“Brave New Worlds” Tour of the Museum of Fine Arts
After watching the film Midnight in Paris (2011), which highlights art museums and monuments in and around Paris, including the Musée Rodin and Monet’s garden at Giverny, students in Professor Leslie Eckel’s Honors Seminar for Freshmen “Brave New Worlds” toured the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on October 4, 2016.
Together, the class explored the Art of Europe galleries, concentrating on the works of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Degas, and van Gogh. In Midnight in Paris, director Woody Allen brings many of these famous figures to life as the characters travel through time to meet their literary and cultural idols in Parisian scenes from the 1920s era of the Lost Generation and then – surprisingly – the 1890s of the Belle Époque.
This seminar examines stories of travel, exile, and cosmopolitanism against the backdrop of the city of Boston and encourages students to consider studying abroad during their college experiences at Suffolk.
Student Adrianne Cormier reflects, “Our trip to the MFA has been a new kind of travel experience for me because I was able to see how people perceived the world at different points throughout history. You are able to ‘travel’ to specific places through art, much like literature.”
An imaginative adventure indeed!
submitted by Professor Leslie Eckel, October 2016