Little Ice Age

I know right now it's Snowpocalypse in the U.S. The New York Times used the word "Epic" in its headline to describe the first storm that hit DC. I heard someone call this second round "snoverkill".

It's also the coldest winter in Europe is 20 or maybe 30 years. While we haven't had two feet of snow, for Danes, it's Snowpocalypse here too. The snow on the side of the roads in Århus reminds me of home: it's dirty because it hasn't gotten warm enough for the snow to melt. In Amsterdam too it was pretty cold -- it snowed several of the days I was there -- though not as cold as in Århus.

At the (much scaled down) Rijksmuseum I saw an exhibit of an earlier cool period: Hendrick Avercamp's The Little Ice Age in the 17th century. Avercamp specialized in showing people frolicking in the Dutch winter.

Winterlandschap met schaatsers. circa 1608. Rijksmuseum.

Details:

My American blog readers, this exhibit closes at the Rijksmuseum soon but it will then travel to National Gallery of Art in Washington DC starting March 31.

Near the Rijksmuseum is an ice skating rink which apparently isn't open, or at least it wasn't at 10am the morning I went. What I saw there evoked the same playfulness as Avercamp's paintings. The ice rink wasn't open but the fence did not close off the space. An old man walking his dog first walked around the perimeter of the ice rink. Then the man and the dog stepped onto the ice rink. The man threw snowballs across the ice and his little dog chased after them. It was delightful to watch man, dog, and ice.
 

Auricular Amsterdam

I took my first trip outside Århus since I arrived. I went to Amsterdam.

The first museum I went to was the Rijksmuseum, the national museum of art and history of the Netherlands. Unfortunately much of the museum was closed due to renovations. The most well-known pieces of its extensive collection were on display in a few small galleries.

I saw pieces by the van Vianen family of silversmiths active in the 17th century. Brothers Paulus and Adam were known for the use of auricular ornamentation. Auricular refers to the earlobes so the ornamentation of scrolls and curved shapes resembling organic shapes and earlobes.

This design is seen in the shapes around the edge of the Diana plate by Paulus van Vianen.

Adam van Vianen made this jug as a three dimensional auricular shape. The whorls at the base and in the body of the jug are particularly ear-like. 

 
At one stop at the Heineken Brewery tour, visitors sat in futuristic-looking chairs. Their C-shape seemed to me very auricular.

On my last day in Amsterdam, I visited the Van Gogh Museum, just across the plaza from the Rijksmuseum. He had ... a difficult relationship with his earlobe.

 (Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear isn't actually at the Van Gogh museum but I definitely thought about it.)

After leaving Van Gogh, I bought a pre-made salad from a grocery store. It had lettuce, cherry tomatoes, mozzarella balls, and auricular pasta.

The next morning I left Amsterdam. 

Alternate readings

Gustav Klimt's The Kiss must be one of the most reproduced paintings in western art. I've seen it as posters, on the sides of ceramic mugs, and even as a necktie at some art museum gift shop. A print of it hangs in the office of Lori Brotto, a researcher of  female sexual desire, as profiled here.
Like most people who have glanced at a reproduction, I thought that it shows a man turning his head to kiss a woman.

But this article mentions two readings of the painting, "The couple in the painting, with the woman either bending sublimely in the man’s emphatic embrace or wincing away from his lips..."

Now that I look at the painting, I see how this interpretations fits the painting just as well as the conventional reading. The the angle of the woman's head suggests she is pulling away or turning her head. And woman doesn't exactly look happy.

carry with me

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First Series, "Art" (1841)

I'm usually apprehensive about selective quoting because it can easily be misinterpreted when taken out of context. But I've had this one on my mind for a while now since I saw it at the body image exhibit at the Union.

Travel, metaphorical and geographical, seemed especially relevant given that I'll be going to Denmark soon. I got approved yesterday.

Also, in a few hours, I'm going to model for a drawing class for the first time and I'll be thinking about this quotation.

Freer Gallery - American and Chinese collections

Freer Gallery

I thought I had spent a long time in the Freer Gallery but now that I think about it, I didn't get there until 2 so I only had three hours until closing. Charles Freer made his fortune in the late 19th century in, I think, the railroad industry. But that's not the focus of my visit today. His business success is only what enabled him to spend the time and resources for his legacy that is the Freer Gallery, both the building and collection inside it.

The American Collection

Because I had heard of the Freer as a collection of Asian art, I was initially disappointed when I learned that the tour I was going on explained the American art collection. (And I was very irritated that a little girl of about 6 or 7 was on the tour only because she and her family used the Freer as a shelter to wait out the thunderstorm.) But then our docent began to talk about the collection. It consists mostly of Whistler paintings (and a few Dewing and Sargent) because Freer was a major patron of Whistler.

The crown jewel of the American collection, and perhaps of the whole museum if American art is your forte, is the Peacock Room. Since Whistler believed his art as studies of form and color more so than depictions of actual things and following Whistler's naming convention, I think this room should be called Composition in Teal and Gold. Every inch of the room is richly painted teal or gilded in gold. When I first walked into the room, it looked almost too busy. At one end of the room is a large gold painting of a pair of peacocks and three large panels along the adjacent wall also of peacocks. The wall color is a rich teal covered with a peacock feather motif, as is the ceiling. Built into the walls are also wooden shelves now also gilt to cover up the brown wood where porcelain plates and vases are displayed.

Only one or two galleries held American art. Freer had commissioned John Dewing to decorate the parlor of his home and those paintings are on display here now. The main colors are misty greens and the chief subject ethereal women and Dewing was like Whistler in wanting to create atmosphere more than object. "The fact that there are women in the painting is beside the point", said the docent. The focus of the series of Dewings was a four-panel folding screen. On each panel was a woman seated among green grasses. I thought it seemed familiar when I first saw it. The docent said that it was inspired by a Whistler screen now on owned by the DIA so maybe I had seen it there, or perhaps just something similar in a photo. The problem with the Dewing was that the gauzy effect made me feel like I was straining to see through a fog or that I needed new glasses.

I was not surprised that Leyland, the English businessman who commissioned the room to be decorated, was appalled by the final product. Leyland wanted a room to show off two things: A Japanese inspired Whistler painting of a white woman in a kimono and Leyland's collection of blue and white Ming porcelain but the painting and the porcelain are overpowered by the peacock motif and peacocks. In fact, teal and gold aren't present in either of those things. So Leyland refused to pay Whistler for the room and so here Whistler left his only narrative painting, since he cared about color and form only. It was inconsequential that his paintings showed people or identifiable "things". The painting of two peacocks shows one peacock with a ruffled neck and a wing outstretched pointing at the other peacock: the angry patron is dissatisfied with Whistler's work.

Incredibly and fortunately for us, the decorations on the walls of the room were never done on the actual masonry of the building but on wood panels basically stuck on to the stone so that it could have been removed from Leyland's house in London, installed in an addition to Freer's Detroit home especially built for it, then after Freer died, it dismantled again and finally reassembled in the Freer Gallery.

Interesting note: The courtyard of the Freer Gallery at some point held live peacocks too for visitors to see, but as the docent said, "They bit people, so they [the museum] had to get rid of them."

The Chinese Ceramics Collection

What to me, and I think most people, is so typical of "Chinese porcelain" was originally not from China at all. Blue and white porcelain became prize in China because it was exotic. China did not yet make blue glaze because it had not yet discovered cobalt. But artisans in the Middle East had blue glaze and Chinese traders brought back their work. So at first cobalt was imported to make blue glaze and after China excavated its own cobalt and production of blue and white porcelain began in earnest in the Ming dynasty(14th - 17th century), peaking in early Qing.

This visit changed the way I thought about Chinese porcelain. I was very surprised that not all fine porcelain is the blue and white variety popular since the Ming dynasty. There are few blue and white porcelains on display at Freer and the ones in the Peacock Room and those pieces weren't the focus. Porcelain making had been perfected since the Song dynasty (10th - 13th c) and through the Jin and Yuan dynasties as well during which pieces were white, black, or black and white.

Northern China doesn't seem to get the glam and glitz of the South. Silk, tea, and trade are all concentrated in the South and because of trade, southern coastal cities have always been, and still are, richer than the inland North. I had thought that porcelain production followed these lines because most people who know of only one porcelain kiln knows the name Jingdezhen, the city in Jiangxi province where this blue and white ware kiln is located. But the white Ding-ware was made in Hebei province.What I love about these pieces, besides their pure white color, is that they have finely carved and molded detail. (These pieces were fitted with a metal rim because the pieces were fired upside down, resting on their rims, to prevent sagging and distortion.)

My two favorites from the whole collection of Chinese porcelain are a bowl with thin molded lines radiating from the center and a plate with a lively scene of mandarin ducks and lily pads. I've completely fallen for white porcelain now for its understated beauty. Blue and white seems too loud.

Dish with Molded Decoration of Mandarin Ducks

China, Hebei Province, Ding ware
Jin Dynasty, 12th - 13th century
Porcelain with transparent ivory-toned glaze; metal rim

(click to enlarge)

Bowl
China, Hebei Province, Ding ware
Northern Song dynasty, 11th - early 12th century

Porcelain with transparent ivory-toned glaze

(click to enlarge)

Other than white clay with white glaze, southern China also made black porcelainware, though the dark glaze can actually range from dark brown to a shimmery iridescent black. The most prized Jian-ware, as they are called, has mottled or blossom-like patterns in the glaze.

Freer Gallery website: http://www.asia.si.edu/

Other things I saw but I didn't get a chance to talk about: Amazing Chinese calligraphy and brush paintings, Maxine Hong Kingston's inspiration for "Song of the Barbarian Reed Pipe", Japanese vs. Chinese tea bowls.

Rant -- Reason #239639821 why I hate children:

I saw a girl TOUCH, that is, trail her grubby little fingers across a Whistler canvas TWICE! This was after she tapped the canvas of a portrait of a woman and I could hear her fingernails click. And only after she had touched it did her grandparents (?) admonish her gently. I would have thrown her out of the museum before could do more damage. Next, she touched the heavy gilt frame of another Whistler. This seemed like a lesser offense until, right after she touched it, the docent said that Whistler was very particular about designing his own frames to complement the paintings. The frame is worth about as much as the canvas.

NYT Op-Ed Art, Music, Literature, and Science

I'm working on another update but I saw this New York Times Op-Ed "Put a Little Science in Your Life" and thought I would say a few quick things about it. Brian Greene is the author of this piece and of the books "The Elegant Universe" and "The Fabric of the Cosmos." He sums up the problem with science pedagogy as follows, "We continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science’s underlying technical details." I like his explanation of " the vertical nature of science", that students must learn the foundations of scientific theories before they can move on to the exciting new breakthroughs. I agree that this is part of the reason that many students find science so boring.

In contrast, the humanities is not bound by such linearity. We now don't teach little kids English literature chronologically, starting with Homer, then Vergil, and so forth until the poem gives way to the novel and to modern authors. But The Odyssey and the Aeneid are introduced once students have a grasp of reading.

It's an apt comparison, the necessity and beauty of art and science. As a musician, I know what Greene meant when he said that this way of teaching science is like making a music student practice scales without performing the great masterpieces.

Earlier this evening I took a walk by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, very close to where I live. Inscribed on the marble facade of the hall was a quote from John F. Kennedy in which he linked the greatness of a nation to the fluorishing of art:
"The is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo Da Vinci, the age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare."

After reading this op-ed, I re-read the quote and realized that Da Vinci was also a scientist and so achievement in science too should be connected to achievement in art and state. The Smithsonian Institute was reluctant to accept Charles Freer's art collection because the institute initially wanted to focus on scientific knowledge. But the in end Freer's bequest became the Smithsonian's first art collection.

Greene writes, "Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension."