Sunday. Day 2: Cologne: der bedeutungslosigkeit des bildgegenstandes

Sunday. Day 2: Woke up in Bonn. I did a watercolor sketch of the view out the window.

View from Jane's apartment, Bonn. watercolor on paper.

We spent Sunday in Cologne.

Museum Ludwig, Köln.

• Modernist Masterpieces. The Haubrich Collection at Museum Ludwig
• Andreas Fischer. Your time is my Rolex
• Man Ray. Renate and L. Fritz Gruber archive.
• Gerhard Richter. Elbe, November, and Other Works
• Saul Steinberg. The Americans
• Art of the 20th Century 
and presence
• Cappuccino at The Ludwig Museum restaurant. Jane and I concur that museum cafes are elegant refuges and kind of a home away from home. I feel this way no matter what city I am in. Almost. 

I love this painting. ^

This is rather nice too. 

Chagall. 

Max Ernst. These look nothing like this in person. Again, photography kills the radio star.  

The thing about the Richters is that that are so deceptively about paint that photography kills them. Next time someone tells me they are painting like Richter, I will slap them. I thought the line on the floor was quite dangerous. I could have fallen into a painting if I wasn't aware of my Lean Forward: Tilt Over ratio. Geometry. 

meh. 

Fantastic show of Andreas Fischer behind the curtain. Busted for trying to snap pics. 

 WALLRAF-RICHARTZ-MUSEUM. 4 floors (?) It's getting little intense now.

A bite to eat at the Wallraf Museum cafe-I think- before heading in. Flowers everywhere. 

If you are an artist or a collector and if this is your life and work, you know that looking at art can be pleasurable but grueling. It requires some degree of mental concentration, random access to your memory database and physical stamina. Even works I'm apt to dismiss take up space and energy as I silently note why they are not working for me. Other works I strive to imprint in my mind pretending I'll be able to recall subtle nuances on demand. After awhile, it becomes pointless. I mean that in the best possible way.

Max Lieberman

Manet,  A Bunch of Asparagus

Asperagus, [from the musee-orsay in France]

Okay, so I'm cheating here so I can include this anecdote:

L'asperge [Asparagus]

The delightful story of this painting is well known: Manet sold Charles Ephrussi A Bunch of Asparagusfor eight hundred francs. But Ephrussi sent him a thousand francs, and Manet, who was a master of elegance and wit, painted this asparagus and sent it to him with a note saying: "There was one missing from your bunch".
The "mother" canvas was painted on a black background, rather like the Dutch still lifes of the17th century. Here, Manet creates a very subtle interplay between the mauves and greys of the asparagus and the colour of the marble on which it lies. He paints freely, and purely for the pleasure, demonstrating in this spontaneous work his formidable skill, his perfect taste and his humour. "This is not a still-life like the others", wrote Georges Bataille, "although still, it is, at the same time, lively".

Thus, increasingly throughout the 1880s, Manet produced small still life paintings with a few flowers or a limited number of fruits. It was as if he was producing extracts, examples of the pure essence of painting. Often they were sent to friends, personal gifts that always contained humorous asides or signs of affection and tenderness.

George Bataille. Small world. I should re-read Story of the Eye. At the time, I was a bit creeped out by it. 

 Irrelevance of The Subject. aka The Insignificance of the Picture Object. Thank you. 

Drawings by Bosch

I opted to take numerous pics or sketch, and am doing a reverse image search on Google to look up names and titles. Efficient.


For day #1 go here.