On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
On the Road: Week of November 9 (5 am)
Albatrossity
Jerry
?BillinGlendaleCA
Yutsano
Mary G.In After Dark this week, we continue with a few more Election Respite posts as we detox from the stress, and toward the end of the week, we slide into Fall Colors.
On the Road Election Respite and Fall Colors: Week of November 9 (10pm)
randy khan – Election Respite, Art to Calm the Soul Edition
way2blue – Election Respite, Late Edition
lashonharangue – Election Respite, Croatian Cascades and Waterfalls Edition
JanieM – Election Respite, The Four Seasons Edition
ema– Fall ColorsNext week, we have a full week of Fall Colors in On the Road After Dark.
? And now, back to Election Respite
randy khan
Art is a balm in my life, and I thought I’d share some of the favorite things I’ve seen over the past few years (well, actually 15 years, but most of them are from the last 5). Oh, and I wanted things that would make people smile or made me feel calm or serene. With one exception, each of these photos is from a different trip, and they’re from six different cities.
The first photo is from The Gates, by Christo and Jean-Claude. I’d been interested in his work since I was a kid and I read about Running Fence. We had a chance to go to New York for the day to see it, and took the opportunity.
It was great. It had snowed not too long before we got there, and the contrast of the bright orange gates with the white snow was great. And it was a little windy, so the fabric was fluttering in the breeze. It’s kind of hard to really convey the piece in one photo, but this one is close enough.
My wife and I keep coming back to the Japanese galleries at the Metropolitan Museum. The temporary shows are great, but it’s also wonderful to revisit the pieces that stay out all the time, including a lot of contemporary Japanese ceramics.
This is one of the permanent collection pieces – PixCell-Deer #24, by Kohei Nawa. He took a taxidermy deer and covered it in glass spheres of varying sizes. From a distance, it’s easy to see the deer, but close up the spheres obscure the shape and you get only glimpses of what’s underneath.
If you’ve been to Chicago, you probably know this piece. It’s Cloud Gate, by Anish Kapor. It’s a huge, monumental sculpture, yet close up it’s an amazingly intimate experience. You’d think the piece would loom over you, but the reflections of the people all around – including you – make it feel personal and you forget the huge mass of steel.
My wife and I collect contemporary art glass, and this probably is one of her top 5 favorite pieces in the entire world. It’s Lynx After a Sketchbook Page by Albrecht Durer, by Marta Klonowska. She’s done a whole series of pieces like this, using drawings and prints as inspiration for glass sculptures.
It’s made of thousands of shards of sheet glass glued together. In person, it looks kind of furry, but of course it’s not.
By the way, the Corning Museum of Glass is really great even if you’re not as crazy about glass as we are. The contemporary galleries are particularly wonderful, but they do demos all day, and the rest of the museum is filled with amazing things from the earliest times people made glass up to today.
This is Together, by Jaume Plensa, which we saw during the 2015 Venice Biennale. It’s in a church on an island along the Grand Canal. We’ve seen other works by Plensa, and they’re usually monumental whole people, so the head and the use of the wire frame are unusual. In the dim light of the church, it was kind of mysterious and ethereal.
The Biennale really is three separate things. First, there’s the main exhibition, chosen by a curator, and held in a building that used to be used to make ships. It’s enormous and overwhelming, with works crammed everywhere. We went through it in an hour with our group, and I think you either have to do that and hope you see the highlights or come back several times. Second, there are subsidiary exhibitions all over town – the Plensa was one of those. Third, there are national pavilions, where countries showcase their artists. Most of them are in one place, although a fair number are scattered throughout the city. I thought the best experience was going to the pavilions, as each one typically is devoted to one artist or a small number of artists, and walking between them gives you a chance to clear your head
This is from the Japanese pavilion. It’s a work by Chiharu Shiota called The Key in the Hand. It filled a huge room – this is only part of it – and it was breathtaking. The dark spots are keys, which she gathered from around the world to use in the piece.
More Japanese art: This is a frog netsuke from a show on Japonisme at the Musee des Arts Decoratif in Paris. (It’s technically part of the Louvre, but it really is entirely separate.) Netsuke are really interesting. They’re functional, as they were made to be part of the rigging to carry things on a kimono sash (since kimonos don’t have pockets), but the Japanese turned them into art. There are simple netsuke, intricate netsuke, beautiful ones, scary ones, and funny ones. Also, they’re not very big – this one was about an inch across. I really liked the expression on the frog’s face.
I am a sucker for still life paintings, and if I had the money to collect serious art, I’d have a bunch of them. A great still life painting showcases beauty, composition, and the artist’s technical skills, and they also carry moral messages, typically memento mori to remind us that life is fleeting. (You may be able to see the insects in this one.)
This painting, in typical still life fashion, is called Flowers in a Glass Vase, and it’s by Rachel Ruysch. It’s pretty unusual to find a painting by a woman from the late 17th or early 18th century, and this is a beauty.
The Driehaus is kind of a funny place. It’s a house museum, but it also hosts some pretty good shows. The house was a real Gilded Age showplace, and it was turned into a museum by a modern-day Master of the Universe, which at least is a better use of his money than donating to Republicans (although maybe he does that, too). This show, which was about Tiffany ecclesiastical stained glass windows, was drawn from Mr. Driehaus’s impressive collection of stained glass.
This piece is King Solomon, designed for Tiffany Studios by Frederick Wilson. It’s got a whole lot of the typical Tiffany signatures in it – layering, textures, variegated glass – and a pretty fun design. I mean, check out his feet.
The Musee D’Orsay has the most amazing series of galleries I’ve ever seen – maybe 2/3 of the north side of the top floor is devoted to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces, including so many of the most famous works that your head spins, with things like the Degas Little Dancer sculpture interspersed for kicks.
This painting is not in those galleries, although it’s in the right period. It’s Madame Roger Jourdain, by Albert Besnard. I took this photo on our last trip in the Before Times, and it really captivated me. She is so serene and confident in her ball gown, and there’s the great, exuberant flower arrangement behind her. It seemed like a good way to conclude this post, in the hope that in the near future we can feel something like she felt.
Jim Appleton
Love love love this!
Thank you.
Emma from FL
Thank you for these. You have given me back my Zen. Like you, I am a sucker for glass. If I had money, I would want a few perfectly chosen pieces displayed in a minimalist room with large windows to catch the sun.
Gin & Tonic
Seconding the vote for the Corning Glass Museum. That whole section on the development of fiber-optic glass was absolutely fascinating (to a tech guy like me.)
Also looks like WaterGirl hasn’t fixed the submission-form problem.
Warren Senders
I first heard about Christo when I was in high school and read about his piece Valley Curtain. I love Christo & Jean-Claude. The amount of logistical work involved in those projects is huge. Christo’s design sketches sell for a lot of money, which was part of their fundraising strategy. Sad that I never got the chance to go to NY when the Gates were up. Lovely.
SkyBluePink
Wonderfully eclectic respite photos.
Thanks!
stinger
What an amazing range of artworks! Thank you!
JanieM
The “traditional” OTR images are always making me put more travel destinations on my far-too-long-already list. This set does it in a different way — introducing me to types of art that I’ve never imagined. The “Key in the Hand” one is amazing even in the picture. I wish I could have seen it for real.
Thanks. :-)
dmsilev
I love The Bean (aka Cloud Gate, but honestly nobody calls it that). Somewhere, I have a Four Seasons of The Bean set I made from when I was living in Chicago; four photos taken from the same location with The Bean reflecting the turning of the calendar. Walking underneath it is great fun as well.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic:
What submission form problem? Oh, maybe you mean 8 vs. 10? I did intentionally choose 10 for the Election Respite submissions, and let those folks know. I figured during this time that more calming photos is better.
Gin & Tonic
@WaterGirl: Number of pictures.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: see my edit just above yours.
Gin & Tonic
@WaterGirl: Ah, understood.
Yutsano
Paging Professor Levenson! Professor Thomas Levenson please come to the white courtesy phone for an important message!
I love all these but especially the glass Eevee.
cope
Glass art, Christo, Chicago and even more beautiful art all in one post…thank you. You’ve seen some stunningly beautiful pieces and taken equally stunning pictures.
Thanks again.
CaseyL
Those are wonderful, and what a nice variety of styles and media. Very calming to look at, too.
Thank you!
debbie
Love the brushwork on the gown in the last photo.
persistentillusion
One of the wonderful things about The Bean is that you can whisper under it and your voice is magnified. Teens use it to shout terrible things, being teens.
Chicago’s museums were an endless source of wonder when I lived there; the Field Museum of Natural History and the Art Institute with its grand collection of Impressionists.
Omnes Omnibus
Is the first one a picture of Melania’s X-mas decorations?
Regine Touchon
Madame Roger Jourdain is my new avatar. The Chicago pic is special. Lovely!
artem1s
I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Christo right before the Umbrella’s piece was put up in Japan. This was shortly before the Berlin Wall came down and he was still working on wrapping the Reichstag. I had never considered how much work went into these large scale pieces and the legal, political maneuvering involved. It was awe inspiring to see someone dedicate decades to a project knowing that it might never be enacted. And the concept drawings were stunning.
West of the Cascades
Love these, thanks!! I was living in NYC in early 2005, and visiting The Gates several times was one of the highlights of the three very intense, fairly miserable years I spent there. On one of the visits, I saw Christo and Jean-Claude pull up and get out of a limo! I still have a blurry photo somewhere – naturally they drew a crowd, and naturally (for me) I backed a long way away.
Isua
Thank you for that picture of The Gates! I went to see them the last day they were up, with snow on the ground – wonder if we were there the same day. It was just lovely, especially since all the people wandering around just looked bright and happy to be there. Thank you for bringing back a good memory!
randy khan
I had a ton of fun picking these out. My wife and I have been really lucky to be able to see so much great art over the years (and she has taught me a lot about it).
randy khan
@Emma from FL:
Glass and light are made for each other. We have a lot of work on our windowsills to catch the light.
randy khan
@Isua:
We were there more or less in the middle of the time they were up. In those days the shuttle was really cheap on weekends, so we flew up early Saturday morning and flew back that night. It would have been worth it at five times the price. I’d really thought I’d never get to see a Christo/Jeanne-Claude piece in person. And somewhere I have the little piece of orange fabric that I was handed as we walked into Central Park that day.
BigJimSlade
@Gin & Tonic: I was all ready to post a link to my 9th picture on Saturday, but the form let me post it, so I didn’t have to link off to a separate image! I wondered what the limit had become.
randy khan
@dmsilev:
I almost just called it The Bean in my caption. I decided I should go with the formal title to be consistent, but I had to look it up.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
Love the glass art pieces and the frog netsuke. Thanks for the posting.
Years ago, I had heard of Running Fence as it was proposed and then later, was being created. It sounded kind of pointless and ineffectual to me. But I ended up driving past part of the fence you could see from 101 as I was driving North and I was amazed that it had quite an emotional resonance for me and was indeed very effective. I imagine the orange Gates was the same way. The pictures do not convey the emotional effect at all. The fence had a way of emphasizing the wildness and the openess of the land it passed through that I had not anticipated.
HinTN
@randy khan: Mrs H and I love NYC and when we heard about The Gates we made plans to go on opening day. Took the train up to the north end and wandered south. Sometimes we caught the team unfurling a gate. It was a bright cold day with a pretty good breeze and the gates sometimes sounded like sails luffing. As we entered at the Harlem Meer we ran into a guy who was pretty high up in the organization that enabled the whole thing. He had a video camera attached to his handlebars and created “Biking The Gates.” Its probably still somewhere on the innerwebs. As you say, the logistics of Christo’s work are almost unimaginable. The Gates were designed to withstand gale force winds AND not damage or alter in any way the pathways upon which they were placed. Phenomenal engineering!
You done good.
blacque_jacques
I was at that 2015 Biennale. The Key In The Hand is breathtaking because it just fills your entire field of vision.
J R in WV
Madame Roger Jourdain reminds me of a work at the Met… I think Madame X but am not sure. But I’m terrible about artist names, much less painting names…
Lovely set of unforgettable images, thanks so much. Chicago has more large scale outdoor art that you would expect. Well done!!
Miss Bianca
@artem1s: Tell me about it. One of these days I want to write a book on Christo’s local “failed” project – Over the River. The political and NIMBY machinations were off the fucking hook.
And then I’d have to deal with the wrath of my sister, an artist who passionately disdained Christo’s work. I have to wonder if there is or was some degree of professional jealousy there.
jame
That “lynx” looks very like the crystal foxes in The Last Jedi.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=KfTalQLQi3o