Friday, August 22

Monet or Manet?

Katie, Eitan and Ethan discuss Monet's 'haystacks'
Katie arranges a wonderful tour of The Met lead by a couple of guys from "Museum Hack" who shows us their favourite things including a 13 century Astrolabe which is an inclinometer historically used by astronomers, navigators and astrologers to tell time to within 15 minutes and determine latitudinal location using trigonometry (The West caught up with spring-driven clocks in the 16th century). According to our guide Ethan, these things were the ipods of the day.

We discuss Edouard Manet (who created "impressionism") and Claude Monet (the world's beloved impressionist). Our group breaks into teams and tasked to find their favourite Monet or Monet and defend it : Manet wins, 6-2 but, for the year, it is about even. 

Monet believed that by mixing fine colour strokes he was fooling the viewer's eye into seeing changing colours or intensities as the looker drew closer to the painting (Sauret took this to the next extreme; premise false btw).  Also: Manet's most famous paintings are of hookers and whores (black neck ribbon; he didn't have to pay them much) and fabulously engaging.