Dinner and MFA with family
My dad came into town this weekend, and my brother and I had a great visit with him. We went out to Bricco for dinner Friday night, which is this wonderful Italian restaurant in the North End. I almost never eat out anymore, certainly not at places of that caliber, so it was a real treat. We ordered pumpkin tortellini, tuna tartare, and beef carpaccio for appetizers, and for our entrees we got duck, swordfish quenelles, and vension. I'd never actually had venison before, and even though it's supposed to be very lean and a bit tough, I was shocked at how tender they were able to make it. Then we went to a nearby pastry place for turtle cheesecake and tiramisu.
On Saturday we went to the MFA, which I'm ashamed to admit I've only been to twice in all the time I've lived here. We saw the Chihuly exhibit years ago, which was wonderful, but I haven't been back since. The main attraction they have now is on Hokusai, the world's most famous Japanese artist, who worked in paint and block printing and whose most recognizable image is The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the first in his "Thirty-Six Views on Mt. Fuji" series.
The ads for it on the museum website didn't wow me, but once we were actually in it, I thought it was great. It was actually neat, because though I wasn't really familiar with his work, but as soon as I saw the Great Wave image, I recognized the art style from a print my dad has had on his office wall since before I was born. It's of a fisherman and a little boy standing on a rock, casting nets into a sea done exactly in the style of the wave. Apparently Dad's print, which he picked up just because he thought it looked cool on his very first business trip to Japan, is number thirty-two in that same series.
I always thought the boy looked like a little sea otter in a jacket.
His work is really distinctive and beautiful, notable for its blue outlines and the way it combines traditional Chinese mythology with depictions of daily life in Edo Japan. He's a lot older than I would have expected, having worked from the late 1700s to the mid 1800s, and he wasn't discovered until he was in his seventies.
We actually loved everything we saw. We checked out the early American exhibit, with its Colonial furniture and portraits of the founding fathers, the American modern, full of Pollock and Warhol, the Cubists with Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp, and the Impressionists, the Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, and Gaugin. My family particularly loves Impressionism, the brushstrokes, the walking-away effect, the soft, vibrant colors, the intensely personal nature of it. My mom was a big fan and a longtime student of it, so we grew up with that sort of art in our lives, and she taught us to love it. The ones in the MFA are so warm and exciting, like looking out a window to a bright clear day to a picturesque part of France. They even had Degas's Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, one of my favorite sculptures of all time. It made us all very happy, and made me remember my mother teaching me about this stuff.
We wanted to stay longer and see more-- we were headed to the Ancient Roman section at this point --but apparently it closes at five. We were sad, but we consoled ourselves by going to then eat a metric ton of raw oysters. But I definitely want to go back. They're free with a valid student ID to a Boston-area school.