Hello everybody and welcome back to My Weekly Flickr.
No complaints on the weather front this week, mild Spring like weather which I am thoroughly enjoying.
It’s been a few weeks since I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and this week I returned for a new exhibition, Peder Balke: Painter of Northern Light. He’s someone that’s completely unknown to me and to many people I would imagine. He is a 19th Century Norwegian landscape painter; a review of a similar National Gallery show in London says he is pretty much forgotten outside of his native Norway. It’s a small exhibit of his work along with paintings by his contemporaries from the Met collection. Many of the loans are from the Hearn Family Trust and from an individual named Asbjorn Lunde. Lunde is an elderly American lawyer with a great collection of northern European landscapes and he’s made gifts and loans to the NG in London, the Clark, and the Met. The Met has a George A. Hearn Fund for purchases. And the Hearn Family Trust partly paid for the acquisition of Fernand Khnopff's “Hortensia” painting in the Impressionist gallery in 2015. The Trust has pretty much no web presence, there are no articles about them or discussions of who they are and how they operate. The hits you find all have to do with exhibitions where they have loaned art. The trust descends from George A. Hearn, the founder of Hearn’s department stores which made him immensely wealthy. In the NY Times database I was able to find articles from the early years of the 20th Century describing art he had purchased and then finally his obituary and disposition of his wealth and art collection which went to his wife. His wife’s obituary explained that she had left several paintings to the Brooklyn Museum, including a Gainsborough, while bequeathing her collection of lace and watches to the Metropolitan Museum. It then goes on to state the art collection, which had recently been appraised at almost $600,000, would be put up for auction at an unspecified date. The following year the auction was held and this article from March 2, 1918 shows the prices realized from 92 Old Master’s paintings, one of which was a Gainsborough Blue Boy although it was unsure if it was the original or a replica.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9803E4D6133BEE3ABC4A53DFB5668383609EDE It was purchased by the Hearn’s eldest daughter. If you look at the list you can see it was a very nice collection. As my Uncle used to say, whether you’re rich or poor, it’s nice to have money.
Many of Balke’s paintings are small, one is roughly 3”x4”, and were a little hard for me to take in. They pretty much all have the moon, the ocean and mountains in common with depictions of stormy seas, towering glaciers and threatening skies. They’re very striking.
This is the very small one, Northern Lights, which depicts the Aurora Borealis.
https://tinyurl.com/k2an5vkThis is Finnmark Landscape, showing two lonely trees on a barren plain
https://tinyurl.com/k4ov39k This is Moonlit View of Stockholm, one of his larger pictures with much to see in it.
https://tinyurl.com/ma4sb8s And this is Moonlit View of the River Elbe at Dresden by Johan Christian Dahl which has several of my favorite motifs, the shining moon hung amid the clouds and a little dog sitting next to the small figure in the foreground.
https://tinyurl.com/le5gggn This is a link to the Met website overview
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/peder-balke and this is a link to all the items in the exhibit.
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/objects?exhibitionId=df4cfbc5-24af-45b5-98c8-333a38431614#!?offset=0&perPage=50 The exhibit only recently opened and I imagine there will be a review in the Times at some point.
Afterward I walked to the next gallery and saw a two painting exhibit, Caravaggio's Last Two Paintings. It consists of The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, which is on exceptional loan from the Banca Intesa Sanpaolo in Naples and is presented with The Met's The Denial of Saint Peter. You can read about them at the Met website here which also has links to the images.
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/caravaggio These hang in the same room as several of the other Met Caravaggio’s.
And finally, I walked to the American wing where I saw City of Memory: William Chappel's Views of Early 19th-Century New York. You can read the overview and see the images from the exhibit here
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/william-chappel These were painted in the 1870’s and depicted New York’s streets as they looked in the very early 19th Century. There is a map of New York streets from 1808 on which you can see the corresponding streets that the paintings show. He painted in detail, homes, streets and businesses as well as activities like the fire department cleaning it’s pumpers which you can see here.
https://tinyurl.com/mavjhby Looking at the paintings you see how Manhattan transformed from a sparsely populated town with wide open spaces to the overcrowded Metropolis it is now.
Leaving the museum I took the B train downtown so as to buy almonds at Trader Joe’s on 23rd Street. The train pulled out of 34th Street and much to my surprise the next stop was West 4th. There was no announcement about the downtown local making express stops so I’m baffled as to what happened. When I went to the website for alerts, there were none. Very odd but trying to figure out the way the subway system works, or doesn’t, isn’t worth the time spent. It was a weekday so I can’t even blame the weekend schedule which is when the MTA really has fun rearranging the schedules with no rhyme or reason. And often without notice.
When I don’t have a movie to watch in the morning I watch the old Jack Benny programs and the old game show, What’s My Line when Fred Allen was one of the panelists, along with Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis and Bennett Cerf. The host was John Charles Daly. The mystery guest that week was the actor Herbert Marshall. Then I watched the pilot show of To Tell The Truth which was originally titled Nothing But The Truth. Mike Wallace was the emcee and the panel consisted of Polly Bergen, John Cameron Swayze, Hildy Parks and Dick Van Dyke. As it was the pilot there were no actual commercials, just a card saying commercial. Swayze came off like a prosecutor lashing out questions at a speedy clip. My lasting impression of him is the commercials he did for Timex watch, one in particular. The Timex motto was, takes a licking and keeps on ticking. He would subject a watch to all sorts of hazardous conditions and always the watch came through intact and running. Except once. He tied a Timex to an outboard motor and when he lifted the outboard motor up to show the Timex still ticking it was no longer attached to the motor. He didn’t miss a beat and said that wherever it was it was still ticking. You can see it here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NHq3Yze6s0 All of the original To Tell The Truth shows are available at this link if you care to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL39ftvD_GHaHhv8Qm_truGRLp61iJNFOg As a child I very much enjoyed the game shows, these two as well as I’ve Got A Secret and they’re fun to look at now to see how things were in the 50’s. People smoke on screen which is very different. And the celebrities who were quite well known at the time probably wouldn’t be recognized by most people today. Unless you’re and old fart like me.
And with that pejorative statement let’s wander over to this week’s Flickrs.
Andy G.
Short and to the point
https://www.flickr.com/photos/136031688%40N06/32977864145/IMG_3511_pp
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mariab74/32508931385/Do Sexy Women really feel good about themselves?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/julieb85/32776008626/Take me home...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/alina_694/33250802981/And for the evening
https://www.flickr.com/photos/144050910%40N04/32946559182/You've heard of Minnesota Fats?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kellyjames/32626594670/IMG_3256
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kerrymay/32504281624/My 2nd Wedding dress 20th Oct 2013
https://www.flickr.com/photos/102846236%40N06/12034478474/VIS_7814
https://www.flickr.com/photos/48151556%40N04/4959519381/DSC_0204
https://www.flickr.com/photos/37372058%40N07/31682448440/
Topic: At Last It’s The Spring Flickr! (Read 13327 times)
