Museum Essay

Unknown Artist                                                  Franz Marc
Marble Statue of a Lion,ca.400-390 B.C          Fighting Cows,1911
Marble,Parian 2                                                 Oil on Canvas

      In the Metropolitan museum of Art I saw many forms of art that I thought to be very beautiful and intriguing but these two,the Marble Statue of a Lion and Fighting cows captivated me the most. They both depict animals as their subjects,which I love, and they also show the animals in a way that makes it better and maybe even refreshing to see. The way the artist re-creates the animal in their artwork is what makes it even more special than the ways the other artists around the museum because it is in their point of view. Although the two pieces of art I choose seem polar opposites, one being a painting while the other being a sculpture and one being really colorful while the other simply being one color,they both share something in common. And I believe that that is the way they were depicted. For example when I saw the lion for the first time, I got the impression of it being more like a playful dog than it being in an attack stance. I get this feeling by the way it seems to be happy and smiling and it raising its rear in the air which can't be an attacking stance since lions crouch to hide from their prey and it helps them sprint faster and higher. Plus dogs raise their rears in such a way that shows they are in a playful mood. And showing that the artist creates this in an out of the box view of a lion and in his own way.
       Also, just like in the sculpture,the painting seems to show the animal doing something out of the ordinary. And I'm not referring to fact that cows are fighting,because that is very normal since they do so for territorial reasons and was even made into a Swiss event in the
1920s.But as i said the artist re-creates the image of the animal in a way they see it, and Franz did just that using colors to represent emotions such as spirituality and maleness to blue, femininity and sensuality to yellow, and terrestrial materiality to red. So in a way it can be said that the fact that the cows are depicted as an unrealistic color would make it an out of the box work of art but it is also the fact that he gives it meaning and creates something that seems fantasy such as the sculptor for the lion which also made the lion seem fictional by giving it a dog like look. And overall both seem to represent stylized forms of artwork which I believe they are in the museum for, as well as the emotions they invoke and the way they were made and the ideas behind them. Whenever I see such artworks in the museums that have huge gaps in time I feel amazed and at the same time surprised at how many differences and similarities they all seem to have no matter what,because they are forms of art and ways of expression.