Category Archives: Museums

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.

The Rantoul Historical Society Museum

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Back on Tuesday. Take holidays whenever you can get them.

Rantoul, Illinois, is a town of about 13,000 just off of I-57 and roughly 20 miles north-northeast of Champaign-Urbana. For the last two years that I’ve been driving regularly between metro Chicago and Champaign, it’s been a sign on the Interstate. I knew that there had been an Air Force base there, and then an air museum on the site, but that both were gone. That’s about all I knew.

So on Sunday, I took the Rantoul exit and made my way to the Rantoul Historical Society Museum. Support little local museums when you can. Besides, you never know what oddities you’ll see, such as White Star brand tomatoes.

The museum is in a former church building on a main road.
Not a particularly old church, either: the Rantoul Presbyterian Church, dedicated in 1953.
The church is something of a microcosm of the town. When the museum moved into the building in 2016, the Rantoul Press did an article about it.

“At one time, when Chanute Air Force Base was open, membership was strong and the building was the site of a number of church and social events,” the Press noted. “But membership tailed off dramatically when the base closed.”

Chanute Air Force Base was open from 1917 to 1993, beginning as an Army Air Corps training facility and ending in a round of base rationalizations. When the base went, most of the local economy went with it.

A good part of the museum is given over to Chanute AFB.

The church’s former sanctuary isn’t used for displays, but a number of other rooms are chock-full of items, some in display cases, some not: photos, paintings, posters, newspapers, other printed ephemera, clothes, household items, knickknacks, toys, furniture, machinery, and items about the Illinois Central RR, which was the town’s reason for being in the 19th century.

In short, the museum sports anything that the good people of Rantoul wanted to give to the historical society after parents and grandparents died, or debris they cleaned out their homes before moving, or things they simply couldn’t bear to throw away. It’s Rantoul’s attic and Rantoul’s basement.

I spent about an hour looking around. I was the only person there besides the fellow watching the place. When I came in, he greeted me and turned on the lights in the other rooms for me. Otherwise, he said, they stay off.

Wonder who Mr. Rantoul was? The museum tells you. And shows you what he looked like.
Robert Rantoul Jr. (1805-52) was a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts and a director of the Illinois Central Railroad. As far as I can tell, he never visited Illinois, but when the Illinois Central was naming towns along its route, he got the nod.

I enjoyed the case full of old telephones.
There were plenty of displays devoted to bygone local sports glory.
A leather football helmet.

I’ve heard you can make a pretty good case that chronic concussion injuries would be reduced if football went back to leather helmets. Besides, they look cooler.

A few of the artifacts hint at someone’s long-ago personal sadness, such as this.
Boy Scout Vest Worn By: Jerry Wright

The picture must be a high school yearbook shot with “1954” added. No doubt the vest was tucked away somewhere by that time. Gerald Wright, it says under the picture. Deceased. Band 1,2,3. Football 1,2.

The Pritzker Military Museum

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One of the things I wanted to do between Christmas and New Year was visit one of Chicago’s lesser-known museums, ideally one I hadn’t gotten around to. So I went to the Pritzker Military Museum & Library, which is on second and third floors of 104 S. Michigan Ave., overlooking Millennium Park.
Pritzker, as in the Chicago family of billionaires, the architecture prize, and the incoming governor of Illinois. In particular, the museum is a project of retired Col. Jennifer (formerly James) Pritzker of the Illinois Army National Guard, who was also in the U.S. Army for a good many years.

All of the display space — a few rooms on the two floors — is currently given over to the Great War. Fittingly. On display are photos, posters and items carried by WWI soldiers.
There are also a few less conventional items to see.

Nothing says Great War like a papier-mâché Kaiser head. According to the sign, “A mask like this one… might have been worn on a float or during a play as a way to mock the German monarch.”

No doubt. What I wonder is how the thing survived 100 years. When the initial fun of Kaiser-mocking died down, did its creator tuck it away in some attic, only to be forgotten for decades? I can imagine some grandson or granddaughter cleaning out that attic in, say, the 1970s, and saying, “What is this? Let’s get rid of it.” But that didn’t happen. Somehow the Kaiser head made its way to the Pritzker, founded only in 2003.

What could be more important to Great War soldiers and sailors than their cigs?

I was especially taken with the collection of posters. Some as conventional as can be.
Some more whimsical.

One appealing to ethnic pride and righteous outrage at the same time.
This was for an organization essentially lost to time, though in fact the American Red Star Animal Relief Program is still around, now called Animal Emergency Services.
“[In WWI] the U.S. armed services used 243,135 horses and mules during the war to transport supply wagons, ambulances, traveling kitchens, water carts, food, engineer equipment, light artillery, and tons of shells. Horses were used in direct combat as well,” American Humane says.

“American Humane sent medical supplies, bandages, and ambulances to the front lines to care for the injured horses — an estimated 68,000 per month.

“Since that time, American Humane has helped the animal victims of natural and manmade disasters, such as floods, chemical spills, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and victims of animal cruelty throughout the country.”

Le Corbusier & Ando

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The first-ever exhibit at Wrightwood 659 is called Tadao Ando and Le Corbusier: Masters of Architecture. You’d think the more alliterative Masters of Modernism would be the thing, but probably the organizers thought that would be too narrow. And Masters of Human Creativity would be too broad.
The Le Corbusier exhibit was on the second floor. Pictures and paintings and models and a lot to read.
Before I’d only had a casual acquaintance with his output. I didn’t know about his paintings, for instance. Such as Taureau VIII (Bull VIII), 1954.

Looks suspiciously Picassoesque to my unlearned eye, but I don’t doubt Le Corbusier’s creativity. The models for some of his buildings, built and unbuilt, show that well enough.

A house he designed in Argentina, 1949.
An unbuilt governor’s palace for Punjab State in India, 1950-65.
Still, when I looked at some of the models, I couldn’t help being reminded of every ugly modernist box I’ve ever seen, even if his own work — in this case Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille — had a bit more style.
Remarkably, the building now includes the Hôtel Le Corbusier on two floors, and some color seems to have been added to the exterior. Even more remarkably, according to the Telegraph: “Double rooms from €79 (£67) year-round, an incredibly reasonable rate for the opportunity to sleep within an architectural icon.”

Reasonable all right. If the hotel were in this country, its owner would brag about curating Le Corbusier’s legacy, tout its upscale amenities, and charge three or four times as much.

On floors three and four of Wrightwood 659 were the Ando exhibits. I believe Ando has some advantages over Le Corbusier. He’s alive, for example, and could visit the exhibit when it opened and draw on the walls. This doodle evokes the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which he designed.
Also, Ando is a niche practitioner who does marvels in concrete, not someone inspiring a rash of urban renewal destruction and ugliness. Here’s a model of Ando’s Church of the Light near Osaka. I need to visit someday.

A lot of the third floor was taken up with a model of Naoshima, a small island in the Inland Sea that’s large enough to be home to a number of Ando-designed museums, developed over the last few decades.

Know where else I need to visit? Naoshima. There are just too many interesting places in the world.

Hull-House

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Besides trees and a little public art and some brutalist buildings, here’s something else I saw at the University of Illinois at Chicago on Sunday, the likes of which I’d never seen before.
It’s a knife-sharpening cart, complete with cobble stones, on display on the second floor of Hull-House, with a sign that says: “Julio Fabrizio, an immigrant from Castelvino, Italy, to Chicago in 1919, built this knife-sharpening cart in the 1930s for his peddling services. Pushing it through the streets of his Near West Side neighborhood, Fabrizio used it to repair umbrellas and sharpen scissors, saws, and knives.”

Since I was already at UIC on Sunday afternoon, I decided to drop by for a look at Hull-House, which is more formally called the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. All the years I’ve been in Chicago area, I’d never gotten around to it.

The current structure is a fragment of the 13-building complex in its heyday 100 years ago, but at least it’s a restored version of the original building, which dates back to 1856. By the time it became a settlement house in 1889, the house was fully part of the surrounding immigrant slum and so exactly where Addams and Hull-House cofounder Ellen Gates Starr wanted to be. The organization’s physical structure grew from there. The later buildings, just like much of the neighborhood, were destroyed in the 1960s to make way for the UIC campus.

“In the 1890s, Hull-House was located in the midst of a densely populated urban neighborhood peopled by Italian, Irish, German, Greek, Bohemian, and Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants,” the museum says.

“Jane Addams and the Hull-House residents provided kindergarten and day care facilities for the children of working mothers; an employment bureau; an art gallery; libraries; English and citizenship classes; and theater, music and art classes. As the complex expanded to include thirteen buildings, Hull-House supported more clubs and activities such as a Labor Museum, the Jane Club for single working girls, meeting places for trade union groups, and a wide array of cultural events.”

The museum is small but well designed to convey how the organization furthered the goals of the Progressive movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, besides providing numerous social services in the immediate neighborhood.

“Among the projects that they helped launch were the Immigrants’ Protective League, the Juvenile Protective Association, the first juvenile court in the nation, and a Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic (later called the Institute for Juvenile Research),” the museum notes.

“Through their efforts, the Illinois Legislature enacted protective legislation for women and children in 1893. With the creation of the Federal Children’s Bureau in 1912 and the passage of a federal child labor law in 1916, the Hull-House reformers saw their efforts expanded to the national level.”

Addams’ bedroom is part of the exhibit.
Fairly spare, though there’s a portrait of Tolstoy on the wall (no artist named that I could see, but it looks like a part copy of a 1901 portrait by Ilya Repin).
Apparently the Russian was an inspiration to Addams, though when they met in 1896 the event was less than comfortable for the American reformer.

The museum isn’t all about Addams or even the other settlement workers. Other people associated with the organization are given their due. One in particular caught my eye: Morris Topchevsky (1899-1947), immigrant from Poland when it was still part of the Russian Empire, painter, etcher, lecturer, writer and red.

Some of his works are on display.

Topchevsky took classes at Hull-House and later taught there. Seems that he also spent time in Mexico in the 1920s, becoming friends with Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, though too early to have hung out with Trotsky.