Art Institute of Chicago

   Our last day in Chicago, was centered around visiting the Art Institute. We had already been here in 2018, but from my perspective, when you see beautiful art, it takes a couple of visits to really appreciate it, and the Art Institute has some unbelievable pieces. I have been unbelievably lucky to have Joani as a travel companion, and together we have managed to see some of the greatest Galleries and Museums in the world, but my favourite art piece hangs here in Chicago, and I have to say, that it is hard for me to admit that it is not a Van Gogh piece! Georges Seurat takes that title, with.

A Sunday On La Grande Jatte

This is truly an amazing piece of art for several reasons. There is a moral story woven into this painting. I'm not going to drone on about that, but I am going to talk about Pointillism. Seurat was lumped into the impressionists because of the time he painted but he was actually a pointillist, a term derived from the way he applied paint to the canvas when he worked. He used the tip of his brush to apply dots of paint in primary colours rather than mixing the colours on his pallette. His concept was basically that he could fool the human eye into seeing mixed pastel colours when what was actually on the canvas was primary colours, placed in patterns on the canvas.

On a Seurat canvas, you never see brush strokes, or mixed/blended colours. He basically used primary colours applied in patterns with little dots to trick the optic nerve into believing it was seeing all the colours under the rainbow. Taking the moral story and the technical aspect of this piece into account. It is a masterpiece of epic proportions.

This painting is just one of many fine works of art in this building. They have a terrific collection of Monet's haystacks to show you how hard he worked on mastering the way light plays off a subject.

 

When you look at the same subject painted over and over.. Haystacks in the morning, in the evening, in the summer, in the fall, winter, spring, etc. etc.. you get the concept of how obsessed he was with the way that light plays over an object. He did the same thing with Lilies, Cathedrals and other subjects but if you go back again, and look at, Madame Monet Embroidering, You can see how all his studies resulted in his mastery of light on a subject!

A couple of my favourite Van Gogh's. ( A ridiculous statement, as I love so many Van Gogh's)

There are three different copies of Van Gogh's bedroom in Arles and I have been lucky enough to see all three in their permanent homes.

A couple of Toulouse Lautrec's works done in what I like to think of as his cariacaturist style.

These are both scenes from the Moulin Rouge and when I'm bragging up Toulouse Lautrec to people, I like to say that without Toulouse Lautrec, people might have never heard of  The Moulin Rouge . Whether or not that is a true statement, he definitely helped make it famous.

 I'll end this post with another of my top ten paintings.

 Firstly I'd like to say that I am not a Picasso fan. I am sure there are a lot of art historians who would say I was being sacrilegious, when I say this, but I feel that Picasso was a genius who mostly wasted his talent. Upon having said that, anything that he did during his blue period, I love and this painting below is, and will always be one of my favourite pieces of art.

 I could talk about this piece for hours, but instead I'll just say that this piece evokes more emotion in me than any other piece of art I know.

I thoroughly enjoyed my Art and Architecture Tour, and hope you did as well.  See you on our next trip.

Chicago

  Our art and Architecture tour had it's last stop in Chicago. More Frank Lloyd Wright, more art and a couple of random thoughts and photos.

 On our first day, we took a Chicago river walk on an extremely, hot sunny afternoon and saw some interesting architecture that wasn't FLW.

But truth of the matter was Chicago was sweltering so we mostly stayed in the shade, ate ice cream and conserved energy.

We got up early the next morning before it got too hot and headed out looking for more of why we went to Chicago.

Joani said that she found a lot of his work boxy and I won't deny this, but FLW was not as concerned with shape as functionality. The materials used in building, whenever possible had to be locally sourced keeping transportation costs down. Interior lighting had to come naturally as much as possible, (banks of windows) and the overhanging eaves would keep the direct sun off the same windows so the house would remain cooler in the summer to keep costs ( air conditioning) down.

This was where parts of the term "Organic architecture" came from.

Many of his houses had wild organic gardens which not only provided shade, but kept the air cleaner in a city environment.

In almost every instance he built with a purpose. Multiple windows with overhanging eaves to allow for natural lighting while keeping the house naturally cooler and walls erected almost to door height to keep wind away in the cooler months to make it cheaper and easier to heat.

Function over form but they all still look cool as far as I'm concerned.

So this is a cheat! It's not a Frank Lloyd Wright home, but I put it here for two purposes.

 #1 It is the perfect juxtaposition to show where American architecture was, before Frank Lloyd Wright came along.

  #2  It's the birth place of Ernest Hemingway, which I hadn't known was Chicago, before Joani and I stumbled across this place in our FLW residential tour.

So that's the end of our second last day in the windy city. I'm going to do one last post for this trip to show our second time back at the Art Institute of Chicago, and then, in my mind this trip will be officially over.

Pittsburg

  So I've called this Pittsburg because that's the closest city. Truth of the matter is Fallingwater is 65 miles or 105 kilometres outside of Pittsburg and we had no intention of getting any closer than we had to. Driving in American cities, or any foreign cities for that matters is stressful, so I avoid it if I can.

 So let's move on to visiting Fallingwater.

 I first heard about Frank Lloyd Wright from Simon and Garfunkel. "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Long,_Frank_Lloyd_Wright"

I didn't think too much about it until years later when I read" The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand and in an interview she stated that the main character was based on Frank Lloyd Wright and I thought, "there's that name again. I need to know more." So when I visited a friend who had a coffee table book on him I started looking through and that was the first time I saw" Fallingwater" This became another odyssey lasting more than 30 years culminating in a visit last week.

 I was keyed up the day before and had a hard time sleeping the night before which sometimes is a recipe for disappointment but I have to tell you; this house (now a Museum) exceeded my expectations and then some. It was fabulous and as I went from room to room I dreamt and wondered what it would be like to live in this incredible house in the woods.

Still holding my breath at this point although it was obvious that the people placing this large piece of granite, or the Unesco World Heritage people would need to be confused for me to be disappointed.

This was the original gravel driveway and what you would have seen when you first pulled into your summer house! Not bad. The little bridge your seeing just slightly right of center leads you to this view

.

Hey this isn't bad. I could live here. The water under the stairs is leading to a waterfall that happens directly under the house. Oh and by the way you access that staircase directly out of your living room.

 

These are sliding glass panes in the middle of your living room, 7 or 8 steps from your kitchen where you can grab your morning coffee, step down to the bottom landing and have your coffee and a biscuit for breakfast while soaking your feet in cool spring water! Yeah, I'm more and more certain I could live here.

How happy do I look! I am such a geek!!! But what a living room!

If you look in the back right corner there is an unbelievable fireplace and a very cool bar. How would you like to hold a party here?

I am not kidding when I say that there is more room on the outdoor balconies than there is inside, and this is not a small house. Again, let's have a party.

Every where you look there's one of these balconies.

These are the steps leading up to the Guest house.

And this is the guest house swimming pool. I'm not sure If I want guests, but I want a guest house swimming pool.

This is the house!

And I've decided I want to buy it. That is if I win the Lotto Max. And of course, if Joani lets me.

Hope you liked Fallingwater.

Philadelphia

  I  can't believe it has been three years since the last time I added a posting to this blog. What can I say. Everyone already knows about Covid, so it would be overkill to complain or gripe about it!

 For 5 or 6 years I have planned a trip that I had titled my "Art and Architecture tour", and although neither Joani or I were ready to take a trip that included getting on a plane and sharing air with hundreds of other people, a driving trip seemed a possibility. With that in mind, my "Art and Architecture tour", became a reality.

 While anyone who knows me, knows that I love Art, it might be surprising to some people to know that I also love seeing interesting Architecture, so we set out on a driving trip, first to Philadelphia to see the https://www.barnesfoundation.org/. Next on the agenda was Pittsburgh, to see https://fallingwater.org/. Lastly we would head to Chicago to see, https://www.artic.edu/ . The original plan was to also include New York to see the Guggenheim as well as the MOMA and the MMOA , but unless plans change, we are heading to New York in the fall to see our daughter in law, run the New York Marathon and will do a little mini A and A tour then.

 So a week long driving trip to see some of my favourite art and some Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. Something else crossed off my bucket list. I am very lucky to have a wife who not only is willing to humour me on these excursions, but actually enjoys them.

 This, my first posting will focus on Philadelphia. Home of......

The first time I saw this collection was more than 30 years ago. The entire collection was sent on the road when the Museum in Philadelphia was being renovated. 

I love all art, but Impressionism and Post Impressionism are two periods that mean the most to me, and this was, at the time the largest collection that I had seen. To this day this collection, still houses two of my all time favourite pieces.

Claude Monet's

Madame Monet Embroidering

I have to confess that this photo is a cheat. I didn't get a good picture myself so I downloaded a copy from the internet, but I'm still going to take a couple of minutes to ramble on about this piece. Monet was a master of light, and this piece really shows that. You are looking at his wife from an interior room, while she is working in a sunroom with the light streaming in from the outdoors. The way that Monet handles this transition of light shading is masterful, and I think that only he could achieve this gradual shading. He also seems to be showing how much he loves his wife with the soft colours and brushstrokes as if he is touching her instead of painting her. A beautiful painting!

The second painting I want to highlight.

Toulouse-Lautrec's

Rosa La Rouge

From the first time I saw this painting I will admit I was spell bound! This was, as I said earlier, more than 30 years ago and I was seeing the largest collection of Impressionist art that I had ever seen, and even though the collection had all my favourite artists including Van Gogh who, still to this day, is the artist that stirs my drink, this painting was, for me the star of this collection. I stayed at the Art gallery for more than 3 hours and stared at this one canvas for at least half that time. For the longest time I couldn't figure out what it was about this canvas that drew me in, but I felt hooked and several times had to force myself to walk away to get to see the rest of the collection. Just before security kicked me out, having overstayed my allotted time period and welcome, it came to me. 

 As I was staring at it, I realized that I hadn't been thinking about what Toulouse Lautrec, as the Artist was thinking when he painted this. All I was thinking was, "What was Rosa La Rouge thinking!". The artist to me had transcended his work. 

Have you ever seen a movie with a really great actor, Jack Nicholson or Meryl Streep acting and 15 minutes into the movie, you forget that they are actors and they just become the characters they are playing in the movie. 

 That is what Toulouse Lautrec achieved in this painting! I never think, What was Toulouse Lautrec thinking when I look at this... I think what's on Rosa's mind!!

 These are the two pieces I love most from this collection but I can honestly say that the entire collection is worth seeing as well as the building it's housed in. It's not a Frank Lloyd Wright building but it's still beautiful.

 We really only spent a day and a little bit in Philadelphia so I'm not going to say a whole lot more, but there was one thing that I thought was very fun.

Rocky

Rocky is a cultural icon in Philadelphia. This statue stands in front of the Philadelphia museum of Art and I believe more people come to see it than the Museum. 

Joani and I had no choice but to go see it as well as the Iconic steps that he runs up in the movie.

We also did some thinking while we visited  Rodin's statue.

The Thinker

Well, I was thinking. Joani was too busy partying!

 Bye from Philadelphia. 

Next stop Pittsburgh and Fallingwater.