The Cleveland Museum of Art

Visiting The Cleveland Museum of Art for the first time, I was impressed by the breadth of the collection. What a fabulous resource for the local community, students in particular, to see works from all over the world, from earliest times to the present.

One object I spent some time examining was the above ceramic jar, in the Native North American gallery. The ancestral Pueblo culture, also called Anasazi, has long interested me. (In high school, I wrote a paper on the culture titled, “Remains to be Seen,” which may be the worst title I’ve ever used. Maybe.)

The olla’s description in the museum’s catalogue says:

The Anasazi lived for centuries in small agricultural settlements scattered across Four Corners region of the southwest. After AD 850, however, favorable factors converged and they built the most ambitious architectural projects ever constructed in native North America: Chaco Canyon’s great houses and cliff dwellings at such sites as Mesa Verde. Pottery-making also reached a high point during this period, as this vessel testifies. By 1300 the Anasazi had dispersed, forming groups ancestral to many modern Pueblo peoples, including the Hopi and the Zuni.

What makes this pot so interesting is how such care was taken to make a utilitarian object, a water jar, into something beautiful. Also that it has survived (albeit in pieces) from maybe 900 years ago. Amazing.

I also like to seek out Vincent van Gogh’s paintings, and Cleveland sure has some.

Vincent van Gogh, The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy), 1889

Andy Warhol’s famous work below made my cell phone camera’s facial recognition feature go crazy. 🙂

Andy Warhol's Marilyn X 100, 1962 — Andy Warhol’s Marilyn X 100, 1962

Finally, something quite interesting that one of the guards at the museum told me, is that their cast of Rodin’s Thinker outside had been bombed in 1970. The video below illustrates how the damaged sculpture has been remounted and displayed.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is museum no. 15 in my #100museums challenge (see 100 Museums Challenge).