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New England, March 2020

We were in New Haven and rural New England just before Covid hit. Everything was gorgeous. The food was great and there was lots of agrodiversity and local produce and small producers even in the smallest towns, things that you essentially can’t get, by the way, here in Berlin where I live. Hard as it may be to believe, they somehow have only barely started getting the memo on eating local. The pictures may look a little gloomy because this was “mud season”, the time in March after the beautiful snow has melted and before spring has started. The trees are bare, mud is everywhere, and many sights, shops and restaurants are closed or have reduced hours. They even advise tourists to avoid March but we had a wonderful time.

Pictures of the excellent Yiddish Book Center in Amherst are here.

New Haven

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The Yiddish Book Center – Amherst, Massachusetts

This is the Yiddish Book Center which lies four hours north of New York City in Amherst, Massachusetts, adjacent to Hampshire College. It’s really great and you should visit. It’s an archives, museum, and cultural center housed in a gorgeous new building recalling a rural eastern European village. A big draw for me was Shtetl in the Sun: South Beach, Miami 1977-1980, an exhibition of photographs of Jewish retirees.

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Vienna – sights and places

Vienna is picture-postcard gorgeous. I still need to post my photos of pre-World War II storefronts that are still intact including their shop signs, which is one of the extraordinary things about the city. Even in Paris hardly of these have survived. Vienna even has some modern ones from the 1950s-60s , which are even rarer because they’ve never been considered historical or important. I did see lots of Klimt and Schiele  art in the museums but did not take pictures because those are easy to find on line.

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“Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove” – Symbolist and Surrealist artworks you don’t see every day

A few interesting and little-known works from the Symbolist and Surrealist movements.

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Exhibition in Paris: “Globes: Architecture and Science Explore the World”

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)

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The Art Nouveau artists’ colony at Darmstadt

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.

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