separated at birth: celadon shards and green tiles

 

Li Hongwei

The Origin, 2022

(exhibition on view currently at the

Alfred Ceramic Art Museum)

detail of façade

Chao Center for Asian Art

The Ringling

Sarasota, Florida

Machado Silvetti, architects

I'm an antique and like print magazines

The ceramics library did not receive the July/August issue of The Magazine Antiques and it has been claimed. I imagined that I could go over to the David A. Howe Public Library and use their copy to index the issue for the Avery Index. Both the Hornell and Wellsville public libraries used to subscribe to Antiques. Those were the days, the before days. The holdings in Wellsville stopped in mid 2020. The librarian looked in STARCat and said that there was no indication of the magazine being held at Hornell. There were quite a few other Wellsville periodicals that seemed to stop in 2020. And the display of current magazines was quite paltry, relative to a few years ago when I indexed an issue there. Sigh.

But it was too early, after I discovered there was no issue to index, to go over to Texas Hot for lunch so I meandered into the special collections parlor and then to the 700s to see what was there on art and architecture. Drifting along into the 900s for history and biography, I noticed a book entitled What she ate: six remarkable women & the food that tells their stories, by Laura Shapiro (Viking, 2017). I read the first few pages of the introduction and went right over to check out the book. Next. 

My current reading is Older brother by Mahir Guven (Europa Editions, 2019). I'm enjoying it so I should be able to get through it and What she ate before the latter is due back at the library.

visiting the Met with my older sister

My older sister Roberta lived in Queensbury, New York, about an hour north of Albany. She was a volunteer at the Hyde Collection, a museum in Glens Falls. Although she did various addressing and desk tasks, the task she talked about with the most warmth was sewing dust covers for some of the historic furniture when it was in storage.

Roberta came down to New York City for a day trip sponsored by the Hyde when I was living in the City, probably at least twenty years ago. The bus dropped them off in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Berta and I spent a couple hours or so in the Metropolitan. Since she was a regular seamstress, knitter, and crocheter, we went to the American collection and looked at quilts. It was delightful to look at textile objects with her. They were art objects but she talked about the bias of the fabric and how it worked with and against the design and preservation of the object.

We looked at other art and then walked across Central Park. We ate at a Vietnamese place on Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side. I don't remember what we did later in the afternoon other than getting her to the Radio City Music Hall neighborhood where the bus was picking them up for the return trip.

I have been thinking especially about Roberta because she died this past week. Just days earlier, she had been on an early 80th-birthday cruise on Lake George with her whole immediate family. That is, both kids and the grandkids. She had a pulmonary embolism about two weeks before she died and then was up and down. After a downturn, she declined returning to the ICU and died in her daughter's arms.

Naturally, she has been much in my thoughts. I went up to the library to drop off a note for one of my colleagues and also picked up the latest issue of Magazine Antiques which is one of the magazines I index for the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals. I was looking at the issue as I walked home and there was an article about the conservation of a canapé à la turque commissioned by Marie Antoinette and now in the collection of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. The subtitle of the article mentions its "prized if drearily upholstered presence at San Francisco's Legion of Honor since the 1950s." The sofa now has new hand-embroidered upholstery. 

Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

This picture, from Wikimedia Commons, predates the conservation and reupholstering. I was not familiar with the term "canapé" in reference to furniture. The Art and Architecture Thesaurus describes a canapé as an elegant sofa developed in France in the 18th century and picked up by Chippendale and others.

Berta would never have had such a fancy piece of furniture in her residence, unless maybe if it was handed down by an elegant relative. It wasn't money. It was common sense. She was the solid rock of us kids and I'll miss that.

no more uppity teachers ... or students?

We were supposed to go on a field trip to the Cuba Block Barn today but Hurricane Debby is working her way up the eastern coast. Rain date in September. When I got to the Alfred Station SDB Church parking lot where we were supposed to combine for shared rides to Cuba, Sharon Burdick arrived and she had copies of a fact sheet on the Bedford Corners School House. The schoolhouse was the added bonus for our trip to Cuba, being on the road between the Block Barn and lunch at Sprague's in Portville.

The schoolhouse is now the home of the Portville Historical and Preservation Society. The main room had double desks to hold two students and was large enough that multiple grades could be taught. The teacher was seated on a platform in the front of the room. Later, it was mandated that teachers should not be on a different level than the students and the arrangement of the room was flipped with the teacher platform at the back.

When I was in first-third grades in New Auburn, Wisconsin, the school house was for all the grades, no kindergarten but all twelve numbered grades met in one building with shared rooms for first and second and for third to fifth. That meant that my older sister and I were in the same classroom when she was in fifth grade and I in third. One day, Roberta's class was discussing the polar regions and nosy me butted in to say that we had been to the North Pole. Roberta had to correct my story to say that it was Santa's North Pole in the Adirondacks.

The "we" of the field trip were members of the Bakers Bridge Historical Association and other interested folks.

the disappearing hours

Having lots of books around the house can be a real delight but sometimes one will just disappear. It won't be in the place that I'm sure it should be. The most recent disappearing title was the small and inexpensive, and long-owned, partial facsimile of the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, Queen of France. This fourteenth-century manuscript illuminated by Jean Pucelle even has a Wikipedia page. 

The facsimile is just under five and a half inches tall. When the book of hours, now in the Cloisters collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was being restored, the Met displayed the disbound manuscript before it was cleaned and rebound. The "facsimile" is actually slightly larger than the original.

The other day, I was thinking about something and the facsimile came to mind. I went to that shelf of small books in my bedroom and the Hours facsimile was not there. The facsimile of the Hours of Mary of Burgundy was there. I went down the shelf book-by-book several times. I looked on a few shelves where other books of manuscript illumination are kept. I thought, for a while, that I might have lent the facsimile to an art student who was in the manuscripts class. No luck. I was about ready to resign myself to no longer having the facsimile.

This morning, it is cooler outside and I was opening the window in the middle room of my part of the family house. I realized that there was another cluster of little books at the end of the shelf just to my left. And, there was the facsimile of the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux. Happiness. Made my day.

P.S. (an hour later) I went to move some of the other little books from the shelf near the window to the shelf in the bedroom, the most expectable collective spot for shelving my little books. There was the book on the Bosch and other Flemish paintings in the Prado that I'd really spent a lot of time looking for a year or more ago. I looked among the travel books and among the folders of stuff from trips to Spain. Nope, it was hiding in the little stack of little books.

just a normal guy

“I’ve never felt symbolic. I felt — you know, I’m just here.” He laughed. “I’m just Ken.” (This was an allusion to Ryan Gosling’s showstopping song at the Oscars, the night before the interview.) “I’m just me. I’m just somebody who’s trying to be a writer, trying to do his best. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

Salman Rushdie, in an interview with Sarah Lyall, in the New York Times Book Review

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/books/salman-rushdie-knife-interview.html

goin' digital

Quite a few years ago, we used to have regular and contentious discussions about the need to retain physical mailings for ARLIS/NA member business and publications. Email was available to many or most of us but not everybody. I used to argue (sometimes) that until we only used email, people would insist on physical mailings. Even today, the local Bakers Bridge Historical Association sends out a regular newsletter by mail to about half of our members.

I did finally get a smartphone but my life has not moved there. It is not my favorite venue for dealing with life. Today, I am reading a message from the Brooklyn Museum that they are moving our membership card to digital. It's not the first museum that I belong to to do this but I'd rather not. It almost irks me enough to not renew my membership. When I was in New York City last week, I used my old membership card at the Museum of Arts and Design and the front desk clerk checked their database to be sure that the expiration date was not past. The Brooklyn Museum letter said an unexpired membership card can be used for a grace period, with the implication that grace would not be extended for a long period.

Palladianism in Kane, Pa., and Yorkshire

McDermott Mausoleum

Kane, Pennsylvania

Temple of the Four Winds

Castle Howard

Yorkshire

Wikimedia Commons

By jcw1967 from Leeds, UK - Temple of the Four Winds, Castle Howard, 17112017, JCW1967, EOS 1Ds (2), CC BY 2.0

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78305779

39 x 2 = 78

I do enjoy when numbers line up or add up as much as I enjoy a good sentence. Well, maybe as much. Words and numbers. Sometimes mirrored like palindromes. This morning, I stopped for gasoline before I went to Wegmans to get my Sunday New York Times. The total purchase was $20.78 for 6.078 gallons. Off to Wegmans where I picked up groceries along with the three papers for me and the two Lindas (Alfred friends for whom I pick up and deliver their Sunday papers). My Wegmans bill was $60.39, minus the $21 for the three papers is $39.39. Thirty-nine is half of 78. When I added the grocery total to my monthly food expenses, the total was $638.78. I guess it's just going to be a 39 and 78 kind of day but no "palindrome" yet.

One of the pictures you get when you search the internet for "39 x 2 = 78." It (39 x 78) happens to be the size of sheets for a twin bed.

Harmony Hammond at the Whitney Biennial

A wonderful paragraph, for a variety of reasons, from the review of the 2024 Whitney Biennial in the New Yorker by Jackson Arn entitled "The Whitney Biennial's taste for flesh." Posted March 22, 2024, to appear in the April 1 print edition:

By a close margin, the four fabric assemblages of Harmony Hammond are the fleshiest things in this show. They use a variety of materials to suggest a whole menagerie of bodies, from pimply-shiny to aged and chalky. Colors are subdued for the most part, and strategically so: when a touch of red shrieks out of the dirty white field of "Chenille #11," it almost hurts. Hammond has suggested that flourishes like this were meant to evoke "sexual brutality against women," but take a few steps back and marvel at how this only deepens her work's mystery -- if the red is brutality, what are the string, the smeared white, the grommets? Interpretation is interwoven with the sheer, thingy strangeness of the object, and can't be ripped out. Art like this is built to last, I would guess. But if you prefer your political messaging neat, no chaser, you are welcome to walk to the other end of the sixth floor, go to the terrace, and spend some time with Kiyan Williams's big dirt sculpture of the White House sinking into the ground, complete with upside-down American flag. There's a label in case you can't figure out what it means.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/01/the-whitney-biennial-art-review

Some of the reasons:

• descriptive words, rich and evocative
• I was lucky enough to spend time with Harmony Hammond when we were both active in the Queer Caucus for Art, an affiliated society of the College Art Association (now rebranding itself as simply CAA).
• particular memory of drinks and conversation after a caucus business meeting in Philadelphia when the last remaining folks in the hotel lounge were several older lesbians and me, and then we walked each other back to our hotels. The younger folks had gone off dancing.
• memories of visits to various Whitney Biennials; this one has just opened and runs until August so there's a chance I might get to the City to see it
• I actually said the word "chenille" today when a friend asked us what color we thought her sweater was. I asked about the material. "Is it chenille?"
• the ending of the paragraph