Philadephia Museum of Art: The Last Renoir

The Philadelphia Museum of Art was first established in 1928. The museum is on higher ground because the land that it is on was once a reservoir that supplied drinking water to the city. In later years, the reservoir became polluted due to the industrial factories that had opened during the Industrial Revolution, so they drained the reservoir and build this fabulous museum. The museum’s architectural design was based upon ancient Rome and Greece’s buildings like the pantheon and the aqueduct. I knew that the building had to be based upon ancient Greek and Roman architecture because of the ionic columns in the buildings exterior and interior. The statue of the Greek and Roman Goddess Diana also symbolized that they cherished Greek and Roman culture. The architecture is something to marvel at, but this summer I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the Last Renoir exhibition.
The Last Renoir is an exhibition that showcases Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s last three decades worth of artwork. The exhibition has most of the artwork, but it may be short one or two paintings or sculptures. The museum’s exhibition pamphlet shows a picture of Gabrielle Renard, who is his children’s nanny and their long time friend because she is Renoir’s wife’s cousin. This showcase of Renoir’s artwork taught me that his artwork influenced many other artists during his time and after his time. One of those people was Picasso. Picasso was upset that he did not get the chance to meet Renoir, so he attempted to create his own version of Renoir’s girls. Although it was still a little bit off, Picasso did learn a new way to paint the same picture. The last three decades of his life, Renoir started to stray away from his original paintings of impressionism and started painting pictures with nudes and paintings that depicts the life of his family and his friends’ families. One of my favorites is his two self portraits and the two photos with Gabrielle in it. (One was the side painting of Gabrielle and the other was Gabrielle with Jean or his elder son.) I took about one hour to two hours in the exhibition rooms because I want to learn more about this artist’s work, life and family. Visiting this museum is a wonderful opportunity to understand a once famous artist that I have rarely heard about.
Not only did I see the Last Renoir, but I took a public tour to the European Art 1500 to 1850. This collection of art is very full of rich culture and history. There is just so much to learn and so much to see because there are Knights and their weapons and there are paintings and furniture from that time period in different countries. Some of those countries include the Netherlands, France, England, Italy, Germany, and the United States. Each country had its own unqiue form of art. For example, England has a room with furniture and paintings, and sculptures from the house of William Penn. They moved the entire room to the museum for people to see a section of an old English home. From that room we can infer that the owner is pretty wealthy by looking at the fireplace and its design and by looking at the painting of him and his wife. His wife was wearing a very long and puffy dress that had a very vibrant color. We can infer that the dress was probably made from a very expensive material like silk. That room also had a couch from that time period and it was the original. That couch was made by a famous designer that wrote a book with his designs and his designs travelled to most of Europe and landed in the colonies. That would be the reason that in America, we would have a similar couch.
This museum is very unique and the museum price for general admission is free on the first Sunday of every month and they have a very big collection of art. It is a place that I intend to visit again when a new travelling exhibition arrives.

The West Lake in HangZhou , China

The West Lake is one of the biggest lakes in China and it is one of the most famous lakes in Chinese history. Many emperors have enjoyed the scenic view of the West Lake and have added their own scenary to the view. One emperor added the three islets that sit in the lake. The three islets are part of the outer West Lake, the site is well landscaped, creating an impression of "an islet in a lake and a lake on an islet." There are three pagodas built in the Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644) rising from the lake, each with five openings. On moonlit night, the pagodas release shafts can release candlelight on the night of the Moon Cake Festival in mid-autumn, when the moon is full. To travel to different locations on the West Lake, I brought boat tickets that allow me to travel to an island in the middle of the lake. The lake has great scenary that are meant to be in nature magazines, so bring your cameras and camera filters.

World Expo 2010

The World Expo is a great vacation destination for the summer and it is an even better place to see the people of China. Out of all the visitors that pass through its gates at the Expo Axis or other side entrances, most of the visitiors are either Chinese that live in China or the Chinese people coming to China to visit their extended family. The people are generally very nice and friendly, but there are a few people who were nasty and rude. For example, I was waiting in line to get on an Expo Bus to move to the European pavilions , when an old man and his family charged to the front of the line. They were behind me and they charged to the bus pretending that they were the the royal family and everybody else was unimportant. More importantly, they pushed someone off the bus just so that they can bring the old lady onto the bus. The volunteers were looking at the line; pretending that nothing happened.

The old man thought he had an excuse by saying that they were one family and they need to stay togeather. He failed to notice that everybody was with their families enjoying the Expo. When he grabbed his family and charged onto the bus, it was like that was the last bus and no more busses were coming. They ruined my day with one incident because I got furious and shouted at them. They were shaming their nationality with their unacceptable behavior that might have some people look down on them and other races of people would have been shocked to see a Chinese person act like that.
Just be a aware of these people when visting the pavilion because they they still have the old agricultural mind. They want to be fast because they experienced a time that was extremely harsh and there was not food and people had to be forceful. However that is no excuse to charge to the front of the line.

The First meeting of the CPC

The building that stands in Puxi today was the old clandestine location of the first meeting of the Communist Party of China. It is now a museum that offers free admission to learning about the history of Shanghai, the Nationalists Party of China and the Communist party of China. The museum offers artifacts that have been rarely seen in other museums and it offers a glimpse at the profound effect that the CPC had on China today. However the museum did inaccurate create a model of the meeting by putting Mao Zedong as the leader and everybody looking to him. The leader of the meeting could not have been him because he was only twenty to thirty years old.

I learned a lot about how the Communist Party of China formed and who was at the first meeting and Why they created the meeting. They created the meeting because the Nationalist Party was weak and failed to create a unified central government that tended to the needs of the common people. People were starving in China under Chiang Kai Shek's rule because his government was very corrupt. The degree to the corruption is extremely corrupt compared with the current government of China.