I was in Atlanta last week and the highlight of my trip was a visit to the High Museum. I'd really wanted to go ever since they opened up the new building (designed by Renzo Piano). It's beautiful, and a great exhibit space, and fits with the old Richard Meier building (one of the great American public buildings of the last few decades) very, very well. I was very impressed.
But happily the interesting and beautiful things about the High didn't end at its architecture. I highly recommend a visit to it. At the moment there's a great Andrew Wyeth exhibit going on, but really it's generally remarkable for a museum of its size in terms of the breadth of its offerings. It's light on photography (though it's got a few gems including a portrait by Man Ray in which he's using the Sabattier effect), but has many beautiful pieces across a wide range of media. It's got great clocks, funky furniture, religious paintings by old Masters, important pieces of American glassworks, and I could go on and on. Personally, I loved the Wyeth exhibit (I exited thinking a lot more of his work than I did previously, and I liked him before), there's a cool, sort of evil, Durer engraving, and great Gorky painting of figures relaxing at a resort, a great "skyscraper" bookcase, a lot of wonderful furniture by the Herter brothers, and ... well, many beautiful things. So if you are looking for an interesting way to spend a couple of hours in Atlanta, you should definitely check out the High Museum.
That said, I noticed two strikes against it. First, the Starbucks in the basement is quite possibly the worst in the world. Secondly, I found the caption on one of the paintings something between bizarre and horrifying. The painting (depicting a scene shortly before a figure in the Bible is raped) is an exceptionally beautiful piece of art. But in the caption the museum opts not to refer to the event depicted as a rape. Instead the caption relies on innuendo and refers to "violent love". Am I the only guy who finds that extremely inappropriate?
Posted by armand at January 9, 2006 08:30 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Culture