Dear Followers,

On our last day in Berlin, we started the morning with breakfast at the Coffee House for Literature. Located in a pre-war building on Fasanstrasse just south of the Zoological Garden stop and near the Uhlanstrasses Metro Station, this famous coffee house rivalled that of the Cafe Einstein in Kurfürstendam, where writers, poets and intellectuals gathered over addictive coffee. We ventured into one of the Berlin galleries listed in Art Forum, but the exhibition was very tiny and not as fruitful as our visit to another recommendation at Kunstraum Kreuzberg on Marienplatz earlier in the week.

We made it just in time to Potsdamer Platz to attend a free noontime concert at the Berlin Philharmonic Concert Hall. The symphony was not performing due to the holiday schedule. Instead, we were able to listen to a short Mozart chamber music performance. On the program, parents are reminded that lunchtime concerts are not aimed explicitly at children, and therefore should only bring children who are able to remain “quietly seated for approximately 45 minutes”. That seemed very reasonable and successful as a message.

Lucas Cranach, Der Jungbrunnen, 1546

Brueghel, Die Kreuztragung, 1606

Hals, Malle Babbe, 1633/35

Vermeer, Young Lady with a Pearl Hairband

Vermeer, the Wine Glass, c. 1661/62

We battled the elements during most of our short visit to Germany and Holland, and this day was no exception. We decided to take a short walk to the Culture Forum, where the Gemälde Gallery of the Staatliche Museum of Berlin is located. It is a huge repository of art and it held major exhibitions on the Botticelli Renaissance and Albrecht Durer. Surprisingly, we found more Vermeers, Bosches, Brueghels, and Rembrandts here than those in the Rijksmuseum. We realized that the Dutch Masters were scattered throughout Europe and that the paintings by native sons were not necessarily displayed in their host countries.

John Ruskin, after Botticelli

Ingres, after Botticelli

Degas, after Botticelli

Willam Morris, after Botticelli

The Botticelli exhibition compared many other artists’ work that emulated the classical Botticelli Venus. She served as a model and inspiration for many other artists, from Neo-Classicists such as Ingres to Elsa Schiaparelli, a dress designer. For me, I found the latter day 19th Century renditions by John Ruskin and William Morris, early leaders of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England, the most interesting. You can see the rich textures of the Morris tapestry already creating the signature pattern that later became so famous in the Liberty of London wall coverings.

I found myself particularly attracted to exhibitions that compare and contrast two different artists’ work. They seem to provide a lesson in comparative world history and painting that I otherwise wouldn’t discover. I am also becoming more comfortable with and more whetted to art museums as a cultural and intellectual experience. I have an opportunity to learn history in a visual way that is easy and interesting for me. The excellent curating and wealth of material certainly enhance these comparisons in the few museums we visited on this trip.

By the end of the day, we were pretty wiped. Nevertheless, my professional food guide was relentless and targeted a German restaurant as gesture to my insatiable appetite for things German for the finale. Sadly, it was closed for the holiday cleaning! We went to the next best, an Austrian restaurant famed for its Wiener Schnitzel. If you look closely at the photo above, you will notice that the regular fork looks out of scale with the schnitzel on the plate. That’s because the schnitzel was super-sized!

The day before, we beat it back from Amsterdam to hit a local Kreuzberg Turkish restaurant.

Apologies for the delay in this final Berlin post. I will be upgrading my site to continue posting the next trip, but have most likely reached the cap for free webhosting after two years with this posting! Stay tuned for the 2016 upgraded version…

…for now, we are sad to leave this vibrant and exciting city on the move. Until next time…Tschuss!! VV.

PS: Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday from Bodega Bay!!

As part of our Thelma and Louise descent on N. Europe in the dead of winter, Melissa and I drove through wind, sleet and snow (no hail) to reach Amsterdam. To an art history major like Melissa, this city is the museum capital of the world. The thought of tackling the Van Gogh, Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk, and Hermitage museums in one visit is daunting enough to send you to dreamland or the loo. (More about that later)

In any event, I had plenty on my mind. Our first major stop today was the Van Gogh Museum.

We were lucky enough to descend on a major exhibition between Edvard Munch and Van Gogh. The curators had a field day placing each major Van Gogh next to a relevant Munch and comparing them. The artists’ styles vary greatly but their humanism and emotionally charged social commentary were consistently similar.

Of course the most charged painting was the “Scream” by Munch. Sure enough, it was on display. This was the first of four versions of the subject matter, in pastel in 1893. You can read more about the exhibition here: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/arts/international/munch-and-van-gogh-together-at-last.html?referer=&_r=0

Borrowed from the Museum in Oslo, the Munch collection was vast. It saved a trip to Oslo in this exhibit alone, but the two artists’ work side by side was overwhelming.

The painting itself was described as a sudden turning of the sky to blood orange. The subject was reacting to the scream caused by the sky and by putting his hands to his face. He was not the creator of the scream, as most of us would think, but it also has that effect.

Van Gogh had a completely different version of a similar setting. (See below, an example of the comparisons and contrasts between these two famous painters’ work).

Aside from following intricate comparisons, I was having my own wonderings. Did Klimt borrow the Kiss from Munch? Munch’s piece, also entitled the Kiss, comes from 1902, followed by Klimt’s piece around 1908. What’s your guess?

The Kiss by Munch

The Kiss by Klimt

The deep dark leaves depicted by Van Gogh reminded me of one of Melissa’s paintings. Similar in color and cool density, the leaves seemed to reflect the mood and style of Van Gogh’s masterpiece!

Another jog in my now cluttered memory bank was the recent Asian Art Museum exhibition of Western art influenced by Japanese artists. The Van Gogh Museum version contained a room with a Van Gogh painting juxtaposed next to Hiroshige’s bridge. Very similar to the recent Asian Art Museum exhibition. Hmm, not bad for making connections…one of my favorite pastimes.

The takeaway from this museum is the vastness of Van Gogh’s efforts to learn and do art. His strokes convey his internal struggle to communicate and reach the viewer. His subjects command awareness and commitment. His peasant families, landscapes and simplicity in living demonstrate his earnestness and conversion from living a bourgeois life (his father was a pastor and his brother a successful art dealer) to becoming an active conveyor of life and living. Here’s one guy who made his avocation his profession!

You can read more about the exhibition here:

And now about the loo. Grubby hubby Gee Kin gets museum sickness whenever we spend too much time browsing and pausing in museums. Initially, he made a dive into the men’s room after about twenty minutes of forking over his hefty share of the entrance fee. Slowly, he is overcoming his immun-deficiency and increasing his brain mass (not tolerance) for visual institutions and the intellectual challenges they offer. After a successful visit to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg last summer, he can proudly claim that he is in remission.

Sadly, I discovered a device at the Van Gogh today that might have saved Gee Kin his misery. It’s known as a Stendhal box.
Developed for museum goers in ecstasy, this chair with a shroud around it (there’s a wooden door to cover your view after you sit inside) can help you to decompress at the end of a raptured experience at the museum! While some may believe this to be comic relief, the confessional certainly could have treated Gee Kin with a refuge from torture and spared him another trip to the loo.

Our fruitful day ended with dinner at De Kas, located on a lake in town. The greenhouse and lab environment was an unusual setting to showcase its hydroponic food production that short-circuits farm to table in an entertaining and palatable way. The single menu included vegetable forward and crunchy appetizers, mushroom consommé, field fowl, and cheese plate or tarte tatin for dessert.