Fortunately, a friend of mine was able to wrangle up some free tickets to the “Americans in Paris” exhibition at the MFA. I say “fortunately” because after seeing it, I know I would have been upset by it had I paid twenty-three bucks to get in. Sunday morning was definitely not the time to go. Here’s what it was like:

It should be heartening to see so many people getting excited about 19th Century art, I guess. But it’s actually not hard to see the appeal (it was much harder to see the art, in fact)–not much has really changed since then, as for the aspirations of the middle class. Styles of dress have come and gone, but the modus operandi is intact. We can still identify fully with Mary Cassatt’s subjects. We may think we have come a long way, baby, since Sargent’s Madame X scandalized society in 1884, but artists and advertisers are operating along the same lines today.

Aside from Madame X, the show’s centerpiece seems to have been Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother, 1871, which people in the gallery flocked to, for some reason. There seems to be a sentimental attachment to the picture that goes utterly counter to the artist’s intentions for it. He painted it as an arrangement of objects, essentially, not as a portrait. But sentimentality was the lens through which art and culture were viewed by the bourgeois in the Victorian era. And not much has changed in this, either.

“Whistler’s Mother” was given a wall of its own, which further lent it an aura of importance. The exhibition organizers seemed to say, “lookit, here’s something.” I’m not sure if it would have commanded quite as much attention if it had been presented differently. Not that it’s not worthy, in its way. It’s an interesting picture, with an interesting past, for sure.

I didn’t spend much time scrutinizing it, myself, though. It was hard to spend much time with any one painting, there were so many people pressing to get up close and personal with all of them. It was so crowded and stuffy in the hall, that we didn’t spend much time there–I think we were probably in and out in fifteen minutes.

I decided it would be more fun to hunt the halls of the MFA for animal portraiture, anyway. This took us to several galleries, where we found some snakes, lobsters, fish and frogs:

(All on this delightful mid-16th century oval platter attributed to Bernard Pallisy, which my friend said would be an absolute bitch to clean. I told him, not to worry, we have people for that. He scoffed, saying, “and anyway what on earth would you serve in it?” I told him I thought Jell-O would be cool.)

And, of course there were lots of dogs, doing what dogs do. Far too many for this humble blog (they deserve an art-dog blog of their own). But here are a couple of my favorites: