September 17th

When we decided to go to New York City to see Hazmat Modine we also started looking for other things to do there. I saw an article in the NY Times about things to do this weekend in NY City.  One of the suggestions was an exhibit opening at the The Met, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, of works by Eugene Delacroix.  So today was a day at The Met.  On the way there we had a very friendly and helpful Uber driver that told us so many things to see around the city, it would takes weeks to see everything – another trip.

Delacroix was an early to mid-19^th century artist and is known as a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic period.  Diane and I were amazed at the detail of his paintings.  Even his watercolor works and drafts were unbelievably detailed.

Besides the many paintings that were on display in the main gallery they had a separate gallery showing his drawings leading up to many of the paintings that we saw in the main gallery.  For instance if a man’s back was to be in a painting Delacroix would study all the muscles in a man’s back even studying cadavers and make numerous drawings until he was satisfied.

Even though Delacroix sought detail in his paintings he never sought perfection.  This is Delacroix’s view of perfection “The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves nothing.”  We were super glad we stumbled onto this exhibit.

After the Delacroix exhibit we view the 19^th century gallery.  I am a huge impressionist fan and they had a lot, Monet’s Manet’s, Renoir’s, DeGas’, Van Gogh’s, etc., etc.  The last exhibit that we visited in The Met was Heavenly Bodies – Fashion and The Catholic Imagination. This was a dialogue between fashion and medieval art from the Met collection to examine fashion’s ongoing engagement with the devotional practices and traditions of Catholicism and it came with music.  Very unusual but pretty cool as well.

We had a great day at The Met.  Our next adventure was the Empire State Building.  The Met is on 82^nd St. and 5^th Avenue.  The Empire State Building is on 34^th Street 5th Avenue.  We wanted to kill time so we walked down 5^th Avenue.  Luckily we avoided rain as it was forecast for the area.  We were on our way to another Thai restaurant, V[IV] near the Empire State Building.  Dinner was good but didn’t quite make it to the Top Thai level.

The Empire State Building was fun and we took lots of photos.  They have observation balconies at the 80^th, 86^th and 102^nd floors and we did all three.  We had to wait for spaces to open up on each side of each observation balcony but that wasn’t a problem because they let you stay on each floor as long as you want.  Afterwards we had a beer at the Heartland Brewery at street level of the Empire State Building.  Then we called it a day and Ubered back to the hotel.