In the Gallery

This is a work in progress as I try to locate images of some of the most impressive paintings (by artists I didn't know about) that I saw.

My trip to Frankfurt was mostly about galleries. After not having been to one for several months I wanted to catch up for lost time. After a suitably monstrous three course lunch in a backstreet German family restaurant my first stop was the Museum of Modern Art. Hugely impressive building - but nothing there really caught my eye. A sizable collection of Warhol's but nearly fifty years after their time they don't have the impact that they might once have had. Best pieces there - probably the two paintings by Roy Lichtenstein

Next stop was the world museum which had a small show: Black Paris - Art and Culture of the Black Diaspora 1906 - 2006. It was more sociological documentary than anything else - but had lots of interesting historical artefacts and a chance to understood more about France's troubled colonial history and its aftermath, which has led to Paris being the European (possibly world?) centre of African culture.

Last stop of the day was the Stadel Museum, Frankfurt's finest, and to which I was mostly drawn to because of its impressionist collection. But on the way in a woman caught my eye.

You can't miss her. She is on their posters and tickets. I asked the attendant who she is and who had painted her - but drew a blank. It felt like a Pre-Raphaelite painting - so I looked in the 19th Century section but to no avail. I finally pointed to the brochure and asked another attendant if she had seen this woman and was directed to the 15th Century Italian masters. Turned out that it's by Botticelli, an artist I associate more with heroic mythological paintings than with intimate portraits. But to achieve such a Pre-Raphaelite style 450 years avant la lettre? I checked the Pre Reaphelite pages on Wikipedia and sure enough they made a conscious decision to paint in the style of these earlier Italian masters. I dawdled a while with the old masters but didn't find much else to my liking (one needs a real grounding in the classics to understand the 'grammar" and significance of these works) so with an hour and a half left decided to check out the 19th - 20th collection.

This contains works by many of the greats (van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, Manet, Ernst, Klee etc). - but only single pieces and not enough to get a feel for their oeuvre. Many of the 20th Century pieces were lost in the 1930s because they were seen as decadent art by the nazis (and painted by Jews too). What really caught my eye was the work of some minor artists, Martin Beckmann, Max Leibermann, Fritz van Uhde (van Unde??), Steyvart and a couple of lesser known paintings by Edward Munch (Jealousy and In the Tavern), both of which are hugely emotionally powerful. But the star of the show for me was a gigantic painting (circa 3m x 2m) entitled Harvest in an Apple Orchard, which blew me away with its brilliant colours. My notes say its by a French impressionist named Daubryssey (spelling?) who, it shames me to say, I have never even heard of and about whom I can find nothing on the web. Right now I am trying to track down some of these pieces on the web (especially the last one) and hope to share some more about painters I should have known about.





(P.S. Has anyone noticed how most of my blog titles are derived from song or album titles? They just well of out me like a font of trivia).