IUAM hosts Valentine's-themed tour

The IU Art Museum offered a Valentine's Day-themed tour through its exhibits Saturday afternoon.\nEileen Rice, who has been an oil painter and docent at the IU Art Museum for 16 years, led the tour. \n"The docents do regular tours of the museum," Rice said. "I decided to push the Valentine's Day theme so I picked works with themes of love or romance." \nRice highlighted nine pieces of art all connected to the theme of love and Valentine's Day. \n"All these artists came at love from different attitudes," Rice said. "The way Alfred Leslie looked at love was very different than Picasso or Joseph Cornell."\nLeslie, a 20th-century artist, painted an image of his wife in heroic proportions called "Portrait of Lisa Bigelow." When they then went through a divorce he painted over her jewelry piece by piece until only the wedding ring was left.\nThe piece by Picasso was "L'Atelier." In it he shows himself painting an image of his girlfriend, who had a fully pregnant belly. Picasso told his girlfriends that if they got pregnant he would leave them, according to Rice. He shows himself shedding a tear in the painting. \n"There is some grief and pain in a lot of these works," Rice said. "But it depends on how you look at it -- the pain can validate love."\nNot all of the works were so grim. Marco Pino de Siena's "Magnanimity of Scipio", a fresco from Italy, shows Roman general Scipio displaying the decency few would expect from a conquering general. The picture takes place after his army seized a town. Scipio has won the hand of the most beautiful woman in that town but returns her to her fiance and his family, who are on their knees begging him for mercy.\n"I was intrigued by the title so I wanted to check it out," said Mona Quinlan, a junior majoring in dietetics from the University of Illinois, who was visiting Bloomington with her boyfriend, Jiongyi Tan. "It was delightful to have five to six guides available in addition to the docent."\nMore than half the tour was given by other docents, so there was no shortage of artistic knowledge present. Despite this wealth of knowledge, Rice stressed the she could only scratch the surface of the history and significance of the pieces.\n"If someone wants a lot of information they should take an art history course," Rice said. "This is just an opportunity to look back at what we have and to make it a little less intimidating for people walking through the galleries."\nThemed tours are offered at 2 p.m. on the first Saturday of every month. For more information, visit www.indiana.edu/~iuam/.