Children in the museum. How can an adult survive and even have fun?

Physiology. The beginning

Children received their short instruction at the entrance: "You may not slide on the floor, even if it’s perfectly slippery: we’re not on the ice. Slowly we walk and look around. We ask questions in a whisper, if any. "
The first question came at the moment.
"Is there a place where to pee?" asked Sofia.
"Yes. There is a toilet. Let’s start with it."
"But now I do not want to go to the toilet, but what if I want to?"
"I see. If art will be too much. However, we’d better got prepared in advance."

The cat's out of the bag

"Exactly!" Kyrylo picked up. "I remember when I was looking at the monument near the Dnieper. There were three heroes and a lady in the boat."
"Kyi, Shchek, Khoryv and their sister Lybid," I corrected him with an important look. "According to the chronicles, they founded Kyiv."
"Well yes. And that lady Lybid has her coat fluttering very strongly, and her braid is lying on her bottom, as if it were nailed. Why is that?"
"Because the sculptor, Vasyl Borodai, worked in the genre of social realism

Realism (from late Latin reālis — “real”) is considered to be the beginning in the development of modern art. In a strict sense, “realism” is an art movement that faithfully and objectively reproduces reality in all its details, regardless of how beautiful are the objects in the picture. Read more

," I explained, gathering my will so as not to burst out laughing. "It means that everything must be pathetic."
"What?"
"Solemnly. And thus, not necessarily fully realistic. Just imagine, if she had her braid sticking out of her head? That would be funny and not solemnly."
"Ah, well, yes," Kyrylo agreed and ran to another room.

The arguments rule the dispute

In one of the halls, children were interested not so much in portraits, as in signatures.
"What does it mean — unknown artist?"
"It means that he was ashamed to admit that it was him to paint it!" Sofia entered suddenly. "If my picture is bad, I never sign it. And throw it away at all."
"Not exactly," I said. "This means that over time, people simply forgot who exactly painted the canvas."
"But he could sign it! Then no one would ever forge him!" Sofia did not like my answer.
"Well, some people did not sign their work, perhaps they were excessively modest."
"…Or because they considered their work bad!" Sofia insisted.

…The concepts of authorship arose in my head, and I began to select words in order to explain at least one of them to the children. But they had already jumped to another room.

An artist or a photographer?

Keep track of time

We have not watched all the halls, for there are more than thirty of them in the gallery. When I saw that my children were not looking at the canvases but rather wanted to fool around, we left the museum.
I noticed how long my "museum researchers" held out without getting tired and naughty — it took a little over an hour.

Healthy and tasty art-crawl

If you think that leaving the gallery is the end of a museum adventure, then you go wrong. Indeed, one of the main goals of exploring the beautiful is to make the child want to return again and again. Therefore, an important point of going to the museum is to fix the impression with something delicious. This may seem overpragmatic, but a cake after walking through halls with canvases would leave a more favourable impression about the gallery and paintings than empty stomach and tired legs. Certainly, if the child is too small, then most likely he would remember the cake than the pictures. Nevertheless, our goal is not to make the kid talk about Munch’s expressionism

You can hardly tell the exact day or year of the birth of Expressionism, which is usual for all powerful art movements. You cannot draw a border on the map and indicate the territory where Expressionism took its start and got stronger. Overall, it’s all roughly known. Except for one rock-solid spatiotemporal benchmark: Northern Europe on the eve of the First World War. Expressionism is an avant-garde art movement, a new tragic worldview, and a whole set of significant motifs, symbols, and myths. Moreover, it is a revolutionary reaction both to the shabby, lifeless traditional academic art, and the light, idyllic southern impressionistic “appearance” of the world. Read more

after the first visit to the gallery?

Author: Olena Syroid

Cover illustration of the material: a young spectator in one of the halls of the National Museum "Kyiv Art Gallery". The source of the illustration on the Museum’s Facebook page.