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St. Louis Diary: You should go to the art museum just to see the lighting

Rome in the time of Trajan, #THELIGHTING

I don’t wake up every day wondering how I can see more marble statues but this was really good. The selection of objects was compelling, the exhibition design pleasing, and oh boy hashtag THELIGHTING. The selection, which included works that have never left Italy, really made you suspect that a knack for simply knowing what to put on display is a talent, or skill, that’s not so common. Maybe it had something to do with the curator being the archaeological curator of the city of Rome. The display design was full of character and slightly offbeat (orchid color scheme! upside-down arches!) but always in the service of the objects, which isn’t always the case. Highly distinctive designs can be unwanted distractions, trying too hard to Make A Statement. Finally, the lighting. A revelation. I don’t know what was going on but it was astonishing. I urge everyone who likes art or museums or architecture to go just for the lighting, no matter how little interest they have in ancient Rome. It was soft and calm, yet clear at the same time. There was no glare or awkward shadows but also there were enough shadows to bring out shapes and textures. You might be wondering how hard can it be to screw in some light bulbs that aren’t too bright or too dim but trust me, plenty of rooms in the Louvre and other great museums of Paris and Berlin have annoying pools of gloom , or glare, or harsh shadows or all three..

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St. Louis diary: When department stores sold books and wallpaper, bicycles and candied lilacs

The most fun I’ve had in a long time was at the Missouri Historical Society looking through the archives of long-gone grand department stores which is redundant since they were all grand. These are newspaper inserts from the 1960s advertising annual promotions based on foreign countries accompanied by cultural programs with hundreds of events. In person it’s breathaking how much larger the papers were then and how intense the ink colors were. I’m pretty sure there’s no way to print colors this vivid any more because the inks and/or technology don’t exist, except for fine art printmaking,  and yes I spend a lot of my time examining printing inks because someone has to.

“Under Three Flags” celebrated St. Louis’ bicentennial and the day of its founding when the city “flew in succession the banners of Spain, France and the United States”. Merchandise included tripe, escargot, and candied lilacs. Candied lilacs barely exist in France itself any more (I’ve looked).

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Inuit clothing

A friend was saying she saw Nanook of the North and wanted to see more of the clothes so here’s some wonderful Inuit dress I once saw at the National Museum in Copenhagen. Sorry for the glare and reflections. The place was lit like a drugstore. You’d think such a rich country could afford decent lighting and anti-reflective glass in its national showcase museum of all places but I guess not.

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Paris: Musée d’Orsay, John Singer Sargent, National Library, Louvre

As always, a personal selection of things you’re unlikely to see anywhere else and none of the greatest hits that you don’t need me to tell you about.

In the major sights nowadays mostly what you see is the back of peoples’ heads such as here at the Musée d’Orsay. It’s getting worse, there’s no end in sight, and no one seems to be doing anything about it. It’s been about ten years since the number of visitors passing through the Louvre’s pyramid entrance starting exceeding double what it was designed to accommodate. They’ve been lowering the daily maximum admissions in recent years but that doesn’t help given that 90% of them are concentrated in the 5% of the galleries that are social media blockbusters (rough numbers) and anyway it’s still double what the Ministry of Culture recommends.

Banner by Toulouse-Lautrec for the traveling show tent of La Goulue,  a Moulin Rouge can-can dancer you’ve probably seen in his posters and other works. Goulue is French for “glutton”.

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Eric Sloane, Chronicler of Barns and Clouds

Just wanted to plop down a few pages from Eric Sloane’s books to give some idea of what he was about. He wrote and illustrated books on rural buildings, woodworking, infrastructure such as bridges and roads, landscapes, and farm life in early colonial New England, as well as the weather and seasons. He even wrote a book just about bells. I’m not aware of anyone else like him regardless of era or region.

Click to enlarge

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Art from museums under attack in Ukraine

Exhibition in Berlin of paintings from the Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art which has had to move its collections to safekeeping because of the invasion.  (Nowadays Odesa has one “s” because that’s how it is in Ukrainian. In Russian it has two.) The high point was a very seldom-seen Italian painter from the late seventeeth-early eighteenth century, Alessandro Magnasco, who made bizarre murky scenes with flickering highlights and figures that resemble those of Schiele,  Kokoscha and other Expressionists two hundred years later.

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The world before Ikeafication

Whatever happened to colors?

The St. Louis Art Museum only has one small gallery for textiles but its exhibitions are always miniature showstoppers. This one was on commercial fabrics which is a topic you rarely see even in design museums. The focus was on the U.S., U.K. and Italy 1940 to 1970 and it really showed how little flair we have around us nowadays. There’s multiple photos because I really need you to see the patterns as a whole as well as close up so you can see the texture. Otherwise it’s like watching a TV from across the street!

On the left is a pattern from 1954 called Concetto spaziale (Spacial concept) by the artist Lucio Fontana who’s known for distorting and slicing canvases rather than just painting them. The raised texture is an illusion on plain flat cotton printed with an ethereal pastel pink and murky dull eggplant. The design on the right was the winner of a competition in Italy in 1957 that got five thousand submissions.

Click to enlarge photos

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What is the deal with the “never ever ending” cafe names in Berlin?

Berliners love cafes with overly long cutesy names and here’s my documentation. They drive me nuts, triggering a visceral loathing like few things other than the Microsoft paper clip do. They’re cloying, gimmicky, and precious (“affectedly dainty or overrefined”, to quote the dictionary). Somehow they aim for cute yet land on pompous, which is quite a feat.

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I look at art so you don’t have to! – Guillaume Lethière at the Clark

Oy, so much art out there, who has the time? This was a really good exhibition at the Clark in Massachusetts, co-organized with the Louvre, that I highly recommend on a mixed-race artist from Guadeloupe named Guillaume Lethière (1750-1832) who was one of the most successful and prominent painters in Napoleonic France and since then has been almost completely forgotten in except in the Caribbean. They also had a few works by other creoles along with paintings by white French-mainland artists of creoles who were prominent in French and Haitian history. This Caribbean-mainland French world should have been the main focus instead of just a minor addition to a Lethière solo exhibition because the fact is he’s just not that good a painter. It would have been plenty to include him as just one among many creole artists.

Oath of the Ancestors

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