Month: January 2020

Saturday

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I am so excited to talk about this clock, you have no idea! It has been one of my favorite pieces ever in the whole of art history since it came to reside in SLAM in 1997.

This clock does not fit any school of design with any degree of affinity, even the up and coming Dadaism or surrealism movements. It has elements of naturalism, elements of modernism, and elements of art deco, but conforms to none of those things. It is truly a unique animal. When you come around the corner and walk down the corridor toward it, it looks like molten, shifting metal that slowly resolves itself into a form – however, even up close, it never quite loses that molten feel, and it always seems to be in motion even though it is clearly not changeable and is not in a liquid form. It all seems very amateur and avant garde in the same moment, and many people pass it by and dismiss it straight out of hand without another thought.

Part of the reason I adore it so much is that it is so different, so unique, and there is no reason beyond Gaudi giving zero fucks and doing exactly what he wanted to do. This was his piece, and the beauty of his genius was that it still stands up today as what could be a completely contemporary piece of artwork.

Friday

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I like that this is a confluence of designs; tintype transfer of engraving on a standardized tile. It gives us an idea that there was some experimentation going on and that, heaven forbid, some cartoons could have ended up in places they weren’t meant to – rather like graffitiing your phone number or a random doodle on a toilet door or wall today.

Tuesday

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Even into the 1830s, sugar was the backbone of the British economy in the western part of the empire (aka, the West Indies, aka, the former slave colonies, aka, the triangle trade, and so on and so forth, nasty little piece of history, but yeah), until it was replaced by cotton and the mills and cheap works in the industrial north of England. As such, ornate sugar bowls were a must on every table that was well enough to do to have sugar on it – even the lower middle class tables that were just scraping by. If you had a good sugar bowl, you were high enough in the world to not be tomorrow’s trash. Sad, but true. This is an example of a fairly middle to upper-middle class sugar bowl – it definitely wouldn’t have graced a ranking aristocrat’s table, but it would have been enough for his servants’ hall.

Monday

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I love that this seems so simplistic – there is no color, no gilding, no over the top – and yet, it is beyond ornate and it is very deliberate in its attempt to stand above the rest by being just so.

Sunday

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This is the kind of thing I think of when I see the Dowager Countess of Grantham taking tea on Downton Abbey: ostentatious overkill in the glamour department. But it’s oh so smart and it was just what the upper classes wanted to make themselves feel superior. Mission accomplished.

Saturday

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I love how Vuillard’s work always seems to be done with the utmost haste and willful disillusionment, as if he has zero fucks left to give. But the very gentle treatment of the subject belies the lack of fucks theory and, instead, gives us insight into the way he cared for his subjects and the world around him even as he treated it with ineffectual disdain and a kind of ADHD slapdashery.

Friday

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Brown is not my favorite color. Brown is not a color: it is all the colors mixed together, and as such, is a non-color. This painting is non-color to the nth degree. However, I still enjoy it for the x factor that it has – the bit of blurry watery-edged give no damn attitude and the way that it just shrugs and says, “take it as it is or not at all”. We all need that.

Thursday

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What I love about Pissarro is that his work is kind of the best of both worlds medium between Monet and van Gogh: it’s got the the dreamy ethereal quality of Monet with the bold color grasping of van Gogh, but somewhere in the middle is a seductive reasoning that only Pissarro managed to maintain.