Recently my mom and sister invited me to join them at the Brooklyn Art Museum to see the Norman Rockwell exhibit. I love Rockwell so I gladly joined along. I had never been to the Brooklyn Art Museum so this was also new NYC exploring territory – wahoo!
The museum itself is a modern, light and airy building with some great characteristics such as this exposed brick greeting us at the entrance. The entrance fee was a suggested $10, that felt pretty reasonable to me.
First things first we visited the exhibit we came there to see, “Norman Rockwell, Behind the Camera.” This exhibit was really interesting and anyone who likes Rockwell would certainly enjoy it. During his career Rockwell started taking photographs of the image he had in mind to draw. He would gather models and instead of making them sit for hours on end while he drew them and got it just so, he would get them set up, take hundreds of photographs and from those photographs he would create his famous iconic pieces.
The entire exhibit showed the photographs that were taken for select pieces and then next to it the finished Rockwell piece. It was really neat to see the models behind the drawings and to see how Rockwell took certain things from each picture. For example, if he took 25 pictures of one scene, he might use posture from one photo, a facial expression from the other, etc. It was fun to look at the photos and the final piece and pick out what he used from each photograph when applicable. The exhibit was really enjoyable, fairly extensive, and showed a video at the end about Rockwell’s life. He seemed like such an eccentric, fun loving, yet serious man.
Once we had fully experienced the Rockwell exhibit we decided to explore the rest of the museum for a bit. The picture above is the European Paintings section. My favorite floor though was the 3rd Floor I believe….
It had houses and rooms decorated from different time periods and well, I’m just a sucker for that kind of stuff. It started out with just rooms on exhibit and we played a fun game where we looked at each room and decided what our favorite thing in the room was. It was interesting to see that we usually all picked different things, guess we have different tastes. Then about halfway through the floor we stumbled upon houses (as seen above) where you could walk in and look at the rooms. It wasn’t exactly like walking through someone’s home you didn’t have complete free access, but I really enjoyed it.
All in all we had a good time. I really enjoyed the Rockwell exhibit, it was easily the highlight of the museum. With all the amazing museums in Manhattan itself it’s tough to give the Brooklyn Art Museum a high rating. I didn’t think there specific art collections were that spectacular but I did love like I said the floor with all the period furnishings. I would recommend this museum to anyone who was really captivated by a special exhibit they were having and then while you’re there tour the rest of the museum.
Post in Comments:
Do you like period furnishings? I love getting a glimpse into how people lived!
Yes! One of my favorite tours I’ve ever taken was of James and Dolly Madison’s home, Montpelier, when it was under renovation (the previous owner left the funds for it to be restored to it’s original grandeur). Unfortunately, many of the original furnishings were sold off years ago, but they did have replica and salvaged items they were going to use for the final restoration on display in a separate area.
By: Erin Bain on March 8, 2011
at 3:13 pm