Harold's Sketchbook

James Ensor at MoMa

Drawings from the Compass in Hand exhibit at MoMa

YellowFever Live at the Whitney

Walking out of the Francis Bacon show at the Metropolitan Museum and looking at the beautiful Joachim Patinir triptych in the European Paintings Galleries.

The Alice Neel show at David Zwirner's Gallery in Chelsea

Another Alice Neel

The Caillebotte show at the Brooklyn Art Museum

To be continued . . .

Visit more of Harold’s Sketchbooks at www.haroldgraves.com

My friend Amala and I went over to the Brooklyn Museum last week and spent some time in the African Galleries on the first floor.  This mask is one of the first things you see on display when you walk into the exhibition space.  There’s a video playing next to it that shows some of the dances where these masks were worn.  Amala and I had a discussion about the Dogon Star People:  a civilization in Africa with a special understanding of astronomy, who believe they are from the constellation Pleiades.  I seem to remember reading about them in Robert Farris Thompson’s book, Flash of the Spirit.  I remember Thompson’s work was being discussed a lot when I was studying painting and drawing at the Yale Summer School of Art, back in 1985.

The Brooklyn Museum has an enormous Egyptian collection; I think I read somewhere that it rivals or even surpasses the Metropolitan Museum in the sheer number of objects that they have on display.  The Brooklyn Museum strives to be “user friendly” in that they post a lot of information about the objects that you’re looking at.  There were several timelines showing the entire span of Egyptian civilization and where the various objects fit onto the timeline.  This little statue of Horus is about a foot tall; I think it was from the Middle Kingdom: