Traveling

I know I’m always making excuses for my lack of updates, but this time I actually have a good one. My boyfriend, Alexander, was in town! He got here on the 20^th, his birthday, and we spent three days in Venice, two in Milan, and three in Florence. The week was the best of my life, though naturally too short…

The first few moments were surreal. 56 days had passed since Alexander and I had last seen each other and when I surprised him at the airport, part of me felt like no time had passed at all, while the other part felt like it had been forever. But enough with the sentimental, cliche stuff, since I already gave you a full dose of that in my last post…

Onto the art we saw and some of the fun, and funny, experiences we had during our travels!

Here in Venice we visited Palazzo Grassi and Punta Della Dogana, the Francois Pinault Foundation museums / two of my favorite museums in the world! I was excited to take Alexander to the museums because I’ve already been to both several times, analyzed the works, and learned enough to give him guided tours. Though I focused my academic studies primarily on modern art, my love for Palazzo Grassi and Punta Della Dogana have gotten my contemporary art juices flowing as of late. In my typical fashion I cannot select just one favorite work from the collections, however a piece that stands out in my mind is Takashi Murakami’s Kawaii! (2002). Kawaii is the Japanese word for “cute,” however according to Japanese culture, these flowers are not cute at all because it is considered quite rude to show your open mouth, as the Kawaii flowers do. As such, Murakami’s intention here, as is the case in many of his works, is to question the Japanese fetish with cutesy, kitschy things. He has suggested that this strange obsession stems from the emasculation of the Japanese people and their culture during WWII. When I told this to Alexander, he noted that paradoxically Japanese business is still very connected to the Samurai mentality, or code; for example, Honda didn’t trash talk Toyota when they were having issues recently, though of course in the U.S. Ford and G.M. had no problem doing so.

On a side note, over the past few weeks I’ve learned a lot about Murakami, and I really wish I could rewind a year or so and revisit his massive retrospective that was held at the Brooklyn museum, which I found interesting though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time. Does anyone have thoughts about the exhibition or about Murakami in general? I know his work is controversial in terms of it’s relationship to consumer culture, sexuality, etc…

Anyway, in Venice we also visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, obviously, and while I worked, Alexander wandered the museum and enjoyed coffee with my lovely coworkers, which made me happy because one of the things I love most about Alexander is that he always makes an effort to connect with my friends…

The Milan segment of our journey began in a (mildly) unpleasant way: first Alexander and I walked to the train station in the rain – Alexander doesn’t like walking, or rain. Our train was delayed. The four-star Splendido Hotel, which we booked online and was supposedly located in the city’s center, turned out to be a negative-four-star dump, two miles from the city, which Alexander and I dubbed the Splendoodoo. The distress caused by the situation led Alexander and I to cab our way to the Four-Seasons where we sat in silence drinking our ten-euro coffee for the next several hours. That’s when our fairy godmother arrived on the scene, i.e. the phone, to save the day, or perhaps the trip – within moments we booked a new room in a chic, “design hotel” called the Straf, which was just steps from the Duomo. Unfortunately, while the grand hotel switch turned on the lights in our new room, the lights were turned off at Santa Maria delle Grazie, disabling us from seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, for which I had booked a reservation three weeks ago. The experience was reminiscent of my having missed the Sistine Chapel in Rome, so I cried for a few minutes and then went to relish in the comforts of the Straf and prepare for one of many delicious dinners.

Milan day two: We woke up and went to Novecento, Milan’s Civic Museum of Contemporary Art, however upon our arrival we found out that the museum will be closed for renovations until 2011, or 2012, which seemed nothing less than fitting, given my range of recent art viewing failures. Without skipping a beat we hit the Duomo, and though the outside is astoundingly detailed and gorgeous, the inside is not nearly as impressive as Venice’s fully mosaic-ed, golden interior. Regardless, Alexander and I enjoyed hypothesizing about how people were able to build such a colossal structure, over 500 years ago.

Next we went to the Steve McCurry exhibition, which was beautiful and moving, but also a painful reminder of all of the injustice in our world. With exception to the famous picture of the Afghan girl that was on the cover of National Geographic, (who by the way was found and photographed again just a few years ago,) I hadn’t seen any other works by McCurry. Aesthetically speaking the works are just beautiful – vibrant colors and handsome people – in fact, based on a quick glance at his lighthearted works, I’d venture to call him The Sartorialist of the developing world (See www.thesartorialist.blogspot.com .) However, as Alexander and I proceeded deeper into the exhibition it became clear that McCurry’s works are in fact quite heavy, as their content often relates to the effects of war and the oppression of children. Below I've posted McCurry's photograph of a Peruvian boy that I found just heart wrenching and continued to think about for the rest of the trip. There were no text panels discussing the content of the photos, however the curators did post the Declaration of the Rights of the Child as devised by the U.N. in the 1959. Seeing McCurry’s photos alongside the Declaration reminded me of the amazing animated shorts Seth did on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the rights of minority children, for the Human Rights Action Center and UNICEF respectively, which you can check out on his website at www.sethbrau.com.

A couple of food related pit stops later, we ventured on to the Triennale Design Museum. Though their permanent collection was entirely uninteresting to us, (and in fact featured many things that Alexander and I personally own, like an espresso maker I just bought for him and Mitch and my Persol sunglasses,) the institution was housing a Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, which was quite comprehensive and very well curated. When I say well curated, I mean that the organization of the works and text panels spark a sense of curiosity in the viewers that create excitement to enter the next room and continue to learn more about the artist and works on display… Though Lichtenstein’s most famous works, like Whaam! (1963) and Drowning Girl (1963) were not on display, there were several works from his Brushstroke series, which I love because of their ability to combine two of my favorite, though they are nearly opposite, movements, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. To the left you can see a picture I took of Naomi last summer, in front of Brushstroke (1996-2003), which stands outside of the Hirschhorn Museum of Art in Washington D.C.

After the Triennale, we headed back to the hotel for the Louis Vuitton fashion week party, which was hosted by our hotel! There we drank lots of champagne and observed Milanese hipsters at their finest. Interestingly, many of the men were dressed as women, and women as men, (Alexander called this “tranny-chic,” which I thought was very funny,) and lots of people brought their dogs as accessories.

Off to Florence!

In Florence we stayed with good family friends Amy and Richie at their beautiful apartment. In addition to hospitably opening their home to us, they also helped us find fun things to do, and took us out to dinner, both nights of our stay, to two delicious restaurants… So thank you, thank you, thank you Amy and Richie for your generosity.

We devoted our first day in Florence to wandering the city, which in and of itself was a beautiful experience. The second day, we visited Palazzo Strozzi where we saw the Gerhard Richter and Giorgio De Chirico exhibitions. The Gerhard Richter exhibition was fabulous and deserves its very own post, which is coming soon. The De Chirico exhibition was only okay, though perhaps I’m biased because my favorite De Chirico is at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Additionally, Palazzo Strozzi’s De Chirico exhibition was cluttered up with Max Ernst works, (Max Ernst and the rest of the Surrealists were heavily influenced by De Chirico,) and I don’t like Ernst’s work at all, though the PGC owns dozens because, as I previously mentioned, he was, for a period, married to Peggy.

Next we headed to the Boboli Gardens, which were utterly stunning – the weather was beautiful, the trees were budding, and from the top there was a beautiful vista of the entirety of Florence. We proceeded to visit the Duomo, of course, and then headed home to prepare for dinner and a night of dancing at the Michael Jackson tribute night of a local discotechque.

On our final day, we went to the Accademia to see Michelangelo’s David (1501-1504), which we thought was displayed alongside Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos, but unfortunately, or should I at this point say expectantly, that exhibition had already been taken down and we thus saw nothing more than the exhibition catalogue at the museum’s gift shop. With that said, I was very moved when I saw David in the flesh, or maybe I should say in the stone, because it is a sculpture that I have seen, or has at least been referenced in every single art history class I have taken.

On that note, I’ll leave you with this funny little photo-log of “David’s visit to the U.S.” To wonderful adventures and good health! Enjoy!

1. Takashi Murakami, Kawaii, 2002. Acrylic on canvas mounted on board. François Pinault Collection, Venice.

2. Alexander on the train to Milan, smiling excitedly about having been forced by me to walk in the rain for thirty minute carrying both of our suitcases. Thanks for being the best boyfriend / friend ever.

3. Alexander and me in front of Milan’s Duomo.

4. Steve McCurry, Afghan Girl, 1884.

5. Steve McCurry, Young Boy in Peru, 2004.

6. Naomi in front of Lichtenstein’s Brushstroke outside of the Hirschhorn Museum in D.C. in 2009.

7. Alexander and me in our room at the Straf just after the Louis Vuitton Fashion Week party in Milan.

8. Me in the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi.

9. Me at the top of the Boboli Gardens.

10. Michelangelo’s David after his trip to the U.S.