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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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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.

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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.

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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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Shaker gift drawings

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.

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More drawings…

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Eclipse

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.

I forgot to take pictures of the scene without the eclipse! Except for this one after the eclipse was finished which you’ll see is the only one that has completely normal picture-postcard green grass and blue sky.

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Does the world really need more pictures of Paris?

Yes of course when it’s things you don’t see every day such as the French counterpart of Target, chocolate-scented postage stamps and mail being delivered on stilts! As usual I’m posting pictures of things I’m pretty sure you’re not going see to anywhere else, with one or two exceptions.

I know, the Postal Museum sounds less interesting than watching paint dry –

but trust me it’s riveting and absolutely worth a visit.

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Imagine Bauhaus meets Frank Lloyd Wright and Dr. Suess, but with Indonesian – The eccentric genius of the Amsterdam School, 1910-1930

Recently in Amsterdam I trekked out to a semi-remote nondescript residential quarter to visit the world’s first modernist apartment building, built in 1917, which is also one of the most important examples of a gloriously eccentric, little-known and absolutely unique style called the Amsterdam School. Lasting from the late-1910s up to World War II, it combined the austere, spartan functionalism of 1920’s modernisn with Art Deco’s geometric extravagance; Frank Lloyd Wright’s dramatic intersecting planes; and – curve ball! – traditional Indonesian styles; and – another curve ball! – a quirkiness that looks like  it could have come from Dr. Suess.

Click on images to enlarge and click again on the edges to jump to next or previous image.

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Four words and one tip that still aren’t in the guidebooks on France

Here are a couple of items that should shed some light on things that actual French people like and don’t like, or do and don’t do, and despite the endless flow of “insider’s” guidebooks,  I’ve never seen them explained in English. (Did you know that you can’t order pastries in restaurants in France, for all intents and purposes?) This post  was inspired by a friend who asked for some travel tips for a part of France that I hadn’t been to. It occured to me though that these tips should save every traveler time and headaches and I think they’re fascinating even if you’re not making a trip.

traiteur – a sort of deli that sells prepared foods to go and maybe sliced cheeses and meats (but not sandwiches! , which are sold at boulangeries, bakeries)….

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