cousin, and I made our way upstairs to the Modern Art. On our way we stopped by the Renaissance Art section, where we saw many interesting and strange self-portraits. We were amused by the fact that some of these self-portraits depicted their painters in unflattering ways, with foul expressions on their faces. It was also interesting to see the ideal for women’s bodies in this time period and in the different cultures portrayed: many of the women were overweight and had loose fat all over their bodies, an ideal that seems to have changed today as the preference in America has leaned more towards thinner women. Yet in these paintings, it was clear that women who were bigger had the most admirers! We also saw some interesting paintings that depicted feasts in which men were bringing lobsters out of ponds, and others in which only one part of the scene was in color and the rest was colorless. We soon exhausted our attention in the Renaissance Art and headed on to the Modern Art section.
The Modern Art was really cool, and included some works from Andy Warhol and other notables of the time period. One of my favorite things from this part of the museum was a set of about ten different canvasses in a row, each painted completely with a pastel-like color. The colors ranged from sunset orange to salmon pink to aquamarine turquoise to rainforest green. It was amazing to see all these shades in a row and made it feel like you were looking at nature, because each color resembled a part of the natural world, like the sea, the flora, or the fauna. I found this work aesthetically pleasing and could look at it for minutes on end! What was nice about the Modern Art section was that no two works resembled each other in the slightest, so there was lots of variety in what we were seeing. Although it was small (only two rooms of artwork), I liked this section of the Met a lot.
Finally, we had completed our stay at the Met. Having been there for a few hours and feeling weary, the three of us returned to meet up with the rest of the group at the Temple of Dendur and head out. Overall, I enjoyed going to the Met and I would recommend it to anyone because since it is so large, there is always something for everyone to enjoy, and even if you stay for a long time there is still always more to see.