Category Archives: Museums

The Andy Warhol Museum

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The earliest memories I have of Andy Warhol are probably him being mocked by comedians, which I must have internalized somewhat. I didn’t give him much thought in my youth, and if I did, he was the weirdo who painted soup cans and oddly colored portraits of movie stars. Later I regarded his work is stuck in ’60s, as dated as go-go dancing or Hair.

More recently his work has grown on me. Maybe in part because he didn’t stick in the ’60s. That was his heyday, certainly, but half a century later, and more than 30 years after the artist’s death, Warhol is still packing ’em in at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which originally opened in 1994.

But I’ve come to appreciate him for more than enduring popularity. I’m no authority of any kind on his art, but I understand a little about its context now, and see that he was doing new and intriguing things, or sometimes just odd or strange things. Taking his considerable talent as an illustrator in all sorts of curious directions. Making things that are still interesting to look at and think about, which is one of my crude baselines for judging an artist.

Though footsore from a day of tourism, we joined the crowd at the museum on the evening of July 5. The extra Friday hours and half-price admission helped attract us, but we probably would have gone anyway. Pittsburgh has a number of worthwhile fine arts museums, as do a lot of other places. Nowhere else has a museum devoted to Andy Warhol.
Andy Warhol Museum exteriorRichard Gluckman, who is known for his museum work, redesigned the building to be a museum. Originally built in 1911 as a multistory warehouse, the structure now sports seven floors of galleries and exhibition space, with the permanent Warhol exhibits taking up the top four floors.

Warhol’s early and student work, as well as his time as a commercial artist in the 1950s, takes up the seventh floor. On the sixth floor are ’60s works; the fifth floor features ’70s works; and the fourth floor exhibits works from the ’80s.

In some ways, his early works are the most interesting, simply because they are less familiar. On display on the seventh floor, for instance, are ink drawings of women and produce trucks (1946), “Seven Shoes” (third image down), which Warhol did for a shoe brand in the 1950s, and the risque “Female in Corset and Stockings,” which probably wasn’t for a client.

Equally interesting are items about Warhol’s childhood and youth. Such as a large, blown-up photo of his high school graduation picture. The face is him, and yet not any Warhol you’re used to seeing. Turns out Andrew Warhola of Pittsburgh had a childhood and an adolescence, as opposed to the comedian-fodder artist who appeared fully formed in New York with frizzy white hair, painting Brillo boxes.

Also interesting to learn about Warhol: he was the son of Lemko immigrants and he remained a practicing Ruthenian Catholic all his life.

The sixth floor displays the most familiar Warhol output: soup cans and other consumer product-inspired items, celebrity portraits in assorted hues, and clips from his early movies, all 1960s vintage. Most of these are so well known — so absorbed into the tapestry of 21st-century American culture — that I don’t feel the need to link to any images. Even so, I look at the soup cans now and think, interesting idea for 1962. Also, who eats Pepper Pot?

Google Image “soup can” and one of the things high in the results offers a silk screen of “Tomato Soup” for sale. For $500. Not even a limited edition. Presumably the Warhol Foundation is getting a cut. Warhol was an astute businessman as well as an artist, and I think that would make him smile.

All that said, I’m not paying that much for an open-edition silk screen of “Tomato Soup,” however interesting the original concept might have been.

The ’70s and ’80s galleries sported such interesting, or amusing, items such as the “Vote McGovern” (1972) and “Space Fruit: Lemons” (1978). An entire gallery wall featured “Mao Wallpaper,” which he created in 1974 but which the museum reprinted a few years ago, probably to put on the wall. Anyway, it’s there, along with “Skulls” on the same wall (individually, not in a group of six). I like to think that’s a comment on the millions Mao murdered, but I’m not sure the museum would say that.

One gallery display of late-life Warhol output was a complete surprise: computer-generated art. Specifically, Amiga generated.

According to the museum: “In the summer of 1985, Warhol was given his first Amiga 1000 home computer by Commodore International and enthusiastically signed on with the company as a brand ambassador.

“For their launch, Commodore planned a theatrical performance, which featured Warhol onstage at Lincoln Center with rock ’n’ roll icon and lead singer of Blondie, Debbie Harry. In front of a live audience, Warhol used the new computer software ProPaint to create a portrait of Harry. He later made a series of digital drawings including a Campbell’s soup can, Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus,’ and flowers.”

These images are on display in the gallery, though for most of the past decades, they  languished on obsolete Amiga floppy disks. “In 2014, we collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Museum of Art to extract the saved files from Amiga floppy disks held in our archives collection,” the museum notes.

That was something I knew nothing about, since I wasn’t paying attention to Warhol or the Amiga in 1985, though I knew a fellow in my office who still had one of the machines in the mid-90s that he said was still working.

Warhol died in 1987. The Amiga display made me wonder what he would have done on the Internet, had he lived only a few years longer. Probably odd and maybe interesting.

After we left the museum, we walked across what used to be the Seventh Street Bridge, which is mere feet away. In 2005, it was renamed the Andy Warhol Bridge. Dating from the ’20s, it’s a self-anchored suspension bridge that has held up better than the original Silver Bridge, which was of a similar design.

Andy Warhol Bridge 2019

I don’t know how Pittsburghers feel about that name; maybe hardcore Yinzers didn’t take to it. But it’s a fine name for a bridge — goes somehow with the neighboring bridges, named for Roberto Clemente (Sixth St.) and Rachel Carson (Ninth St.) — and I was happy to walk across it.

The Eugene V. Debs House

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Tucked away among the buildings and open fields of Indiana State University in Terra Haute is a structure from the Gilded Age, but also associated with the golden age of socialism in the United States: the Eugene V. Debs House.

Eugene V Debs House

We arrived in the mid-afternoon on Saturday, in time to take a detailed tour from an exceptionally knowledgeable guide, but not for an event earlier that day in honor of the 125th anniversary of the Pullman Strike.

Debs led the strike, of course, and for his trouble was tossed in the McHenry County Jail in Woodstock, Illinois, for six months — an event that radicalized him. After he got out, his commitment to socialism never wavered.

The museum’s event involved a book signing of a new volume about the Pullman Strike — The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America by Jack Kelly — and a reading of “Liberty,” the speech that Debs delivered to a crowd of thousands of supporters in Chicago after his release from Woodstock Jail, on November 22, 1895.

It was a speech I’d never read, so I looked it up later. Credit to Debs for giving good speeches in an era when political discourse hadn’t yet been dumbed down to semiliterate 280-character bursts. A couple of selections:

“Out of range of the government’s machine guns and knowing the location of judicial traps and deadfalls, Americans may still indulge in the exaltation of liberty, though pursued through every lane and avenue of life by the baying hounds of usurped and unconstitutional power, glad if when night lets down her sable curtains, they are out of prison, though still the wage-slaves of a plutocracy which, were it in the celestial city, would wreck every avenue leading up to the throne of the Infinite by stealing the gold with which they are paved, and debauch Heaven’s supreme court to obtain a decision that the command ‘thou shalt not steal’ is unconstitutional…

“I remember one old divine who, one night, selected for his text George M. Pullman, and said: ‘George is a bad egg, handle him with care. Should you crack his shell the odor would depopulate Chicago in an hour.’ All said ‘Amen’ and the services closed.

“Another old sermonizer who said he had been preaching since man was a molecule, declared he had of late years studied corporations, and that they were warts on the nose of our national industries, — that they were vultures whose beaks and claws were tearing and mangling the vitals of labor and transforming workingmen’s homes into caves.”

The museum staff was giving away souvenir ribbons, replicas of the ribbons worn by supporters who greeted Debs when he got out of Woodstock. We got one.

The house is both a house museum of the period, with many of the Debs’ possessions, as well as a museum about labor organizing, American socialism — Debs was adamant that the ideology wasn’t some imported Euro-virus — and the fight against government overreach, as expressed by siding with the bosses in the ’90s and the sedition laws of the First World War.

It was a pretty nice house for its time, vintage 1890. I understand that Debs caught some flack for living in a comfortable house. Comfortable with a few touches of affluence, since his wife Kate brought some money to the marriage. Some of the fireplaces feature cobalt blue porcelain tiles imported from Italy, the mahogany dining and parlor furniture is pretty nice, and a display case sports the Debs’ set of Haviland china.

Of course that’s the kind of lightweight criticism that politicians and activists of all stripes receive. The house was clearly upper-middle class for the time, but so what? The Debs were supposed to live in a shotgun shack? Besides, bread and roses.

Also on display are a number of depictions of Debs. This one is by Wisconsin sculptor Louis B. Mayer (not the movie mogul).

Louis Mayer - Eugene V Debs

LM could also be Louis Mayer. In any case, this is also a sedition trial-era work.

Plus plenty of buttons from Debs’ many runs for president.
In the house’s attic, which was once merely storage, all of the walls are covered with murals. The centerpiece is Debs in campaigning mode.
One of the smaller details on the mural walls, but one I liked best, is a campaign button from 1920. Debs received 3.5 percent of the popular vote, more than any other socialist candidate for U.S. president, before or since. While in federal prison.
The museum notes: “The murals were painted by John Laska, former Professor of Art at Indiana State University and active Foundation member. Completed in 1979 after three years of hard work, the murals depict Debs’ life and time in chronological order…”

The Ernie Pyle museum reminded me of a long-ago English teacher of mine, Mr. Swinny. The Debs museum reminded me of another long-ago teacher, Mrs. Collins. She taught us freshman U.S. history. About 60 at the time, she grew up in Buffalo and — I think I remember this correctly — had been a Wobbly as a young woman.

That would have been during the Depression, after the heyday of the Wobblies, but still. Mrs. Collins wasn’t shy about throwing in some labor history and using texts sympathetic to socialism, most notably The Jungle. Naturally, Debs came up as well.

The Ernie Pyle World War II Museum

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I have a sneaking suspicion that the later 21st century is going to be completely indifferent to war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Like almost everyone else, he’ll join the ranks of the obscure. The items now collected at the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in rural Indiana will scatter to archives or private collections or landfills. Only occasionally will anyone read his writings, as found in libraries or odd corners of the Internet.

The process is already underway. The museum used to be the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site, owned and run by the state of Indiana. When the recession came 10 years ago, state budgets suffered. I doubt that anyone put it down officially in a memo or the like, but I’m sure the decision to close the Ernie Pyle SHS came down to, “Who’s heard of him anyway?”

A nonprofit, the Friends of Ernie Pyle, now owns the site and carries on the struggle against obscurity. The organization renamed the museum nearly a decade ago. Yet Randy McNally, in its 2017 Road Atlas, still calls it a state historic site. So does Google Maps. It isn’t a place that gets a lot of attention.

We arrived in the hamlet of Dana, Indiana, early in the afternoon on Saturday. Rain had dogged us most of the way from Champaign, Illinois, where we’d spent the previous night. The museum includes the house in which Ernie Pyle was born in 1900, relocated from the nearby farm fields.

Next to the birth house are two Quonset huts, World War II vintage but never used for military purposes, that house displays and Ernie Pyle artifacts. It continued to rain while we were in the huts, with drops drumming on the metal in their distinctive way the whole time.

I probably would have heard about Ernie Pyle later anyway, but I like to think that the reason we came was that Bill Swinny, one of my high school English teachers, planted the seed by telling us about him during class one day. Mr. Swinny, who taught us a good deal more than high school-level literature, managed to convey how upset the nation was at the death of Ernie Pyle, coming as it did right after the death of President Roosevelt.

We were the only visitors at the museum. An informative woman in her 60s took our admission. Also on staff was a much quieter young man, perhaps as young as 20 and perhaps a relative of the older woman, who was doing his bit to help out, though that’s just a guess on my part.

The larger displays, including Pyle-like mannequins standing in for him, evoke Ernie Pyle’s wartime circumstances. That is, living with the GIs he wrote about.
A good number of his columns are posted for visitors to read. You can also listen to excerpts from the columns by picking up telephone receivers. There are a few videos. One is devoted to a single early 1944 column, “The Death of Captain Waskow.” As well it should be, since the column is a masterpiece of reportage.

Good to know that Ernie Pyle got a Purple Heart, by act of Congress in 1983. A rare honor for a civilian.
The birth house was interesting, though less compelling. But I did learn that Ernest Taylor Pyle was born poor. At the time of his birth, his parents were tenant farmers.

The museum isn’t quite all there is when it comes to commemorating Ernie Pyle in that part of Indiana. A few miles to the east of Dana, on U.S. 36, is the Ernie Pyle Rest Park, essentially a wayside rest stop. One feature stands out, and got me to stop despite the rain.

Ernie Pyle Memorial IndianaIt’s a replica of Ernie Pyle’s memorial on Ie Shima, the small island on which he was killed by enemy fire.

At This Spot
The
77th Infantry Division
Lost A Buddy
Ernie Pyle
18 April 1945

This is a replica of the original built at Ie Shima by the 111S Engineer Combat Group United States Army.

I can’t speak for Ernie Pyle, but I imagine that the thought of being forgotten by future generations might not have troubled him. I get the sense that he would have preferred that the men he wrote about be remembered instead.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice & The Legacy Museum

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As you enter the National Memorial for Peace and Justice on a hill in downtown Montgomery, Alabama — as we did on May 17 — it’s hard to see what’s ahead.
The path passes “Nkyinkyim Installation” by Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, erected with the memorial when it opened only last year. The work speaks for itself.

The memorial structure includes over 800 corten steel (weathering steel) monuments, one for each county in the United States where a lynching took place. Engraved on the columns are the names of the lynching victims documented for that county.

Here are the victims in Wilcox County, Alabama, to pick one of the first steel monuments you encounter: Riley Gulley, William Lewis, Arthur Stewart and Ephreim Pope.
Visitors enter the memorial at one corner of the square shape. On the first side of the memorial, the steel monuments are flush with the floor, with the names at eye level or lower.

On the second side of the memorial, the floor begins to slope downward in the direction of travel, but the steel monuments continue to be at the same level.
In the third side of the memorial, the floor slopes even more and the effect becomes very noticeable. The steel monuments are hanging.
You need to look up to see the county names.

The fourth side. The effect is practically tunnel-like by now.
The writing on one wall says:

For the hanged and beaten, for the shot, drowned, and burned, for the tortured, tormented, and terrorized. For those abandoned by the rule of law.

We will remember.

With hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice. With courage because peace requires bravery. With persistence because justice is a constant struggle. With faith because we shall overcome.

Water flows down the other wall.

The text:

Thousands of African American are unknown victims of racial terror lynchings whose deaths cannot be documented, many whose names will never been known. They are all honored here.

Outside the memorial structure are smaller versions of the steel monuments arrayed in long lines, lying with their text face up. I understand that if a county named on one of them wants to use it as part of a local memorial to lynching victims, it will be given for that purpose. So far no county has taken any of them.

The Legacy Museum, developed by the same organization as the memorial — the Equal Justice Initiative — is also in downtown Montgomery, pointedly in a building where enslaved black people were imprisoned, near the site of the city’s 19th-century slave market. By the mid-1800s, Montgomery was the focus of the slave trade in Alabama.
In full, it is The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. It’s a small museum, 11,000 square feet, but a powerful one.

The EJI web site for the museum says: “Visitors encounter a powerful sense of place when they enter the museum and confront slave pen replicas, where you can see, hear, and get close to what it was like to be imprisoned awaiting sale at the nearby auction block. First-person accounts from enslaved people narrate the sights and sounds of the domestic slave trade. Extensive research and videography helps visitors understand the racial terrorism of lynching, and the humiliation of the Jim Crow South.”

The museum also illustrates that the more recent (and ongoing) war on drugs, a toxic interplay of political calculation and moral panic, has made black Americans “vulnerable to a new era of racial bias and abuse of power wielded by our contemporary criminal justice system.”

A quote from the all together remarkable EJI Director Bryan Stevenson, who lead the effort to build the memorial and create the museum:

“Our nation’s history of racial injustice casts a shadow across the American landscape. This shadow cannot be lifted until we shine the light of truth on the destructive violence that shaped our nation, traumatized people of color, and compromised our commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice.”

The National WW II Museum

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World War II was a big war, and it has an impressively big museum in New Orleans, the National WW II Museum, which we visited on May 14. The focus isn’t the whole — that’s too big — but rather the American part in the global conflict. A big enough subject.

All together, the museum includes five buildings of more than one story each, artifacts large and small, a vast number of words to read with the exhibits, and dozens of continuous video presentations.

The building reminded me a bit of the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building, but a different architect did the work, Bart Voorsanger.

The structure isn’t finished yet. Looks like the wing-like-thing (wing of victory?) is being added right now.

A museum of this scope is exhaustive and exhausting, but I’m getting old. It has a lot of ground to cover, of course, but more than that the museum needs heft to amplify the war’s increasingly dim echo as time passes. It’s mostly vanished from living memory.

The Second World War was my parents’ war, so when I was growing up, the echo was pretty loud, largely in the torrent of books and movies and TV shows dealing with the war. Some of my earliest memories of watching TV include Combat! and The Rat Patrol, to use examples of televised WWII fiction more and less serious. The details of the war might have faded some by the time I came along — it was years before I got Bugs Bunny’s joke about A cards at the end of “Falling Hare” — but the big picture was still clear.

Time passes, even the big picture fades. Just look at what has happened to the Great War. It’s all we can do that they shall not grow old.

So the National WWII Museum starts off big, with a Douglas C-47 Skytrain hanging from the ceiling over the entrance and ticketing counter, which is in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion.
On the floor is a replica LCVP, built from original plans. This kind of boat is pretty much the reason the museum is in New Orleans.
As an acronym, LCVP is about as standard Army as you can get: “landing craft, vehicle, personnel.” Less formally, they’re Higgins boats, designed by Andrew Higgins and built en masse during the war by Higgins Industries of New Orleans.

Wiki describes the usefulness of the boats well: “The Higgins boat was used for many amphibious landings, including Operation Overlord on D-Day in Nazi German-occupied Normandy, and previously Operation Torch in North Africa, the Allied invasion of Sicily, Operation Shingle and Operation Avalanche in Italy, Operation Dragoon, as well as in the Pacific Theatre at the Battle of Guadalcanal, the Battle of Tarawa, the Battle of the Philippines, the Battle of Iwo Jima and the Battle of Okinawa.”

Pretty much a greatest hits of U.S. amphibious landings during the war. In its early days, beginning in 2000, the museum focused on D-Day exclusively, so what better place than the city where the Higgins boats were built?

Upstairs in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion is a floor devoted to the U.S. industrial production so critical to victory. As the museum notes, “By the time the Japanese surrendered in 1945… American manufacturers had turned out more than 96,000 bombers, 86,000 tanks, 2.4 million trucks, 6.5 million rifles, and billions of dollars’ worth of supplies to equip a truly global fighting force.”

A number of artifacts illustrate the Arsenal of Democracy, such as a jeep chassis.
Along with smaller items, such as the cigarettes, chocolate and gum that made a soldier’s lot slightly more bearable.
A machine to make dog tags.
They actually were an innovation just before WWI, at least as far as Americans were concerned. For millennia, many men went off to war and simply vanished. I remember, for instance, seeing at Gettysburg National Cemetery row upon row of stones marked UNKNOWN.

Also in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion is the D-Day exhibit. As the original crux of the museum, it’s very detailed, with artifacts, images, reading material and more. The rooms reminded me of the Musée du Débarquement Arromanches in Normandy, though that facility had the advantage of looking out on the remains of one of the artificial harbors used during the landing.

A copy of the Order of the Day, June 6, 1944, along with French currency presumably carried by soldiers. Notes, not coins.

Another building, Campaigns of Courage, highlights the course of the war in the European and Pacific theaters with artifacts, photos, movies, text and some elaborate diorama-like sections that visitors walk through.

In Europe, for example, the Seige of Bastogne, done to look like snowy woods, though without the freezing temps. In the Pacific, the Guadalcanal Campaign, done to look like a tropical rain forest, though without the venomous bugs. There’s only so much verisimilitude a museum can do.

It took quite a while to work our way through these exhibits and, as usual, I knew we were absorbing only a small fraction of what they had to offer. So it is with large museums.

About 20 minutes before the museum closed, we arrived at the U.S. Freedom Pavilion: The Boeing Center. On display are airplanes, as you’d expect. Hanging from the high ceiling.
The centerpiece of the display is My Gal Sal, a B-17E Flying Fortress, one of only three or four such warplanes still in existence.

You can ride up to the fourth floor and look down on the plane.
Heights don’t usually bother me from behind a secure railing, but looking down from above the plane, with it filling the void below me, made me a little unsettled.

My Gal Sal probably survived because bad weather forced it to land in the wilds of Greenland in 1942, and it couldn’t fly again. The crew survived, but the plane stayed on the ice, not to be salvaged until the 1990s and restored in the early 21st century.

Sign of the Times: The Great American Political Poster 1844-2012

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Visiting the Elmhurst History Museum for its local history collection was fine, but what I really wanted to see on Saturday — before it ends next weekend — was an exhibit called Sign of the Times: The Great American Political Poster 1844-2012. I’d picked up a leaflet about the exhibit when visiting the Elmhurst Art Museum, so that kind of marketing works sometimes.

The exhibit includes 50 items and occupies the first floor of the museum. I could have spent an hour looking at everything, but not everyone in the family is as enthusiastic about presidential ephemera as I am. Even so, I got a good look and had the chance to explain some things to the girls, such as who this fellow McGovern was. He had a fair number of posters, for all the good it did him.

As promised, the exhibit begins with the election of 1844. As we all know, Henry Clay headed the Whig ticket.

Less well known is the Whig for vice president that year, Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey. Vice presidents are often obscure, but men who ran for VP and lost tend to be even more obscure. Too bad he was never veep. Vice President Frelinghuysen has a ring to it.

The Kellogg Brothers of Hartford, Conn., did the poster. They were rivals of Currier & Ives but about as well remembered as Mr. Frelinghuysen these days. Google Kellogg and you tend to get cereal, and they aren’t mentioned in any Christmas songs that I know of.

“An Illustrative Map of Human Life Deduced from passages in Sacred Writ” (1847), which is Wiki’s example of one of their works, makes for some interesting reading.

These were the days of hand-colored prints. This one’s exceptional.
John C. Fremont and William L. Dayton, the first Republican candidates for the presidency and vice presidency, in 1856. A wonderfully named artist, Dominique O. Fabronius, did the poster, which was issued by C.E. Lewis of Buffalo. Look at Fabronius’ portrait of “Spoons” Butler here.

On to the golden age of the color lithograph: two posters from the 1900 presidential contest. First, William Jennings Bryan. A busy poster, promising no cross of gold, attacks on the Standard Oil octopus (I assume) and other things.
William McKinley and TR: an even busier poster.
The artists are unknown in both cases. I enjoyed this detail on the McKinley-Roosevelt poster.
I’ve posted about Phrygian caps before, but not in a North American context. Maybe it’s just as well that the caps are generally forgotten in this country as a symbol of liberty. Such symbols are sometimes co-opted by wankers.

The last of the two-man campaign posters: TR and his mostly forgotten VP, Charles Fairbanks. The city in Alaska is named for him, at least.
Note the fasces. Talk about being co-opted by wankers.

Fast forward a few decades. This poster offers a more folksy style for voters in the 1940 election. Note that a happy worker smokes a pipe, besides supporting Willkie.

Offset lithography was the most common means of poster-making by that time. Artist unknown in the case of the Willkie poster.

In 1964, Goldwater got a fairly standard treatment (unknown artist again) in a pro poster.
Along with a stinging anti poster drawn by Ben Shahn.
The ’72 election was represented by previously mentioned McGovern posters, but Nixon made an appearance as well.
By R. Crumb. Am I right in finding it strange that the Nixon campaign would enlist Crumb to do a poster? Well, strange bedfellows and all. Nixon and the Do-Dah man. The ’72 election was a long strange trip, after all.

The Elmhurst History Museum

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Lilly visited for Easter weekend this year. We were glad to see her.
Easter Saturday turned out to be brilliant and warm, much like the Saturday two weeks ago when we visited Elmhurst. So all of us, including Lilly this time, went back to Elmhurst to wander around in the park again, but also for something we didn’t do last time: visit the Elmhurst History Museum.

The museum, founded in 1957, is in the former home of Elmhurst’s first village president, Henry Glos, and his wife Lucy. The mansion dates from ca. 1892.
As I’ve mentioned before, the Gloses are interred across the street. I understand that street didn’t exist when they were alive — in fact, not until the 1970s — so their mausoleum and their house must have been on a single piece of land.

A few odds and ends dot the grounds. Such as the Elmhurst fire bell.

The plaque says (all caps, but I’ve regularized that):

The old Elmhurst fire bell
is here erected as a memorial
dedicated
in the Illinois sesquicentennial year 1968
to the brave men of the Elmhurst Volunteer Fire Department
who served with courage and devotion
from the days when fire fighting equipment
was crude and horse drawn
on behalf of a grateful community

The Elmhurst Historical Commission

It doesn’t look bad for a bell that’s been in the elements for more than 50 years now.

The museum has a modest but interesting collection of Elmhurst-specific artifacts.

Such as an Order of Odd Fellows sword. How often do you see one of those?
It goes along with a Shriner’s fez, a Jaycee’s collection box, some Knights of Columbus pins and other fraternal org items.

This calendar, produced by the local Rothmeyer Coal Co., belongs in the don’t-make-em-like-that-anymore file.

Notable birthdays on the calendar for January 1934 include Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and William McKinley.

A six pack of Baderbrau beer.
A short-lived Elmhurst brew (1989-1997). Never heard of it, even though Chicago’s well-known Goose Island brewery acquired the name and formula after 1997 and brewed it for a few more years. A mid-2010s revival didn’t work out either.

Better known are the Keebler elves. Keebler Foods Co. used to be located in Elmurst until its owner Kellogg Co. moved the snack operation to Michigan. I suspect not all of the elves relocated. There’s probably a neighborhood in Elmhurst where some of them still live.

You’d think the Village of Elmhurst would try to get permission from Kellogg to build an elf tree in one of the local parks. Do it right and people would come to see that.

The Whole World A Bauhaus

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After a pleasant weekend and a warm Monday and Tuesday — lunch on the deck is my benchmark for warm days — the hammer dropped on Wednesday. Mostly we got cold rain, but I also saw flecks of ice on the deck and in the greenish grass today.

I’m pretty sure that the first time I ever heard of the Bauhaus, or Walter Gropius for that matter, was ca. 1977 listening to Tom Lehrer’s That Was The Year That Was album. One of the songs, “Alma,” was about Alma Mahler, who had died during The Year That Was, that is, 1964.

Walter Gropius was Alma’s second husband. In amusing Lehrer fashion, he made a rhyme of “Bauhaus” and “chow house” in the verse about Walter and Alma.

But he would work late at the Bauhaus
And only come home now and then
She said, “Vhat am I running, a chow house?
It’s time to change partners again!’

This is an interesting video about Alma. Nearly 55 years after her death, she still inspires strong opinions, pro and con; see the comments section. I think my opinion about Alma will be, I don’t care.

We went to the Elmhurst Art Museum on Saturday to see The Whole World A Bauhaus, a traveling exhibition mounted for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus. Elmhurst, it seems, is its only stop in the United States.

Blair Kamin did a good write-up of the exhibition in the Chicago Tribune: “Amid the show’s 400-plus objects,which include photographs, works on paper, architectural models, documents, films and audio recordings, are classic chairs by Mies and Marcel Breuer; geometric wall tapestries and carpets by such Bauhaus masters as the textile artist Anni Albers, wife of painter Josef Albers; and curiosities like a yellow, blue and red cradle and flyers for Bauhaus designs.”

Curious indeed, that cradle.

It looks like with a vigorous push, you could roll it completely over, throwing an unfortunate infant onto the floor.

But never mind that. At least it’s a Bauhaus object. Kamin calls the exhibit “overstuffed,” and I’ll go along with him. It’s overstuffed with photos and documents and other Bauhaus ephemera.

For true Bauhaus nerds, this might be exciting, but the minutiae was a little much for me. For a school that produced a wealth of artful objects, or perhaps elegant industrial objects, The Whole World A Bauhaus had relatively few of them on display. Fewer pictures of Bauhaus types at work and play and more Bauhaus output to examine in person would have improved the show.

Even so, I learned a fair number of things — such as how the Bauhaus formed factions almost immediately, as you might except from a group of people with talent, strong opinions and high ideals.

One example, as Kamin tells it: “One was the charismatic Swiss artist Johannes Itten, who shaved his head and wore rimless round glasses and gurulike garb. Itten made his students do breathing exercises to improve their powers of concentration. When the school’s founding director, the urbane German architect Walter Gropius, shifted the focus of the Bauhaus’ workshops from distinctive crafted objects to design for mass production, the idealistic Itten left the school in 1923.”

I also enjoyed much of what I saw. Such as the model of the Dessau Bauhaus building.
I wondered whether it, unlike the school itself, survived National Socialism, or the war or the DDR for that matter. Yes, it turns out. In reunified Germany, the Dessau Bauhaus is a big-deal tourist attraction.

I consciously looked for works on paper that would make good postcards. I found a few. Such as “Construction for Fireworks” by Kurt Schmidt.

I’m not the only person who thinks a line of Bauhaus postcards would be just the thing. Gropius himself apparently thought that.

“In 1923, the Bauhaus was preparing for its first exhibition, where Walter Gropius, the school’s founder, would extol the benefits of industrial mass production,” notes Wired.

“To publicize the events, the Bauhaus mailed out beautiful postcards.”

Here’s one more. Who needs a course catalog when you have this?

I wondered for a moment how the Elmhurst Art Museum bagged the only U.S. visit by this exhibition, and figured there were a few reasons. The Chicago area has strong ties to modernism, for one thing, but a few rooms of Bauhaus might get lost in a larger venue like the Art Institute.

Besides, the Elmhurst has its own ties to modernism. Namely, the main display space is adjacent to the McCormick House, a single-family home designed in 1952 by Mies van der Rohe, last director of the Bauhaus 20 years earlier, and moved to its current location from elsewhere in the village of Elmhurst.

The house was restored to a more original appearance recently.
The house is open, so we wandered in for a look. Not quite as striking as the Farnsworth House, but definitely Miesian.

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

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If you want to see artful concrete, Tadao Ando is your man. I came to a fuller appreciation of that when we visited the 659 Wrightwood in Chicago late last year. On exhibit at the 659 were images of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, an Ando design that looked pretty artful, too.

As it is.

Modern Art Museum of Fort WorthThat’s the back of the structure, or at least the side facing the water feature and a scattering of outdoor sculptures, and sporting the museum’s distinctive Y beams.

The front, or at least the side facing the parking lot and a public street, isn’t quite as distinctive, but it is handsome in a modernist sort of way.
Modern Art Museum of Fort WorthAndo’s design is apparent not only in the exterior, but in the smooth concrete walls that form parts of the interior.

The Modern is one of a cluster of art museums in Fort Worth that also includes the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (designed by Philip Johnson) and the Kimbell Art Museum (Louis Kahn and Renzo Piano). The last time I spent a day in Fort Worth, early in 1990, I visited both of those. The Modern didn’t exist then, opening only in 2002.

How best to approach a museum whose collection is as eclectic as the Modern? Wander around and look at things. Some works will be interesting, some less so. I try to wander around upper-end grocery stores with the same attitude in mind, if I have time.

The usual modern suspects were all in evidence at the Modern: Picasso, Lichtenstein, Rothko, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollack, Josef Albers, Henry Moore and more. Worth seeing, but it’s also good to see interesting works by artists that aren’t quite as well known.

Such as “Ladder for Booker T. Washington” by Martin Puryear (1996), a wooden ladder-like structure fixed to the floor that winds its way upward. It doesn’t merely appear to shrink in size as it rises, it actually does. The surrounding Ando-style concrete walls add to the effect.

Or the curious “Camouflage Botticelli (Birth of Venus)” by Alain Jacquet (1963-64), an image of Venus on a cockle shell merged with a Shell gas pump.

For something newer, and more kinetic, there’s “Kind of Blue” by Jenny Holzer (2012), an array of nine LED signs with blue diodes fixed to the floor, emitting blue words that appear to flow along. As far as I could tell, there was no direct reference to the Miles Davis album of that name, but I could easily be wrong.

The video also offers a good look at the tall glass windows that overlook the museum’s shallow water feature — essentially a field of rocks covered by a little water.

Photography is part of the Modern’s collection as well. One wall sported a number of gelatin silver prints of water towers in France, Germany and the U.S. by Bernd and Hilla Becher. How is this tower in Dortmund-Grevel, Germany, anything but a delight?

Near the museum’s front entrance is “Vortex” by Richard Serra (2002), who is best known to us rubes for the notorious “Tilted Arc” in DC.
Vortex Richard SerraOn the other side of the museum, beyond the water feature, we took a look at a familiar figure.

"Conjoined" by Roxy Paine

“Conjoined” by Roxy Paine (2007), done in stainless steel. I remember seeing his work at the National Sculpture Garden and, I believe, at the Denver Art Museum, the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, MOMA and the Hirshhorn. Cool. But does lightning strike the Modern piece?

Texas Winter ’19

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My recent trip to wintertime Texas took me to Dallas and Fort Worth, San Antonio, and a few other burgs. February is winter in Texas, but it’s a pale moon of a winter compared with where I live. During the trip, temps varied but didn’t drop below freezing, and we experienced rain but no ice or snow.

I spent the weekdays working, but I also visited my brothers, one nephew and his family, one nephew by himself and a friend I’ve known for 45 years now.

I made it to a few new places and a few familiar old places. No matter how often you go somewhere, there are always new places, and no matter how familiar an old place is, there are always new aspects.

One new place was the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which I’ve had a mind to see since we went to Wrightwood 659 in December. Tadao Ando designed both Wrightwood and the Modern, which is easy to visit from Dallas, as Jay and I did: just pop on over on I-30.

While gadding around in greater DFW, we also saw the Cao Dai Tay Ninh Temple and the Cambodian Buddhist Temple of Dallas, whose neighbors in the southwest of the city are the likes of Mission Foods, Standard Meat, Cartamundi USA and Old Dominion Freight Line.

In San Antonio, we had the benefit of a free evening admission to the McNay Art Museum — an example of a familiar place offering some new things to see. Later, while on the road between San Antonio and Dallas, we stopped by the Hays County Courthouse in San Marcos and the San Marcos City Cemetery, whose burials go back to the 1870s.

Had some good meals along the way too. In San Antonio, a dinner at one of the Paesanos locations, a local Italian restaurant with roots in the 1968 world’s fair. Good pork shank and gnocchi. In Waco, a lunch at a joint that goes even further back: the curiously named Health Camp, in business, as the exterior says, since 1949. Good burger and shake.

In Dallas, on the day I flew in, I enjoyed sausage and homemade sauerkraut and Texas beer and other good things at my nephew Sam’s house, on the occasion of his 36th birthday. Naturally there was birthday cake too.

Reminded me of the morning, late in my college career, when Jay called me to tell me that Sam had been born. Been an uncle ever since.