Bruges’ Groeninge Museum was excellent. Laid out in a somewhat traditional chronological fashion, century by century, it offered laminated placards in every room with explanations for most of the artworks so you didn’t need to bend over to read ill-placed, scantily illuminated placards and block other visitors’ view. Of course, as I’ve been doing in almost every museum we’ve visited, I found the mirrors tto photograph myself in.
Click on the pictures to see them all full-sized (if you’re seeing this in email you may need to click the post title first to make this work).
The Magritte show is on level -4. We then descended to levels -5 through -8 for the Fin-de-Siècle museum. Again I was struck by the geometry, space and architecture that museums always exhibit as much as the art they display.
Canterbury Cathedral is the seat of the Church of England and dates back to the conversion of the King of Kent by St Augustine and his missionaries in 597 CE. Impossible to miss on the skyline around the town and hard not to want to photograph, even if one could more easily just buy postcards. Click any image to see them all full sized.
Victor Brauner, Conglomeros, 1945. Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris
In Plato’s cave allegory we are bound and can only see images of the shadows cast by statues of real things. As we free our minds, we first discover that we are looking at mere images, shadows. Next we discover that the shadows are cast not by the real but by statues, imitations of the ideals which they represent. Only when we emerge from the cave do we discover the world of real things.
I stopped to compliment this man on how beautiful his house and garden looked and we chatted for a minute, after which he graciously permitted me to photograph him in front of his house.
Continuing west on 24th Street we came to the Luhring Augustine Gallery and these Frank Auerbach works (from 1978 – 2016). Really luscious impasto and a lovely autumnal palette of (mostly) muted shades.
The Kwoma are a group of people living in the Washkuk Hills north of the Sepik River in northeastern New Guinea. Most Kwoma villages have, or had, one or two ceremonial houses, consisting of a rook reaching nearly to the ground and supported by posts and beams. These structures have no walls, and the sides are left open except when rituals are taking place inside. A finial (yaba), carved with images of supernatural beings, projects from each gable. The decoration of Kwoma ceremonial houses was formerly less extensive that it is today, but since the 1970s, the amount of ornamentation has increased. The supporting wood architectural elements are now carved and painted, and paintings typically cover about half the roof’s interior.
Kwoma paintings are created on bark-like panels made from sago petioles, the lower portion of the leaves of the sago palm tree. After the petiole is cured and flattened, the artist covers the smooth side with a wash of black clay. The main outlines of the design are laid out in clear water, retraced in paint, and then filled in with color. Although one man lays out the design, an assistant may perform the work of infilling and painting the bordering dots. The semi naturalistic designs represent people, animals, or other natural phenomena associated with the village clans. Each artist primarily creates paintings of designs that are associated with his own clan. These paintings are then installed on the ceiling together with those of other clans. Artists from several different clans were involved in the production of the present ceiling.
The pained panels are installed on the ceiling in no particular order. They are mainly arranged lengthwise along the axis of the house, with a few placed laterally at its midpoint. The midpoint forms the center of the structure, the most ritually important area, and it also roughly demarcates the sectors allotted to each clan.
Most of the paintings for this reconstruction of a Kwoma ceremonial house ceiling were commissioned in 1970 and 1973, from a group of twenty-four artists in Mariwai village.
