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.
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.
