JUDGING ONLY BY THE ARTISTS represented, we could have been at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris or the Met in NYC. Surprise— Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes is in Buenos Aires! We took advantage of “Oosterdam’s” overnight stay for a look at their impressive collection of Impressionists.
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
The Kiss
Degas is always a favorite
The whole gang was represented—Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pisarro and Berthe Morisot—paintings we had never seen before. The exhibit centered around the sculptures of Auguste Rodin which had been donated by an Argentine philanthropist and a plaster of “Earth and Moon” which Rodin, himself, gave to the museum.
Best in Show goes to Vincent
There is more modern work, too; Amedeo Modigliani, Henry Moore, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock plus rooms full of Argentine painters. Best in show—in my opinion—is “Le Moulin de la Galette” the slow-starter Vincent van Gogh.
Recoleta Cemetery, worth dying for
Oppulence in Death
RIP, Evita
Cementerio Recoleta could be only Buenos Aires. Covering fourteen acres, Recoleta must be what a Roman necropolis looked like. There are more than 4600 mausoleums in styles from Egyptian to Art Deco, Baroque to Art Nouveau containing the remains of famous Argentine politicians, Nobel Laureates and military leaders. The most notable, Eva Peron, occupies one of the most unpretentious mausoleums—and most difficult to photograph.
Morning walk in Buenos Aires
The jacaranda blossoms we remembered from 2010 have fallen but one thing hasn’t changed. We passed a dozen dog-walkers, each with six to ten dogs of various sizes—the most entrepreneurial guy had sixteen!—all walking along in harmony. We read that owners pay $2.50 for an hour walk, not a bad gig for a city with an average wage of less than $5/hour.
