Monday, April 2, 2007

Art event: Visit to the Walters Art Museum

Over spring break, I visited the Walters Art Museum in order to see Untamed: The Art of Antoine-Louis Barye.

Barye lived between 1796 and 1875, and is most well known for his bronze sculptures of animals. Most of the animals in his sculptures are in action in some way-- most often hunting or being hunted. There were tiger hunts, there were lion hunts, there were stag hunts, there were bear hunts. There were bears attacking stags, dogs attacking bears, tigers attacking crocodiles, and snakes attacking tigers.

They were all variations on a theme, to say the least.

He was very good at what he did: in the hunting scenes, riders often look like they're about to fall off their horses. He was excellent at capturing motion and action.

What was very interesting to me was that they also displayed a variety of his paintings, in oil and watercolors, which were, to me at least, sweeter. It was a very nice break from all the man vs. nature captured in bronze. The paintings still always involved animals, but it was more likely that it was a lion trotting along a path, or a tiger rolling around on its back. However, Barye never really left France, never really got to see these exotic animals in their natural habitats. He studied and sketched them at the Jardin des Plantes, and so often wound up painting a lion trotting along a path... in the French countryside.

In fact, I attended this exhibit with my mother, and when we saw the lion tortting along the path in the French countryside painting, she exclaimed, "Someone better call the zoo, quick! That lion's escaped!" She didn't even need to read the wall text to see that the lion was out of place.

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