Lovely day in Recoleta

I wrote this on Sunday, so if anywhere it says “today,” I mean Sunday.

On Sunday, Meg, her friend Rachel, and I had a lovely afternoon in Recoleta. We started at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, a name that highly amuses me. “Bellas artes” means “fine arts,” but the direct translation is “pretty arts,” which always makes me think that the other museums are showing ugly arts. Anyway, the museum is a big pink building surrounded by trees. It’s on Av. del Libertador, a beautiful, wide avenue lined with parks, statues, and grand-looking buildings with columns, many of which are museums.

The MNBA has a very nice collection. The ground floor (what Americans would call the first floor) is mostly European art, with a nice room of impressionist paintings. I love impressionist paintings, mostly thanks to my grandmother. Most kids do things with their grandmothers like bake cookies, or maybe go to the park. My grandmother, however, was a modern art connoisseur, and my childhood was filled with trips to the east wing of the National Gallery, where my grandmother was a volunteer docent and tour guide for many years. We would walk through the rooms of Monet and Degas (my favorites), Manet (her favorite) and many others. She would make me stand back to see the whole painting and then stand right up next to the canvass to inspect the individual brush strokes. She loved the brush strokes and that a shadow might be painted using colors that aren’t really in the object, like purple shadows in a green apple, or on a woman’s face. She loved that when you got up close, the images lost their clarity, and she would always have me point out the brush strokes I liked. She also liked the textures and paintings where the artist had built up the paint and it wasn’t just smooth.

She encouraged me to use this technique during our many art-making sessions. When I didn’t show any affinity for drawing or painting, we focused on collage and sculpture, making eclectic works of art with the large quantities of varied materials that she hoarded for me, and which took up most of the closet space in my grandparents’ small apartment. She also had quite a collection of those postcards that you can buy at the gallery with prints of famous paintings on one side, and we spent a lot of time with these. She would quiz me on the artists (I’m sorry to say I’ve probably forgotten most of them) and ask me what I saw in the paintings. I don’t really know that much about art, and I’m not very articulate when discussing it, but I still love the impressionists and when I go to museums I still stand back to see the whole image and then get up close to examine the brush strokes.

Well, that was a little off-track, but I miss my grandmother very much (she died six years ago) and I always think of her when I go to art museums. So, the point is that I really enjoyed the MNBA. The first floor (known in the States as the second floor) is Argentine art, which we didn’t really look at, so I’ll definitely be going back. The second floor (or the third floor…you get the idea) had a temporary exhibit of photographs by Cuban photographer Cayetano Arcidiacono, and is actually the reason we went to the MNBA in the first place. The exhibit was small, but I really liked it. Speaking as someone with a very limited knowledge of influential photographers (besides, of course, the important works of my father, my uncle, Dave Burnett, and Pete Souza), there were some images that really reminded me of Ansel Adams and that other photographer whose name I can't remember.... Helpful, I know.

After the MBNA, we walked across the street to the Recoleta Cultural Center. On the weekends the plaza outside the center serves as a huge artisan market, and on a beautiful day like today, there are tons of people out, tourists and Argentines alike. Besides the artisan booths, there were bands playing and an array of circus-type acts, like people spinning plates, walking tightropes, miming, and whatever you call that thing where people wrap themselves in cloth and do acrobatics hanging from the ceiling (or in this case, a tree), cirque du soleil style.

The plaza at the Cultural Center (and the many other parks in BA) is definitely a place Argentines go to hang out Sundays. It is very common to see families and groups of friends sitting out on nice afternoons with picnics and mate, which is a very Argentine tradition. Mate (pronounced MAH-teh, for you non-Spanish speakers) is a lot like green tea, and Argentines drink it out of a vessel that is also called a mate. This is a very social practice; everyone drinks out of the same mate. Traditional mates are made of hollowed-out gourds, but you also see ones made out of metal, wood, and porcelain. Mates are often works of art, with beautiful paintings or intricate carvings. And it’s not one of those traditions you hear about, but don’t really see; they really are everywhere. So we sat on the lawn and ate fruit salad and pan rellena (sort of like a calzone, but yummier). It was a lovely day!