My Favorite Museum? It’s a Close Race

Too close to call

Image by author.

I’m an art gawker, so I have traveled far and wide to view my favorite works of art in person. Let me assure you, if you have not stood in front of Renoir’s Le Moulin de la Galette, at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, then you have never really seen it, regardless of how many pictures of it you may have looked at. That painting is alive, it vibrates, the light shimmers as if it were a movie. A photo cannot reproduce that experience.

Trust me, you know when it’s real.

So, asking me to choose my favorite museum is challenging. I tend to equate museums with the works they house. To see Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez, I went to the Museo del Prado in Madrid. I had seen images of that painting countless times, but at full scale, in real life, it’s astonishing.

I can say the same about Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm or Picasso’s Guernica. The sense of scale of these works magnifies the viewing experience. I visited Ottawa to see Voice of Fire by American painter Barnett Newman. It is a massive piece, 540 cm × 240 cm (213 in × 94 in) in size. It hangs alone in a cavernous room.

It is a simple composition consisting of three equally sized vertical stripes, with the outer two painted blue and the centre painted red. I know… it doesn’t sound like much, until you…