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.
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”.
Continue reading “Paris: Musée d’Orsay, John Singer Sargent, National Library, Louvre”
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.
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
Continue reading “Eric Sloane, Chronicler of Barns and Clouds”
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 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.
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.
Continue reading “What is the deal with the “never ever ending” cafe names in Berlin?”
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.
Continue reading “I look at art so you don’t have to! – Guillaume Lethière at the Clark”
Shaker “gift” drawings such as these from the 1840s and 50s are the only objects where Shakers used ornament or decoration. Only around 200 are known to exist and 25 of them are at Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts where I saw these. Today they’re called ‘gift drawings’ only because they’re referred to as gifts the few times they’re mentioned in journals, where ‘gift’ meant a spiritual message received supernaturally from deceased Believers. Otherwise we don’t know what the Shakers called them and in fact no record exists of the Shakers referring to them as drawings at all, or as art.
Photos of the uncanny light and color in the landscape during the solar eclipse which are almost as exciting as the eclipse itself. I can’t find other photos like these anywhere online! (sun photos are at the bottom). Colors become dull, washed-out, greyish or reddish. At times everything looks flat and two-dimensional. Sometimes it looks like an old faded photograph or that thing on flat screen TVs nowadays where they make everything you watch look like a cheap badly-lit 80s daytime soap opera (it’s called “Motion Smoothing” but most people call it “soap-opera effect” and everyone hates it; most TVs have a hard-to-find setting that lets you switch it off ). It would take a very expensive camera and lots of experience to really capture the colors it but you can get the idea here.
