Along with the raggle-taggle Angels, O!
A cold clear windy day, and all the leaves have blown away to dress the angels. Where?
After six years of boarding and hammering, the old Fogg Museum has reopened as a new glass lantern, crowded up against Le Corbusier's concrete dream of grand pianos copulating. All three of the University collections—all the old beloved objects with hundreds on hundreds more from the Harvard art-caves, never shown—are merged. Go play.
I slipped round there this afternoon for a preview.
O my! That's a stunning space—or interpuzzled spaces. There are glassy outposts here and there, filled with, oh, random Bernini terracottas. The galleries are thematic, with piece speaking to piece across centuries or millenia. And because there's space, the lesser characters, the little things—the art world's cameos—can speak. There's space, not just for a Japanese-inspired print by Mary Cassatt, but for a whole long series of its states and proofs.
I wandered about, greeting old friends lovingly, entranced with the new. (They had what? and they never showed it?) I had Ben Jonson as a head-guest in among the antiquities, admiring the kraters. I learned a new word for a genre new to me: Weibermacht, the power of women. And I danced for joy on seeing all of Burne-Jones's raggle-taggle angels in a row:
Five days of his Creation, anyway: the Fourth was stolen, damn it, of which Oscar Wilde wrote, "... and the crystal glows like a heated opal, for within it the creation of the Sun, Moon, and Stars is passing." Over the years, the Fogg has now and then hung one or another of the Days, but I can't remember if or when I've ever seen the week. They're confronting the artist's mermaid, drawing down her drowned mortal to the vaults of the sea. Mine.
No postcards as yet in the Shop, which is filled with all manner of aesthetically seductive useless things. There are tables in the courtyard, a good, light-filled space, with a café. With macarons. It looks like a nice place to write.
Nine
After six years of boarding and hammering, the old Fogg Museum has reopened as a new glass lantern, crowded up against Le Corbusier's concrete dream of grand pianos copulating. All three of the University collections—all the old beloved objects with hundreds on hundreds more from the Harvard art-caves, never shown—are merged. Go play.
I slipped round there this afternoon for a preview.
O my! That's a stunning space—or interpuzzled spaces. There are glassy outposts here and there, filled with, oh, random Bernini terracottas. The galleries are thematic, with piece speaking to piece across centuries or millenia. And because there's space, the lesser characters, the little things—the art world's cameos—can speak. There's space, not just for a Japanese-inspired print by Mary Cassatt, but for a whole long series of its states and proofs.
I wandered about, greeting old friends lovingly, entranced with the new. (They had what? and they never showed it?) I had Ben Jonson as a head-guest in among the antiquities, admiring the kraters. I learned a new word for a genre new to me: Weibermacht, the power of women. And I danced for joy on seeing all of Burne-Jones's raggle-taggle angels in a row:
Five days of his Creation, anyway: the Fourth was stolen, damn it, of which Oscar Wilde wrote, "... and the crystal glows like a heated opal, for within it the creation of the Sun, Moon, and Stars is passing." Over the years, the Fogg has now and then hung one or another of the Days, but I can't remember if or when I've ever seen the week. They're confronting the artist's mermaid, drawing down her drowned mortal to the vaults of the sea. Mine.
No postcards as yet in the Shop, which is filled with all manner of aesthetically seductive useless things. There are tables in the courtyard, a good, light-filled space, with a café. With macarons. It looks like a nice place to write.
Nine
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