We took the students to Dublin for the bank holiday today. In all the previous years that I’ve participated in the program, we’ve spent the weekend closest to Bloom’s Day in Dublin. But this year we are taking our weekend excursion in Galway so we can visit Inish Mor and the Cliffs of Moher. Our director Barry Vaughan made arrangements for all of us to be picked up at 9:00 a.m. this morning so that we could get the 10:00 a.m. train, tickets for which went on sale at 9:30. We wanted that train because the ticket price was the least expensive of the day – 12 euro round trip, or for a “return” as it’s called here.
I wasn’t up for a marathon day of walking around the city. Once we arrived my colleague Bob Farwell and I walked to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, just ten-minutes from Heuston Station. The IMMA is housed in the facilities of the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, which was built in 1684, and includes a formal garden. I’d never been there before, and the big draw was a special exhibit of paintings and drawings by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
The exhibit, Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera: Masterpieces of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, was remarkable and included some of Frida Kahlo’s most iconic self portraits. Go here to learn more about it and see images of some of the paintings. There were three paintings that really knocked me out, two of which are the ones depicted on webpage: Frida’s "Self Portrait as a Tehuana or Diego in My Thoughts" and Diego’s "Portrait of Natasha Gelman."
The third was Frida’s “The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Me, Diego, and Senor Xolotl”, painted in 1949. I snagged the image from this site. Here’s what the exhibition guide said about the painting: “Kahlo’s multi-layered composition highlights her search for harmony between the dualisms of life and death, male and female, light and dark. The painting shows deities in a series of embraces: an alabaster-skinned god (the universe) encompasses the dark-skinned goddess (the earth/Mexico), within whose arms Kahlo is enfolded. The goddess Mexico acts as cosmic wet nurse to Rivera, while Kahlo carries the child Diego, who is depicted as the Indian God Shiva. In this work therefore, Kahlo connects Christian iconography with Eastern traditions.” I'd say there's some indigenous mythological concepts in there, too.
After the exhibit I had an unexpectedly excellent lunch of salmon en croute and carrot salad in the café. I made a quick jaunt past the formal gardens, and then headed back to Heuston Station. The 2:30 train for Athlone was at the platform when I arrived at 2:11, so I found a seat and promptly drifted off for most of the trip home. I was back in my apartment by 4:15 p.m. Barry was back by 5:15 and the students have been drifting in. The last train left at 7:15, so ideally they will all be snug in their apartments by 9:00.
Good thing, too. The temperature has been dropping steadily for the rest of the evening. It’s now raining hard and Barry told me that snow and sleet are expected in the higher elevations tonight. It’s January weather in June.
The photos at the top show the exhibit announcement at the entrance to the museum and roses from the garden. The one just above here is the top 15 feet of a sculpture outside the main entrance. Below is a corner of the formal garden with modern Dublin apartment buildings behind.
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