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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).

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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.

Click to enlarge photos

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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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India’s 1,500-year trade secret: The mysteries of dyeing at the St. Louis Art Museum

For nearly two millienia, India was the only place where people had figured out how to dye or print in multiple colors on cotton. Before modern industrial chemicals, getting just about any color to stick to cotton textiles – apart from indigo and a couple more – involved complicated, labor-intensive methods and obscure plant extracts that no one else had discovered. As early as  70 A.D., Pliny was marveling in over India’s colored cottons; the British couldn’t dye cotton until they learned India’s methods in the mid-1700s through their colonial trade. Until then, India was more or less the only supplier of colorful printed cottons, or chintz – a Hindi word – not just to Europe but also throughout Asia and they didn’t simply export their own designs but instead tailored them to each region’s local traditions. An exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum entitled Global Threads: The Art and Fashion of Indian Chintz tells the story.

Click to enlarge and page through each set

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Global Market!

Colossal world supermarket – Poland, Germany, Czechia, Italy Russia, Turkey, UK, India, Korea, Japan, China, Arabic countries

This is just a part of the German department with as much Christmas stuff as in a German supermarket: spice cookies, stollen, marzipan, chocolates with liqueur, Ritter brand chocolate bars including limited-edition Christmas flavor (Lebkuchen, Zimtsterne, Stollen, Marzipan, Pralinen mit Weinbrände und Liköre, Ritter Sport Weihnachtssorte). Even a special tongs for melting rum-soaked sugar into a mulled Christmas wine punch (Zuckerzange für Feuerzangenbowle). Nonchristmas German food includes Leberkäse (similar to bologna), Rollmops, Matjes (both are herring), Spätzle (noodles).

 

The brands of Italian tomatoes you see in every German supermarket and various Russian specialities

This is the exotic produce aisle where more or less nothing you see can be found in an ordinary supermarket, such as the sweet potato leaf, drumstick leaves, amaranth leaves, fresh chick peas and jackfruit in the last two photos.

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Protestors in St. Louis, 1920-30

These are photos of protests  in St. Louis for racial equality (1930) and voting rights for women (1920) from a spectacular exhibition of panoramas at the Missouri History Museum.

Incredibly, the roughly 5-by-30 foot photos are enlargments of the originals which are only about 8 by 50 inches and were also on display – yet they’re sharp enough that you can see individual hairs and the texture of the clothing fabrics. I believe they don’t make cameras any more that can obtain such high resolution except for the most sophisticated professional equipment used in science, the military or aerial photos on Google Maps.

Click on photos to enlarge

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