Tag: art

Leopold Museum And The Concert

Looking at the posts about our previous visit to Vienna in 2022, this one and that one, it appears to be hopeless – I was complaining about the cold weather back then, and promised to get there in better weather, and we came back for even worse weather!

Also, I still haven’t done my homework on Modernism in Vienna, but at least this time, we had more time to explore. After Belvedere, we headed to the Leopold Museum, which was partially under reconstruction last time, and this time, we spent a lot of time there. It was a more in-depth dive into the New Objectivity, Modernism, Kimpt and Schiele, Secession and Women’s Rights, and the artists in the exhibit were pretty much the same we saw in other museums, so I won’t repeat myself. The Leopold Museum has an excellent online collection that you can tour.

I liked a four-minute movie with the tram going through Vienna in the early 1900s (don’t remember the exact year). It always feels surreal to see people “live” more than a hundred years ago, and it’s surprising how much alike things look (you want to say these are the same trees :)), and the people waiting at the tram stop. It’s also interesting how little the men’s clothing changed since then, and how much the women’s clothing changed 🙂

Several pictures of the museum interior, a couple of interesting objects, and paintings:

I don’t know how they make this spiral to fly in the air, but that’s how it looks
The Insinuation by Luksch
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Belvedere

On Monday morning, we planned a visit to the Belvedere Summer Palaces and park.

I thought that Belvedere would be mostly about architecture and interiors (same as many summer palaces around St. Petersburg). But it turned out that only a few rooms in each palace are restored in all their baroque glory, and there was more art and more information to process.

I will still start with the architecture, though. Everything would look better during summer, but I imagine there will also be hordes of tourists when the weather is nicer (same as in Paris, Athens, and other big tourist attractions, so I am counting my blessings.

We started with the Upper Palace and the park, which actually looks a lot like the Peterhoff Uppaer Palace.

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Albertina Museum In Vienna, Part 2

Paul Klee
Boris Grigorjew. A couple: Thief and Prostitute. 1917

Once again, I didn’t know anything about this artist, so I saved some notes from the exhibit:

Boris Grigoriev is one of those artists who, despite the omnipresent search for new forms of avant-garde expression in the contemporary Eastern European art centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, stuck to figuration and the classical genres. A brilliant draftsman, he initially worked as an illustrator for magazines and made a name for himself as a recognized portraitist of well-known personalities. Self-Portrait with a Cigarette is one of these powerfully expressive portraits.

Grigoriev’s portraits thrive on a direct confrontation with the sitter and the exaggeration of gestures and facial features, as well as the expression of an emotion that captivates the viewer. In this sell-portrait Grigorier presents himself in a defensive posture: the raised shoulder and the skeptical, grim gaze suggest a defensive aloofness; in addition, the figure is viewed from below, by which the artist elevates himself while subordinating the viewer it is through such powerful means that Grigorier lends this traditional genre o modernity that a comparable and roughly contemporaneous with the visoalizations of Expressionism and New Objectivity. Not lost because of the criticism of his “European style,” the artist left Russia in 1919 and settled in Paris in 1921

I recognized Deineka, and was wondering how he could possibly paint a baseball game, and it turned out that he was “awarded” a trip abroad, including the USA, approximately at the same time as Ilf and Petrov
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Albertina Museum In Vienna, Part 1

On Sunday, we planned to visit both Albertina and at least some of the Hofburg museums, but we ended up spending the whole afternoon in Albertina (including lunch, which took longer than we expected for a museum cafe).

We started with the State Rooms exhibit, then moved on to Monet to Picasso and Fascination Paper.

This very unconventional piece of furniture was made for Archduke Carl, who got tired of the constant presence of the staff who didn’t allow him to do anything by himself. Having this very modern looking, and for his time, revolutionary, this stand allowed Archduke to put things on it and take them off independently (do not ask, that’s what the exhibit description says!)
And that’s how Archduke Carl looked
On the opposite side of practicality – a porcelain table
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Bruce Goff Exhibit

I briefly saw this exhibit when I was at the Art Institute with my granddaughters during their winter break, and I wanted to go back and see it one more time when not in a rush (and possibly more times later – I usually try to visit each new exhibit several times). My original plan to do it on January 3 didn’t work, so my next opportunity was this Thursday, when the Art Institute is open until 8 PM. I still had to visit my mom on that day, so I planned to be there for no more than 1.5 hours, and maybe come one more time later.

When I entered the hallway which led to the exhibit, I saw a sign “Free event today,” but since I had never seen any evening free events in the Art Institute (just fancy receptions sometimes), I thought that this sign was left there since midday. But to my surprise, when I walked into the exhibit hall, I heard a conversation which sounded exremely interesting, and I hurried up to join it.

It turned out that there were two docents conversing with the group of visitors. I can’t even call it a tour, because it was very informal, and both docents were passing the ball of the conversation to each other, happily including the visitors, and turning their questions into the prompts to tell more. It was a million times better than any lecture!

These drawings represented different music genres

Goff was an artist, an architect and a composer, and he didn’t want to follow conventional way in anything he did, including the choice of materials.

From Goff’s shirt collection. He loved extravagant shirts, and people were gifting shirts to him.
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Art Institute And CSO

On Thursday, I had a very packed after-work schedule. First, I went to the Art Institute to finally see the Strange Realities exhibit. Usually, I am among the first to see a new exhibit, but this time, I have something going on each Thursday, and I didn’t have time to make a separate trip to the Loop on any weekend.

Upon entering the exhibit, I realized that symbolism as an art movement had completely dropped from my radar many years ago. In high school, we studied symbolism in literature, including Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely. We “obligatory loved” Balmont, Annensky, and other poets of the “Silver Century” of Russian poetry. I just tried to find (unsuccessfully) a blog post where I wrote about how an “intelligent person” in Soviet Russia was supposed to admire certain poets and writers, who were not explicitly banned, but were not praised by the official propaganda; loving symbolists was one of those “requirements.”

Now I realized that for many years, it was not obligatory anymore, and this artistic movement dropped from my sight, and it took me a while to realize: yea, I know what it is all about!

Kupka: The Fools
Ensor: The Entry of Christ into Brussels
Hans Thoma: The Dream
Felicent Rops: The Greates Love of Don Juan
Alfred Kubin: Judith with the Head of Holofernes
Grasset: Morthin Addict

I think I will go see this exhibit again; I didn’t have enough time because I also wanted to catch up on the Elizabeth Catlett exhibit (I saw it as a “second one” when we were at the Art Institute with Boris in August, and it was not enough).

Next stop was the CSO. A week before, they advertised the pickup dinners at the Rotunda. I think it was in response to the disappearance of the affordable “before the show” dining options, which I also complained about. So I tried it, and the answer is no :). I would rather stop at Lea!

As for the concert, it was absolutely amazing! It was an all-Berlioz program with Klaus Makela conducting, and now I have finally started to like him. I won’t say I disliked him when I heard him conducting for the first couple of times, but he is so different from Riccardo Muti that it was a difficult switch! This time, I sat with my mouth open throughout the whole concert 🙂

Oh, and the violist Antoine Tamestit was absolutely outstanding!!! Loved every moment of his performance in the Harold in Italy.

Weekend With Lena

Lena finally made it to Chicago – in September instead of July, and it turned sharply cold, and we could not go to the beach. Still, our interests are so much aligned that we made it an absolutely perfect weekend.

Lena arrived on Friday evening and met with her Chicago-based coworkers. We chatted for a bit before and drafted the plan of activities.

Saturday was chilly, and since Lena uses each of her Chicago visits as an occasion to dress nicely, and I am happy to join her, we ended up being dressed not precisely to the weather, and were moderately cold most of the time :).

We started the day in the Field Museum, and I was able to properly see all the exhibits (and the recent updates to the “Evolving Planet,” which Lena didn’t see yet).

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The First Homosexuals Exhibit

Yesterday, I went to see The First Homosexual Exhibit at 659 Wrightwood. Now I can’t remember where I learned about this exhibit; the usual suspect is WBEZ.

The place is seriously guarded, and all tickets should be purchased online in advance (I won’t be surprised if they run background checks before issuing tickets – they don’t show up in your inbox instantaneously).

I planned to go with a friend who cancelled a couple of days before, but I didn’t find anyone to offer tickets, so I went by myself.

The exhibit is extremely interesting, and gianormous! I didn’t expect it to be so intense, and didn’t allocate enough time. They have curators in every room, and elaborate descriptions for almost every piece in the exhibit. I came earlier than my ticket said, and they said it’s fine. I thought I would be done in an hour, but more than an hour later, I realized that I had seen only half of the exhibit. At the end, I had to rush, and unfortunately, I won’t have another chance to see the rest, since I will be out of town for the second half of June.

I ordered a catalog, which should arrive in the beginning of July. I mostly wanted it to retain the loads of information. In the beginning, I tried to take pictures of almost everything, until I realized it was not possible 🙂

Below are two pictures of the space, which is absolutely amaizing.

And just t little bit of the exhibit itself, to give an idea.

…. and over 300 pieces, each with the load of information!

For those who are planning to go, plan on staying for 2.5 hours or so.

Art Institute: Ancient Roman Sculpture

I still keep myself muted about the activities that take most of my time these days, draining my whole self in the process. There still appears to be room for cultural activities (but no time to blog about them), so I will try to post a short summary of the past two weeks.

Myths and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from Torlonia Collection is a new exhibit that opened at the Art Institute last week. I was there on the opening night for the Members-only preview (and invited a friend). I didn’t expect anything groundbreaking from this exhibit (what could be new about the Roman Sculpture?) and mostly thought about taking my friend out, but there were plenty of new things!

This private collection was not on public view for over 70 years, and many sculptures where cleaned and restored for this exhibit specifically.

Men were always presented with their distinct personal features, and women in a more generic way, so it’s often difficult to identify the portraits, or even tell whether it was a portrait of a nobility or a goddess or a random person.
Younger and older Markus Aurelius on the right
As my friend noted, in most couples represented in this exhibit, the man looks way happier than the woman
Hercules is smaller than Athena and Apollo, probably because he was mortal
Arthemis with multiple breasts
Bacchus

After we saw this exhibit, I realized that my friend hadn’t seen the Black Planet exhibit yet, and we rushed there, and didn’t have enough time. And now, one more exhibit is about to open!

Ateneum

I am back in Chicago, and 200% of the time, I am busy, as anybody can figure out from my silence here. The previous post was drafted during my flight back and was not published because the in-flight internet connection went down in the middle of the flight, and I didn’t have time after that :). Still, I wanted to write a little bit more about what I saw in Helsinki.

Whenever I come to Helsinki, I immediately feel “everything is fine, and ok, and life is normal and orderly.” I know that my Finnish friends disagree with me, but we have different reference points :). This time, I worked every day, so it was not that much time to do something else. The only fun thing I’ve done was an outing with my friend Natasha: we went to the Ateneum Museum, which recently reopened after a major reconstruction.

The exhibit we saw is called Gothic Modern, and it explores the influence of Medieval art on 20th-century modern art. Each room is dedicated to one of the themes common to both historical periods: religion, life, death, sexuality, violence, etc. I didn’t know most of the Finnish artists who were part of this exhibit, and I even purchased an exhibit catalog with the hope of reading more! At some point, I stopped taking pictures because I realized I wouldn’t be able to remember what exactly had drawn my attention.

Munch
Max Klinger. On the Rails
Sasha Schneider. Feeling of Dependency

Getting back to the existing worries about the state of the economy and life instability. I would not say that the worries are unjustified. However, even now, even with all the economic uncertainties, I appreciate the virtual non-existence of homelessness, the accessibility of healthcare (yes, I know, but again – we have different baselines), and the fact that the buses run on schedule:))