Ceci n'est pas un blog

Spent much of Sunday at the National Gallery. It was lovely. This was a beautifully curated museum with a central area organized by theme with art from all times included and then a series of galleries that moved forward through time, each one focussing on a particular movement or trend in the art of the day. One thing that was particularly nice, in addition to the bilingual plaques, was that they would include reference pieces. For example, several Norwegian women went to study at Ferdinand Léger's Académie Moderne in Paris and brought back works heavily influenced by his abstract and mechanical paintings. So the small gallery of their work included a Léger as well. The Norwegian impressionists were accompanied by a Monet, and so on.

While Munch has his own museum a few miles away, the National Gallery also has quite a few. They are striking. A lot of his larger paintings have an improvisational, almost hurried quality that gives them an urgency and a sensuality but without being sloppy or amateur, he clearly has a well trained technique that is especially evident in a striking portrait of his sister (whose face appears throughout his work). Some of the paintings were so moving that I didn't notice the Scream until I walked right up to it. The breadth of his work is certainly under appreciated outside of Norway.

I heard an interesting theory about the recently returned Munchs that has been stolen. Apparently a few years ago there was a massive bank robbery, the largest in the nations history and every available investigator was hot on the trail of the thieves who needed a big distraction. Cue one art heist. This high-profile theft would surely pull police manpower off the bank case and give the thieves a couple of hostages they could use to bargain with if they did get caught. Curiously, in support of this highly unofficial theory, the paintings were recovered during the sentencing phase of the bank robbers trial.

Later, I went to St. Hanshaugen park and watched the ducks and the children. It is a beautiful park that is a hill, from the center you can see down to the harbor and across to the Nessoden peninsula. Gorgeous day. Yellow and red leaves formed perfect circles on the ground around the trees and young people walked their dogs or pushed prams along the paths. I even saw a man with a ferret riding in his sweater hood.

After dinner I read for a bit. I'm reading the Booker Prize winning "The God of Small Things". (Thank you, CMFM). It's a difficult book. She dances around in time slowly uncovering little bits of information until you start to see what the plot might look like. And the language is mostly beautiful and evocative but often crosses the line into that high school technique of random specificity, "somewhere a dog barks, a trash can falls". The story is fairly unrelentingly depressing and that makes for a slower read but now that the plot is showing itself, should go more quickly.