When I turned the page of the T magazine and encountered this advertisement, I was almost as stunned as first viewing the famous dildo picture of Lynda Benglis in Artforum, way back in the 1970s. Stopped in my very thoughts.
Caption: Lynda Benglis by Juergen Teller. loewe.com
As you may know, I'm a fan of watching the credits until the very end of a movie. I just watched "Cloudburst," a 2011 Canadian-American film starring Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker. The catering was done by several groups including the Hantsport Baptist Church Auxiliary. Here's the Hantsport Baptist Church in Hantsport, Nova Scotia.
Every month, Architectural Record runs a "Guess the Architect" contest. The May issue came in today's mail and the building looked familiar but I couldn't place it. The architect was identified as being known for his interest in brick and the building's shape alludes to its location in a harbor city and its ownership by a shipping company. I googled around with various things and finally put in "hamburg" as a fairly wild guess, and there it was.
The Chilehaus was completed in 1924 and designed by Fritz Höger. His Wikipedia page is linked under his name. One of the sources of information is the newspaper clipping files in the 20th Century Press Archives at the ZBW, aka the German National Library of Economics. The clippings are digitized and easily zoom in and out. We've had lots of sessions and discussions about artist files in ARLIS/NA circles. We finally got Artist files into the LC controlled vocabularies, specifically LCGFT.
The artist files were a very important part of our library resources when I worked at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, in the early 1990s.
By the way, when you look at the Chilehaus in context with the assistance of the little yellow guy in Google, the prow of the building is considerably less pronounced.
Bonus picture, aerial view of Chilehaus:
Twice during the past couple-three weeks in the New York times book review, writers have mentioned Hieronymus Bosch.
"'The Doloriad' evokes Beckett's plays, or, in its static depiction of misery, Hieronymus Bosch's paintings. But 'Endgame' and 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' are funny and don't take five hours to get through. Ultimately this book, for all its ambition, isn't for me. But, who knows, it just might be what your rotten little heart deserves." -- J. Robert Lennon, in a review entitled "Wicked by design" of The Doloriad, by Missouri Williams, MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York times book review, March 27, 2022, p. 10.
"One of my treasures is a book received long ago from fellow students as a present for my Ph. D. It is a beautifully illustrated volume about Hieronymus Bosch, the medieval painter. Many people find his art disturbing, but I was born in the city where he lived and worked, and grew up with his imaginative visions of heaven and hell. I like his attention to facial expressions while depicting humanity's sins and follies. There are also tons of animals in his paintings mixed with trees, fruits and figures that are half human, half animal. Bosch was the world's first surrealist." -- Frans de Waal, "By the book," New York times book review, April 3, 2022, p. 6.
I wonder if Frans de Waal's "beautifully illustrated volume" is the 1966 monograph on Bosch by Charles de Tolnay that has had a place of honor on my shelves for more than 50 years. I am much more taken by de Waal's image of Bosch than Lennon's "static depiction of misery." Flying to Madrid to see Bosch's paintings may take more than five hours but it is well worth the trip.
And then your mind drifts to those art nouveau houses you saw in Brussels:
Or to the multicolor exteriors of art nouveau houses in Turin:
This morning on my morning walk, I noticed a chipmunk was crossing the street about fifteen feet ahead of me. I stopped walking, just about as the chipmunk stopped moving. It seemed to be listening to see if those approaching footsteps were dangerous. It turned around, ran back in the direction it had come, and went almost up to the pine trees and stopped again. I didn't move. It reassessed the danger. Turned around again and ran across the street when it determined the footsteps were no longer approaching.
When I lived in Texas, I had a bumper sticker on my Isuzu pickup that said "I brake for Greek Revival." I think it came from the preservation society in Providence because Texans don't have quite so much Greek Revival as they have in Rhode Island. Bob drove the truck to work one day and one of his coworkers thought it said "I brake for Geek Revival." Not the same thing.
P.S. because it's a small world. I was looking for a picture of a chipmunk running across the street and one of the Google responses was from Dickinson, North Dakota, the destination of the road trip in Breakfast with Buddha.
Today I got to try to disentangle the authority record for Arts Fort Worth which is the new name of the merged Fort Worth Community Arts Center and the Arts Council of Fort Worth. But, more importantly, I got to think about this wonderful building.
Now the Modern looks more like this.
