Sunday, April 25, 2010

Museum Report - Indian Art

I am not what you would call an art lover but I do appreciate the arts that surround each culture. This was my second time to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a great museum that is very large and full of different exhibits that change frequently.


Beautiful day shot of the outside of the Met before it started to rain.



Once you enter the Indian art exhibit you first see these tiny artifacts.



There wasn't a description on them, so I am sorry I cannot explain what these artifacts are. What I find fascinating is that these small artifacts are highly detailed. I start to notice that Indian art focuses a lot on details from the facial features to the body elements.




Krishna fighting a horse demon.


This is a large piece of art showing Krishna jamming his elbow into the horse demon's mouth. The body below Krishna shows the death of the horse demon.










As you walk deeper into the exhibit the art pieces get larger. What definitely caught my eye was the giant statue of the four armed Vishnu


standing at nine feet tall. His role is to preserve the world-- he would be called upon to descend down to Earth to combat great evil.


















The next piece that I found interesting was this Shiva being portrayed as the Lord of Dance.
At first I did not notice the hands until I read the plaque. It says this one image depicts Shiva's role as creator, preserver, and destroyer.



This is called Buddha in Meditation. There were various Buddha's displayed however this was the only one that stood out with its copper material.



After walking through the Indian art exhibit, I noticed that all their art is very detail oriented. I also noticed that a majority of the sculptures have a similar emotion on their face no matter if the figure is in a fighting, dancing, or meditating stance. They all seem to have a similar happy smile on their face in every sculpture. The only artifacts that showed a different emotion was that in the first picture seen above. There wasn't a plaque with a name for these artifacts so my attempt at Googling for an answer failed.

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