The Best of Both Worlds

It was a tough week for me, but it finally ended, and I tried to go out and cheer myself up this weekend.  As nearly always, the best way for me to go about doing just that, is to check out an art museum I havent yet seen.  There are so many great museums in Mexico city, to see them all would take more than a year.  But I dont have any intention of see them all, just those that have something in them that I think would be cool to see.  So it was with this in mind that on Saturday morning I skipped my usual lazy reading of the newspaper over breakfast, and went downtown to check out the National Art Museum. 

The museum is dedicated to the art of Mexico from the conquest to the present day, and is housed in a really cool, giant, grey stone colonial mansion with an open air court yard in the middle and beautiful marble staircases inside which gave it a very European feel.  After I saw all that I started to think how cool this place was going to be, and couldnt wait to jump in and check out all the paintings. 

I like to look at a painting at my pace, on my time, without nobody looking over my shoulder.  It should be just me, and this work of art.  It is only through seeing a painting this way that I can forget about the rest of my problems, and give myself over to the painting in front of me.  But there were so many guards around the place, vastly outnumbering the amount of visitors, that I could not enter a room without two or three guards jumping out of their chairs and following me around.  What is the point of that?  Cant they just sit there in their chair and watch me like at any other museum in the world?  As small a complaint as this might sound, it is one of the things that I cannot stand, and once I lose my concentration like that, its all over. 

So I stepped out for a minute, took a deep breath, and tried my best to ignore the peeping eyes that I felt all over me.  Its times like this that some Zen training would have come in handy, to lose myself in myself, and not be concerned with what everyone else around me is doing.  But, alas, this does not fit my personality well at all, and I allowed myself to get a little angry.  It didnt matter much at first, though, because the paintings on display werent anything to get excited about.  It was kind of fun to note all the different European influences: Italian mannerist influences in the early stuff– people with curvy, allongated necks, then Velazquez and Zurburan in the works from the mid 1600s.  But there was nothing brilliant, and I was able to quickly pass through the whole two centuries from 1580 to 1800 in an hour, and wasnt too bothered about the guards anymore. 

Those rooms were not exciting at all, and all that mediocrity was very uninspiring. Mexican art and architecture from the colonial period usually leaves you with that feeling, that everything here is a cheap imitation of Europe.  The same thing exists in the US, which also always seemed pretty boring to me, and with very little to offer culturally, compared to the rest of the world. 

But on the second floor of the musuem was where all the stuff from the revolucion is located, and it was here that my interest first started to be piqued. There was so much color and vibrancy in all the paintings!  When I saw them, I immediately thought, this is Mexico.  They werent just drab copies of European styles, but works whose theme fit the multi-racial culture of North America, and were full of all the color of the native cultures.  Finally, I was inspired, and I think I just got another lead in where I want to head on my next Mexican adventure.