I don't like Las Vegas. But I am obliged to go there now and again to see my grandparents, aunt, and uncle who live in there. If I didn't adore them as much as I do, I should never go at all. I've been to Vegas around four times as an adult, but my stays have never exceeded 48 hours at a time. Vegas is hideous to me, it gives me a headache with all of its bright lights, big ugly buildings with gaudy interiors, and just the insane excessiveness of the whole thing. Maybe I'd like it better if I gambled, something I have never done simply because it doesn't make any sense to me, or if I liked shopping. Vegas also has lots of shows and things, but they are not to my taste. I like classical music, Greek tragedy, and opera, so magic shows, showgirls, and the like aren't for me. Las Vegas is very kitschy, flashy American, and I am pretentious enough to think I'm not.
At any rate, we stayed at the Rio Hotel and Casino, which has a Mardi
Gras theme, from what I gather, anyway. The main tower is covered in
turquoise
blue, purple, and hot pink glass and matching lights. The carpet in
the hotel area isn't as scary as most, lots of colors
but the
design was almost tasteful, with a grapevine motif. The room we
stayed in was a suite, and it was fairly well appointed and spacious.
For Christmas dinner, we ate at Tinoco's
Bistro. Apparently, my aunt likes it a lot and had asked them to open
the restaurant especially for our family dinner.
Las Vegas also has a small Chinatown (it's also known as the Spring
Mountain district), which has Chinese
restaurants, bakeries, and a market. It is clean and somewhat quaint.
Las Vegas does have the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, which is in the Bellagio Hotel and Casino. The hotel has a Tuscan theme, an amusing fact if one considers Florentine and other art from Tuscany in contrast to the art featured at the Bellagio. The art collection is almost entirely from 19th and 20th century, including works by Gauguin, Degas, Renoir, Manet, Matisse, Miro, Modigliani, Picasso, Cezanne, Monet, and Van Gogh. Do note that the one Italian here is in fact a Tuscan, born in Livorno (Leghorn).
There are two small rooms of the gallery, and a gift shop, which ironically is about the same size as one of the rooms. There were three guards for the gallery area, and they were good at attending to what people were doing. One is not allowed to eat, drink, smoke, photograph, videotape, write or sketch in the gallery. Classical music is softly played in the gallery, and it was only a minor distraction. The audio tour was adequate and included in the admission fee, a very clever thing because it stops people from talking to each other, but the drawback is that people stand in front of paintings longer than they would usually. The audio tour also has classical music in the background, and they played the slow movement of Beethoven's 7th during the Goya part of the tour, which annoyed me immensely since it is so beautiful and shouldn't be used as background music. It seems I may be getting ahead of myself though.
My sole reason for going to the Bellagio Gallery was to see a self-portrait of Rembrandt that they happen to have. I had tried to make it to the gallery on my last visit to Vegas in June 2000, but there just wasn't time. Naturally, the Bellagio collection wasn't being shown when I did get there. From September 2000 until 4. March 2001, masterworks from the Phillips Collection were being shown. Although the Phillips Collection is a museum of modern art, in fact the first of its kind in the states, it does include some old master paintings that Duncan Phillips felt were the basis of modern art. The exhibit consisted of 25 paintings and 1 sculpture (a bronze head by Giacometti), and there were two old master paintings, both of the Repentant St. Peter, one by El Greco and the other by Goya.
The El Greco painting is incredible. It is oil on canvas, 36 7/8 x 29 3/4 inches, and was done around 1600-1605 or later. The painting is characteristically El Greco in the ethereal quality of the main figure, in part accomplished by elongating face, neck, and arms. The colours are luminous, especially in the turquoise blue robe and saffron mantle. St. Peter's eyes seem to glow and the position of the body, in kind of opposition so that the hands are to his left and his head is twisting upward to the right, is particularly soulful. The background of landscape to Peter's right is very loosely done, and there is a curious robed figure walking in the foreground. It looked like it could be a woman or a young man holding a lamp or vessel in one hand.
The Goya painting is markedly different. It is also oil on canvas, 28 3/4 x 25 1/4, and was done around 1820-1824, after Goya had gone deaf. The colours are quite matte, the blue of the robe is more indigo, the composition is sparser with a plain black background and a rock that Peter is resting his folded arms on. Goya's Peter is more peasant like, solid and corporeal. He is balding, his head upturned, and we see him from his right side.
The other painters featured in this exhibit were Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Cezanne, Degas, Willem de Kooning, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Manet, Matisse, Modigliani, Monet, Berthe Morisot, Picasso, Maurice Prendergast, Alfred Sisley, and Van Gogh.
The only painting I really looked at besides the old masters was the Degas, though I did take a glance at Manet's Spanish Ballet and Van Gogh's Entrance to the Public Gardens in Arles. Degas painting probably has the most public appeal of the whole exhibit since it is of ballet dancers. Not surprisingly, it was used to advertise the exhibit, and it is on the cover of the brochure. The painting is of two dancers at the barre, they are stretching their legs. The light-haired one on the right of the painting has her left leg up, and the dark-haired one has her right leg up. We are viewing them from the back and right. The colours are very pretty, and the use of contrast between yellow and blue works well. The dancers backs are beautiful. I had a hard time making visual sense of the dark haired dancer's lower half. Her left leg is set at an angle that looks bizarre if you consider where her hip is, it looks as if she is bending her leg the wrong way, as if her knee hinged the wrong way. Obviously she can't be doing that, no amount of flexibility could get you such a result. The dancers' legs are also unrealistic, they don't look like the legs of ballet dancers at all. Maybe ballet dancers were much less athletic in 1900.
As an aside, I ran into this satire of the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art web site by Together We Can Defeat Capitalism.