Coup de cœur means “a delightful special thing you’ll fall in love with” or “personal favorite” as I’ve mentioned elsewhere and I’m using the term half-ironically because the French use it so much. They’re crazy about it. You can’t go five minutes in France without seeing it, at least in print; I think not really in everyday speech. But these really are some of my coups de cœur.
Subway poster for exhibition “Baudelaire: Melancholic Modernity”
I just learned that the Netherlands has a long history of paper cuts, the artworks made by cuttiing a single sheet of paper. Hardly information about the Dutch tradition is available in English so I gathered together a few highlights. (Incidentally I also just found out there is a Jewish paper cut tradition going back 500 years. You may have seen Chinese paper cuts around; they’re much better known.) One Dutch paper cut artist I like a lot is Hil Bottema (1913-1968). Much of her work is printed matter based on paper cuts. I don’t know whether she did them originally as paper cuts or just drew them in that style.
My favorites are her New Year’s cards.. Click images to enlarge.
Postage stamps and pages from an informational booklet that accompanied them. The stamps are for Christmas and other holidays and have a surcharge that benefits children’s charities.
Museum of Applied Arts. Three different exhibits of chairs including one on the history of Thonet bentwood with around 300 examples!
A few interesting and little-known works from the Symbolist and Surrealist movements.
This was an exhibit on globe-shaped and globe-inspired buildings since 1700, some actually built and some just proposed, at a museum called Cité de l’Architecture (click to enlarge)
Continue reading “Exhibition in Paris: “Globes: Architecture and Science Explore the World””
The Darmstadt Artists Colony is one of the world’s most important assemblages of art nouveau buildings, or as it is called in Germany, Jugendstil (“youth style” which got its name from an art magazine founded in 1896), consisting of exhibition halls, artist’s houses (mansions, really), a tower and various park features built from 1901 to 1914 on a hill in the western German city of Darmstadt. The architects were some of the era’s greatest such as Peter Behrens and Joseph Maria Olbrich of the Vienna Secession movement. They and the artists also designed objects such as furniture, ceramics, glassware, and printed matter and one of their principles was to integrate all the diverse media. They carried this out in the form of multidisciplinary exhibitions and built projects, most of which didn’t survive World War II or just changing tastes, such as cafes where they designed everything from the china and menus to furniture and wallpaper.
The whole thing was sponsored by a duke and the tower was just to commemorate his wedding. Each floor has one little room – top floor for visitors and receptions; lower floors for a marriage chamber and a registry office.
The surrounding grounds have a fountain, pavilion, tree plaza and so forth. Also there is an incongruous and unrelated Russian orthodox church which a czar built a couple years prior so he would have a place to pray when he visited. The site is under consideration for UNESCO World Heritage status.
Continue reading “The Art Nouveau artists’ colony at Darmstadt”
March 2019
