Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York City - the Fifth Floor

This really was an artistic treat.  There are 6 floors of exhibitions with lounges and cafe’s and expresso bars.  Lonely Planet tour guide recommended we get tickets on line but I had no way of printing them so decided instead to get to the museum early.  This was a good idea. It opened at 10 am and when we left around 12:30 there was quite a line up for tickets.  $25 for adults and well worth it for the 5th floor alone.  This was the collection galleries 1880 to 1950’s.
I love Paul Klee. I love Marc Chagall. I love Gustav Klimt.    I love the impressionists. I love the post impressionists.  I love the surrealists especially.  It’s all so inspiring.  So we walked around the gallery full of favourites like going to a concert with dozens of stages.  Visually this modern art is like seeing live, Sinatra, Elvis, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Dylan, Joni Mitchell. It’s that sort of experience.
I love Picasso’s early paintings and his later cubism.  Without knowing what an incredible artist he was in pictures the boy with the horse or his blue period I’d not appreciateh is abstract art.  He’s so accomplished.
Starry Nights by Van Gogh.  There’s the song and here was the original.  Wow!  I loved seeing the surrealist Salvador Dali’s clocks.  Wow!
Seurat and Monet.  So many greats, a generation of artists to choose from and there were a whole lot of lesser known but equally or almost equally as exceptional.  As a result of the world wars there was a lot of repudiation of the modern.  Lots of soul searching and trying to express this.  Surrealism was a dream like exploration with elements of Freud.
A whole room of Matisse.  Matisse’s dancers and the dancers of Degas.  So uplifting. I forgot how much I loved Rousseau until I saw his pictures, thought I love that, and found out it was Rousseau.  And Gauguin of course, The Frenchman’s dream come true. We just fell in love with the Fifth Floor and had more floors yet to go.  Unbelievably rich eye candy, mind changing, soulful experience.

Ulyanovsk Art Gallery

Barrett and I walked to Ulyanovsk’s Art Gallery. On the way we passed little horses presumably waiting to be ridden by kiddies as well as bicycle rentals. The city crews were out working on the lovely gardens overlooking the Volga. We’d opted for the Art Gallery because they had Dali and Picasso.  “Quite the show for a little town, wouldn’t you say,” commented Barrett. Indeed.  What we found out though was that the ticket to the art gallery excluded the Dalli and Picasso Room.  I was happy to shell out the extra but Barrett thought the one room charge exorbitant.  She went for a walk in the park while I did the one room realizing immediately that Barrett wouldn’t have liked it anyway. She’s not much on terribly abstract. This was Dali at his most abstract. Bits of bodies and flies and such. Mostly they were pencil and paper sketches of both greats as if they were from their art books.  I liked the selection.  They didn’t allow photographs. t also liked the art in the other exhibit too.  They they let me photograph.