We took the back entrance from the parking lot ($5).
And up the staircase.
As you would expect for a museum of this stature, there are thousands of exhibits most of which would be worth a large fortune.
But what really impressed me was the Grand Staircase to the Art Galleries.
The stairway leads to the second floor which has large murals on the wall.
One of the murals.
The floor.
The Museum is famous for its collection of plaster casts of famous porticoes, temples etc. The casts are quite realistic, it's only when you bang on them (lightly) that you can tell they are not the real thing.
The detail is impressive.
More porticoes.
The Hall of Sculpture, modeled on the Parthenon's inner sanctum.
On this day, there were just these chairs in the Hall.
This was perhaps the exhibit that fascinated me the most and it's only a few thousand years old.
What a great office chair. It looks so heavy and solid.
An interesting way to make a dining table out of two slabs of wood from the same tree.
Part of a fascinating video by Doug Aitken, 'Migration' which features wild animals placed in motel rooms. The link leads to a Youtube video.
Of course, there are the usual range of famous paintings that one would expect to see in a major art museum. However, after three months in Australia, I did note a serious lack of Aussie paintings in this museum and I did rather miss them.
At this stage, my camera batteries ran out so although we went into the adjoining Carnegie Museum of Natural History and saw the dinosaurs,I have no photos of them.
If you plan to visit these museums, allow the best part of a day. They are quite large and there is plenty to see.
Great photos. That's one fascinating building - reminds me of visiting some of the London museums and being taken by the buildings at least as much as the collections...
ReplyDeleteThose porticoes sound interesting - something I'd love to see. But I also like the modern exhibits you've covered - tables and chairs as art is an interesting idea.
Watched the "Migration" clip - again, a very unusual idea and some wonderful shots, although I felt a bit sorry for the animals being left in these strange (to them) environments. None of them seemed frightened, rather curious - which makes me wonder how "wild" they actually were, or how many such experiments it took to get the film together, and how many trashed motel rooms?