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.
Art from museums under attack in Ukraine
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.
