San Francisco Trip & Edvard Munch

While attending one of Tom Petty’s final concerts of his 40^th Anniversary Tour my daughter and I visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. There was an exhibit of the work of Edvard Munch, who as it turns out was a very depressing guy. Fortunately, there were also works by several of my favorites: Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Franz Marc, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Salvador Dali, Joan Michell, Edward Hopper, and Robert Rauschenberg.

While traveling from France to Italy in May of 2011 we stopped in Nice and visited the Matisse Museum. Also got to see the Marc Chagall Museum. I remember one of my early and most successful art projects when my daughter was in elementary school involved making a composition that included a shape from a Matisse work. Some of the windows of the museum were painted on the outside of the building.

Although I never taught a lesson about Braque, his work is somewhat similar to that of Picasso. When I teach about Franz Marc, I usually pair him with Wassily Kandinsky.

In my Kindergarten Art Projects post, there is a project on LINE inspired by Mondrian.

I enjoy seeing works by artists like Jackson Pollock that are not like his typical splatter paintings although he does like to use lots of lines.

I could do an entire post about the 12 female abstract impressionists (like Joan Mitchell) who were on display in the Palm Springs Art Museum when we visited in March 2017.


I'm not sure why but I love seeing the work of Edward Hopper. His "Nighthawks" has been parodied several times including the one with Elvis, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Humprey Bogart.

Rauschenberg is another artist whose mixed media collage is a textural feast for the senses.