wish my name were irish

Went to the Hugh Lane Gallery today in Dublin.  Much more worthwhile than the National Gallery or the Irish Museum of Modern Art.  The Hugh Lane started as a private collection (of Sir Hugh Lane) and is now a public gallery funded by Dublin City Council.  The building itself was beautiful and functional, nicely integrating a recent extension, seen below.

National Gallery, in contrast, had all these hallways that went unused, stairways blocked off, and little nooks that were completely empty in the Millennium Wing.  It’s like the museum people and the architect were not communicating when it was built– he incorporated all this great display space and the museum people decided they didn’t like it after the fact.

At the Hugh Lane, there was an exhibition called Other Men’s Flowers.  The curator explained that the title came from the French moralist Michel de Montaigne – “in this book I have only made up a bunch of other men’s flowers, providing of my own only the string that ties them together.” The pieces in the show all seemed to draw their inspiration from or be quoting from other works of art.  Exhibition was so-so, but I thought the quote from Montaigne was applicable to a lot of what we do in creative and academic endeavors.

One part of the museum I found very strange– the museum has Francis Bacon’s studio in its entirety.  They had a team of archaeologists meticulously record the thousands of objects that were in the room (in London) and then shipped it all to Dublin and set it up again exactly as it was the day that Bacon died.  The room was a mess– paint smeared on the walls, newspaper clippings and pages torn from books all over the floor, hundreds of paint brushes, torn canvases, etc.  Just odd to see it in the middle of a museum.

Cherishing the rest of my time in Dublin before I am forced to be with the group for 3 straight weeks in Northern Ireland (leaving this Tuesday).

Going to the Irish Film Institute tomorrow to see part of the Documentary Film Festival including a film about Annie Leibovitz and a series of short films.

Just realized I used proper captialization in this post.  No idea why.  Too bad I still write in fragments.