Traveling with Coffeepots

When I ran across an American tinware coffeepot, I knew at once it belonged in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Alpine Kitchen (1918).

I took scraps from the first attempt, embellished them, and came up with another variation on the theme.

The coffeepot theme took a weird turn after that, via Hans Baluschek’s Here The Family Can Make Coffee (1895) which, for no good reason whatsoever, was destined to peek out from Ferdinand Desnos‘s Boars at Moonlight (n.d.) as an owl looks on.

As wild boar roam in the Alps, it seemed only fitting that our music selection for this post should be Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony.

A Maiden Contemplates Kushner

Recently, we visited an exhibition at DC Moore of Robert Kushner paintings. Kushner’s paintings are part of the “Pattern and Decoration” movement in fine art:

“The Pattern and Decoration movement consisted of artists, many of whom had art education backgrounds, who had been involved with the abstract schools of art of the 1960s. The westernised, male dominated climate of artistic thought throughout Modernism had led to a marginalisation of what was considered non-Western and feminine. The P&D movement wanted to revive an interest in minor forms such as patterning which at that point was equated with triviality. The prevailing negative view of decoration was one not generally shared by non-Western cultures.” [cite]

Faces of Women and a Very Determined Girl, to Music by 2023 Music Award Winner Eve Beglarian

The three faces in the collage at the head of this post are one by Lotte Laserstein, from Im Gasthaus (1927); a portrait of Renata Symonds, Jungian Therapist (2004), by Michael Taylor; and an undated Vivian Maier photograph. They made a fine trio, I thought.

Three Ancestral Jugs and a Tlingit Comb

My friend Lucy had the very clever idea of making up a Bingo card consisting of works to be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What a treasure hunt it was, taking me to corners of the Met where I’d never ventured.

Buildings, Inside and Out

“Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish Art” at the Met Museum is entrancing in ways I did not expect. The Met writes of the exhibit: