Madrid
V. jet-lagged and tired for trip to the Reina Sofia, so didn't get full value from what looked to be a pretty good collection. Introduced me to Santiago Rusinol via the mysterious "Aranjuez Garden. Arbor II" (1907). And liked the James Coleman installation "Box (ahhareturnabout)" (1977).
The Prado's collection, while huge, is basically all about pre-20th century art and pretty light-on for 19th, and therefore basically exactly outside my own interests. I sort of drifted through it a bit, but we were in there for several hours nonetheless; two that sunk in were Joachim Patinir's "Rest on the flight into Egypt" (1518-20) and Bernard van Orley's "The Virgin of Louvain" (1520).
The Thyssen-Bornemisza was much more to my taste, housing a strong selection of late and post-impressionist stuff. Two of the Monets particularly grabbed me - "The Thaw at Vetheuil" (1881) and "The House Among the Roses" (1925). I looked at that latter for quite a while before making out the house itself amidst the roses; seeing that large, late Monet water-lilies painting hung amidst Rothkos and other recognised examples of abstract expressionism at the Tate Modern last year has really opened up his work to me, giving me a new appreciation for it. Apart from pieces by some of the usual suspects (van Gogh, Kandinsky), was also drawn to a naturalistic landscape that I thought had some symbolist elements, Thomas Cole's "Expulsion, Moon and Firelight" (1828) and Ivan Kliun's abstract "Composicion" (1917).
Fortuitously, also on at the Thyssen-Bornemisza was an Edward Hopper exhibition - small to medium sized, but something of a career survey, and satisfying. It included a range of his earlier works (from the earliest, somewhat expressionist pieces, through the 1920s as many of his signature images emerged - eg women observed in rooms, light coming from outside) and some of his finely detailed sketches and watercolours, as well as many examples of his most famous pieces, including "Cape Cod Evening", "Morning in a City" and "South Carolina Morning". I was struck by "Railroad Sunset", which I think I've actually seen before (maybe at the Whitney in NYC a few years back), and certainly in reproduction, but never fully registered.
With the ones that I already knew well from books and/or previous viewings, their 'painting-ness' was particularly apparent, which somehow added to their depth and appeal, a bit despite the realism of Hopper's style. I guess that what I really like about his work is the way that it's invested with a sense of the extraordinary - perhaps the infraordinary, rather - an effect achieved through his evocation of light and shadow, and use of colour, mood and composition - and in some sense that's augmented by being able to see the paintings themselves.
St Petersburg
We went to a lot of museums and the like in St Petersburg. As far as I can remember:
* The Hermitage lived up to expectations, massive, sprawling, and filled to overflowing with all types of art, including large numbers of the old masters - Rembrandt, da Vinci, etc. My focus was on the extremely comprehensive selection of 19th to early 20th century art, with all of the key figures in the development of representational, figurative and colour-oriented painting represented by multiple pieces - Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky plus the lesser but still important figures of Derain and de Vlaminck.
* The Museum of Political History of Russia had an absurdly complicated floor plan and itinerary to follow through across two buildings and three levels - I half-suspected that the desk people were playing some sort of trick (Russian bureaucracy etc) when they marked it all out for us on a map, but it turned out to be deadly serious. The exhibitions had names like "Death Penalty: Pros and Cons", "Lenin's Study", "The Accursed Civil War", "It Cannot Be Forbidden...To Be Stored" and "What Do We Know About Petr Stolypin?". Sadly, "Collapse of the USSR: Historical Inevitability or Criminal Conspiracy" was one of the ones without English notes, so the answer to that particular question remains a mystery.
* The Vodka Museum was a bit of a non-affair, particularly with all the captions in Russian only. Andreas enjoyed the tasting, though.
* The Nabokov and Dostoevsky Museums were each located in houses that their respective subjects lived in and filled with a range of more or less interesting author-related material. I'm not mad for these kinds of biographical excavations, but didn't mind wandering through.
* Pushinskaya-10, a graffiti-covered and industrial-looking building, houses several more or less unmarked galleries, including a couple comprising 'The Museum of Noncomformists Art'. We only explored a couple.
* Another art centre was 'Loft Project Etagi' - well worth the seeing, particularly given that it also housed (along with a hostel) a nice rooftop bar/restaurant where we had dinner and drank Soviet champagne as the afternoon faded behind us.
Helsinki
There was a neat Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition on at the Helsinki Art Museum - Tennis Palace, meaning that, along with the Hopper in Madrid, I was able to see two of my absolute favourites within the space of just a couple of weeks - a real treat. There's a sense of infinity in her paintings, and an endless interplay between abstraction and representation (flowers, skulls, landscapes) - it's so easy to get lost in the light and colour of her work, in the luminosity of all of the tones and shades (even the browns and greys), which perhaps comes from the New Mexico desert setting in which most were done; "Dark Tree Trunks" (1946), say, is far more compelling than in reproduction in books, partly for that reason...although interestingly, the later "Blue Black and Grey" (1960), which is very close to pure abstraction, has that same luminous character.
The Ateneum Museum was featuring a large exhibition of work by Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946); I hadn't come across her before, but apparently she's a key Finnish painter. I was most drawn to some of her earlier paintings, which had a poignant, somewhat nostalgic (if maybe a tiny bit sentimental) air - "Once Upon A Time (Old Memories)" (1892), "The Broken String (By The Rivers of Babylon)" (1892) - oil paintings, but with a dusty, hazy air and glow. Over her career she moved to a more simplied, reduced style, plainer and flatter, and often wan-looking, physically rubbed and thinned out; more and more distortions were introduced into her work, taking on an expressionist and even cubist flavour.
And the Kiasma contemporary art museum impressed me, both as a building and for the art it held. Two exhibitions, both, as far as I'm concerned, highlighting the best type of thing that contemporary art has to offer, at once serious and playful, conceptually interested but grounded in a rigorous artistic practice: "Eyeballing: The New Forms of Comics" (best were Hannerrina Moisseinen's "Cloth Road", Mari Ahokoivu's "Rumour Birds" and Katja Tukainen's hyper-kitsch "Paradis k (Kidnap)" (something of a guilty pleasure for me, that last); and "Camouflage: Visual Art and Design in Disguise" (best: Jiri Geller's "Sugar" series of brightly coloured plastic sculptures, Kariel's (Muriel Lasser & Karri Kuoppala) 'room' installation "Pier", and Idiot's (Afke Golsteijn & Floris Bakker) series of taxidermied animals melded with precious stones and man-made objects, which manages to surprise and please despite the seemingly obvious idea).
(Despite its being the longest leg of the trip, no museums in Iceland - there was more than enough to see out of doors!)
V. jet-lagged and tired for trip to the Reina Sofia, so didn't get full value from what looked to be a pretty good collection. Introduced me to Santiago Rusinol via the mysterious "Aranjuez Garden. Arbor II" (1907). And liked the James Coleman installation "Box (ahhareturnabout)" (1977).
The Prado's collection, while huge, is basically all about pre-20th century art and pretty light-on for 19th, and therefore basically exactly outside my own interests. I sort of drifted through it a bit, but we were in there for several hours nonetheless; two that sunk in were Joachim Patinir's "Rest on the flight into Egypt" (1518-20) and Bernard van Orley's "The Virgin of Louvain" (1520).
The Thyssen-Bornemisza was much more to my taste, housing a strong selection of late and post-impressionist stuff. Two of the Monets particularly grabbed me - "The Thaw at Vetheuil" (1881) and "The House Among the Roses" (1925). I looked at that latter for quite a while before making out the house itself amidst the roses; seeing that large, late Monet water-lilies painting hung amidst Rothkos and other recognised examples of abstract expressionism at the Tate Modern last year has really opened up his work to me, giving me a new appreciation for it. Apart from pieces by some of the usual suspects (van Gogh, Kandinsky), was also drawn to a naturalistic landscape that I thought had some symbolist elements, Thomas Cole's "Expulsion, Moon and Firelight" (1828) and Ivan Kliun's abstract "Composicion" (1917).
Fortuitously, also on at the Thyssen-Bornemisza was an Edward Hopper exhibition - small to medium sized, but something of a career survey, and satisfying. It included a range of his earlier works (from the earliest, somewhat expressionist pieces, through the 1920s as many of his signature images emerged - eg women observed in rooms, light coming from outside) and some of his finely detailed sketches and watercolours, as well as many examples of his most famous pieces, including "Cape Cod Evening", "Morning in a City" and "South Carolina Morning". I was struck by "Railroad Sunset", which I think I've actually seen before (maybe at the Whitney in NYC a few years back), and certainly in reproduction, but never fully registered.
With the ones that I already knew well from books and/or previous viewings, their 'painting-ness' was particularly apparent, which somehow added to their depth and appeal, a bit despite the realism of Hopper's style. I guess that what I really like about his work is the way that it's invested with a sense of the extraordinary - perhaps the infraordinary, rather - an effect achieved through his evocation of light and shadow, and use of colour, mood and composition - and in some sense that's augmented by being able to see the paintings themselves.
St Petersburg
We went to a lot of museums and the like in St Petersburg. As far as I can remember:
* The Hermitage lived up to expectations, massive, sprawling, and filled to overflowing with all types of art, including large numbers of the old masters - Rembrandt, da Vinci, etc. My focus was on the extremely comprehensive selection of 19th to early 20th century art, with all of the key figures in the development of representational, figurative and colour-oriented painting represented by multiple pieces - Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky plus the lesser but still important figures of Derain and de Vlaminck.
* The Museum of Political History of Russia had an absurdly complicated floor plan and itinerary to follow through across two buildings and three levels - I half-suspected that the desk people were playing some sort of trick (Russian bureaucracy etc) when they marked it all out for us on a map, but it turned out to be deadly serious. The exhibitions had names like "Death Penalty: Pros and Cons", "Lenin's Study", "The Accursed Civil War", "It Cannot Be Forbidden...To Be Stored" and "What Do We Know About Petr Stolypin?". Sadly, "Collapse of the USSR: Historical Inevitability or Criminal Conspiracy" was one of the ones without English notes, so the answer to that particular question remains a mystery.
* The Vodka Museum was a bit of a non-affair, particularly with all the captions in Russian only. Andreas enjoyed the tasting, though.
* The Nabokov and Dostoevsky Museums were each located in houses that their respective subjects lived in and filled with a range of more or less interesting author-related material. I'm not mad for these kinds of biographical excavations, but didn't mind wandering through.
* Pushinskaya-10, a graffiti-covered and industrial-looking building, houses several more or less unmarked galleries, including a couple comprising 'The Museum of Noncomformists Art'. We only explored a couple.
* Another art centre was 'Loft Project Etagi' - well worth the seeing, particularly given that it also housed (along with a hostel) a nice rooftop bar/restaurant where we had dinner and drank Soviet champagne as the afternoon faded behind us.
Helsinki
There was a neat Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition on at the Helsinki Art Museum - Tennis Palace, meaning that, along with the Hopper in Madrid, I was able to see two of my absolute favourites within the space of just a couple of weeks - a real treat. There's a sense of infinity in her paintings, and an endless interplay between abstraction and representation (flowers, skulls, landscapes) - it's so easy to get lost in the light and colour of her work, in the luminosity of all of the tones and shades (even the browns and greys), which perhaps comes from the New Mexico desert setting in which most were done; "Dark Tree Trunks" (1946), say, is far more compelling than in reproduction in books, partly for that reason...although interestingly, the later "Blue Black and Grey" (1960), which is very close to pure abstraction, has that same luminous character.
The Ateneum Museum was featuring a large exhibition of work by Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946); I hadn't come across her before, but apparently she's a key Finnish painter. I was most drawn to some of her earlier paintings, which had a poignant, somewhat nostalgic (if maybe a tiny bit sentimental) air - "Once Upon A Time (Old Memories)" (1892), "The Broken String (By The Rivers of Babylon)" (1892) - oil paintings, but with a dusty, hazy air and glow. Over her career she moved to a more simplied, reduced style, plainer and flatter, and often wan-looking, physically rubbed and thinned out; more and more distortions were introduced into her work, taking on an expressionist and even cubist flavour.
And the Kiasma contemporary art museum impressed me, both as a building and for the art it held. Two exhibitions, both, as far as I'm concerned, highlighting the best type of thing that contemporary art has to offer, at once serious and playful, conceptually interested but grounded in a rigorous artistic practice: "Eyeballing: The New Forms of Comics" (best were Hannerrina Moisseinen's "Cloth Road", Mari Ahokoivu's "Rumour Birds" and Katja Tukainen's hyper-kitsch "Paradis k (Kidnap)" (something of a guilty pleasure for me, that last); and "Camouflage: Visual Art and Design in Disguise" (best: Jiri Geller's "Sugar" series of brightly coloured plastic sculptures, Kariel's (Muriel Lasser & Karri Kuoppala) 'room' installation "Pier", and Idiot's (Afke Golsteijn & Floris Bakker) series of taxidermied animals melded with precious stones and man-made objects, which manages to surprise and please despite the seemingly obvious idea).
(Despite its being the longest leg of the trip, no museums in Iceland - there was more than enough to see out of doors!)
