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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
Oh boy, the lighting. But first, the exhibition was really good and I say that as someone who doesn’t wake up every day wondering how I can see more marble statues. Somehow all the objects seemed special and engrossing. It made me wonder if some people are just better at choosing what to put on display than others. Maybe it had to do with the curator being the archaeological curator of the city of Rome, or that many objects had never left Italy before so maybe we’re not used to seeing things of this calibre.
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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 have a feeling the inks and/or technology for printing this vivid don’t exist any more or would be so expensive it amounts to the same thing except in 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).
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.
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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Alexanderplatz
A friend was wondering what Alexanderplatz in Berlin used to look like so…
Before the war it was a busy jumble of 19th-century styles including lots of extravagant Victorian wedding-cake ornamentation.
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.
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
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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