WI Day 2 - Fine Art, Family Friends, and Frank Lloyd Wright
Today was a cyclical sort of day which started out with saying goodbye to one set of family friends and ended with staying with another. My best friend James and sister, Julianne, flew back to MA this morning, and even though it was only a short visit, between the great sights and the better company there stay included some of my favorite days of the whole trip.
After bidding them farewell, I started my solo travels for the day by going to the wonderfully named Alderaan Coffee. Beyond being named after Princess Leia’s ill-fated home planet, the shop had little to do with Star Wars but they had a sleek stylish interior and some excellent coffee. It definitely tasted better than a great disturbance in the force like millions of voices suddenly crying out in terror and being suddenly silenced.
Near the coffeeshop, I stumbled across one of Milwaukee’s hidden gems: Swing Park. Located under the Holton Street Bridge, this whimsical public playground was initially established by a local arts group called beintween to add a sense of wonder and playfulness to the city’s infrastructure. It’s a simple thing, but the unexpectedness of coming across swing-sets when you don’t expect them is an oddly joyous occurrence that felt sort of like something out of a Wes Anderson movie.
After a bit of swingin’, I made my way to the Milwaukee Public Market for a bit of breakfast. The market was inspired by Pike Place in Seattle and it did have a sort of pleasant Northwest Vibe despite being about half a country away from Washington.
Before I arrived in Milwaukee, James and Julianne had hung out in the market for a bit waiting for me, and they said they thought I’d really like it there. As soon as I walked, I immediately understood what they meant because I was greeted by a giant inflatable lobster and a neon dappled swordfish sculpture hanging above the St. Paul Fish Company. It was wonderfully goofy, and I basically had a grin on my face the entire rest of my time there.
Another highlight came in the form of incredible handmade chocolates from Kehr’s Candies which were both impressively carved and absolutely delicious looking. My favorites were shockingly realistic motorcycles and adorable BB-8s from the new Star Wars movies. While everything looked amazing I do have to say that I found the midwest’s penchant for calling lollipops “suckers” somewhat unpleasant.
For breakfast, I decided to go with a slightly healthier route by being a shameless Millennial and getting some avocado toast from a hip cafe called On the Bus. The homemade sourdough bread, smashed avocado, and olive oil were all fresh and tasty, but I’m embarrassed to say that the red pepper flakes did quite a number on my weak Irish palette.
After breakfast, it was time to take my car/home to get major service because at this point I’d finally hit the milestone of 30,000 miles traveled since January. I went to John Amato Nissan, and they were all perfectly kind and helpful but it would be quite a bit of work so I left my car in their hands and got a Lyft ride to my next destination for the day.
The Milwaukee Art Museum wowed me right away with some of the most elegant architecture I’ve ever seen. Taking full advantage of the museum’s location overlooking Lake Michigan, Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava designed the entrance to the museum’s Quadracci Pavilion to look like the hull of a giant ship complete with a structural feature called a brise soleil which actually opens up during the day like a giant winged sail and closes over the pavilion during the night. Besides being visually stunning, the structure’s form fits its function as it help keeps the building’s internal climate under control by deflecting direct sunlight. It was really an astonishing building.
After being properly wowed by the entrance to the museum, I made my way inside. A hallway with big sleek glass windows connects the grand pavilion to the main gallery building, and fittingly the hallway also featured some incredible examples of contemporary glass artwork (in addition to some might fine views over the Great Lake). I’m always a sucker for glass art, because it never fails to blow my mind what people are able to create with such a delicate and temperamental material. Highlights included: abstract irregular vases and bowls by Marvin Lipofsky, Harvey K. Littleton, and Fritz Dreisbach; a mesmerizing conical piece by Vaclav Cigler; a stunning vase with a glass still life embedded inside by an artist whose name I sadly did not take down; a vibrant, flowery piece made by carefully fusing glass threads together by the talented and wonderfully named Marry Ann “Toots” Zynskey; a bubbly piece featuring a pleasant geometric abstraction in the center created by the reflection of the colored glass at the top by David Hutchhausen; and a crazily constructed piece called Cube in a Sphere by Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova.
I came out the other end of the spectacular glass hallway and entered the museum’s contemporary wing. While the Milwaukee Art Museum is not the largest country in terms of size, it does have one of the largest collections clocking in at over 25,000 pieces (!) so each wing was really jam-packed with great art, and I basically spent the next 3 hours walking around with my jaw perpetually on the floor at the sheer overwhelming quantity and quality of art.
While maybe not everyone’s cup of tea, I was happy to start in the contemporary wing because each gallery was vibrant and unpredictable, and I got to see a lot of the artists I’d grown to love on the trip as well as some I was seeing for the first time. The first gallery I walked through was dedicated to Pop Art, and my favorites included: a very Milwaukee three-dimensional still life of an orange and a can of PBR by Tom Wesselmann; some simple but striking word art by Christopher Wool; a really clever piece by Michelangelo Pistoletto called Ragazzo (boy) which was painted on reflective stainless steel to sort of turn the gallery space into its backdrop; a classic Roy Lichtenstein comic-book style portrait of an unknowable woman; another Roy Lichtenstein but this time riffing on Monet’s famous water lilies; a Jasper Johns piece combining abstract forms, references to other abstract paintings, and a random but charming inclusion of the famous optical illusion where you can either see a young woman or an old crone; a dreamy oil painting of Jackie Kennedy and her son John by Elizabeth Peyton; a bizarre neon-esque painting by Ed Paschke called Pedifem meant to look like distorted TV advertisement; and a fairytale scene made of a mishmash of pop-cultural figures and advertising logos called On Duty, Not Driving by Reginald Baylor.
Next up was a series of modernist takes on on portraiture with my favorites beings: the always insanely photorealistic Chuck Close’s portrait of his friend Nancy Graves; a perfectly nice portrait by David Salle called Within Sleep in which he also surreally superimposes abstract colors, comic strip doodles, ancient religious art, and mild pornography; a beautiful portrait by Kehinde Wiley called St. Dionysus of a young contemporary Black man done in a lavish Rococo style; an almost imperceptible portrait by Tim Rollins called White Alice II made of acrylic on photocopier paper; a disturbingly realistic fiberglass sculpture of a janitor resting up against the wall by Duane Hanson; and a photorealistic oil painting of three stylish 70s women gathered around a coffee table called Xmas at Gilroy by Robert Alan Bechtle.
Next up came the more abstract pieces which I’ve grown to really love seeing because I never really know how they’ll strike me or why. My favorites here included: a black and white geometric abstraction by Al Held that played around with perspective and seemed to sort of move and shift before your eyes; a dreamy piece by Gerhard Richter called Breath which was made by layering pigments on top of one another covering them in plastic and then peeling it away to created the work’s unusual blended texture; a quirky boldly colored jumble of blobs called Night Reach by Elizabeth Murray; a bizarre oil painting called Mist from the Chest by Susan Rothenburg in which expressive abstract forms sort of resemble the soul leaving the body; a minimalist piece by Cy Twombly that looks like small chalk drawing but is actually all paint and crayon; a colorful geometric abstraction by Frank Stella on a boldly irregular canvas; a painting that almost looks like a classical portrait devolving into amorphous blobs by Barabar Rossi called Sea-n-Ciper; an engrossing blend of sketches, colorful blobs, and cubist abstractions by Jorge Tacia; and a colorful cubist abstraction mysteriously entitled It’s Raining Anita Huffington by Larry Rivers.
Next up were some surrealist scenes, which were some of my favorite pieces because they’re in my sweet spot of being super strange but feeling like they’re still capturing real characters and emotions. My highlights here include: a creepy expressionist historical scene called City of Copper by Mimmo Paladino; a dream like piece called Hardhats by Robert Colescott depicting a 1950s suburban kitchen blending with a construction site using dream logic to explore class and race relations under the guise of romance; a still life by Phillip Guston using his signature high-brow/low-brow blend of abstract expressionism and cartooning; an incredible and haunting image of hands gripping a barred window over an eerie purple backdrop called Repose in Ludwig’s Castle by Sigmar Polke; a manic blend of colors and cryptic phrases scrawled across a canvas with wood supports by the late great Jean-Michel Basquiat; and a fascinating piece called Claudio al Mandrion by Julian Schnabel which featured a couple juxtaposed amidst abstract imagery with a unique texture created by the artist adding broken pieces of ceramic plates to the canvas and painting over them.
Next up were more installation-y pieces that explored physical and/or conceptual space in a way more traditional mediums can’t. Highlights for me here included: the deeply strange MMPI (Self-Portrait in Yellow) by Tony Oursler featuring a doll with its head being crushed by a metal folding chair while the artist’s face was projected on it and repeatedly answering questions from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory for a bizarre and uncanny effect; a piece called Come Out by Glenn Ligon that uses various thicknesses of silkscreen prints of the phrase “Come out to show them” to try to visually replicate the effect of listening to Steve Reich’s iconic piece of sample based sound-art (using audio of a young Black teen falsely accused of murder describing being assaulted by the police) of the same name; an untitled minimalist sculpture by Roger Morris featuring a piece of industrial felt cut into drooping slits in the center and suspended in such a way as to really play with perspective and shadow in a way that was surprisingly captivating for such a simple construction; an incomplete but sleek ] cube made of white painted aluminum by Sol LeWitt; an untitled sculpture by Donald Judd featuring six aluminum cubes mounted on the wall at eye level to reveal that the inside faces of the cube were colored plexiglass which played with both the light in the room and viewers’ expectations of what a sculpture is; a conceptual piece by Robert Smithson called Non-Site: Line of Wreckage (Bayonne, New Jersey) in which the artist collected rubble from a destroyed New Jersey highway and carefully placed them in in a crisp, painted aluminum container creating minimalist art-world elegance out of the chaotic industrial detritus of the real world; a very strangely beautiful piece by Cornelia Parker called Edge of England which features small irregular pieces of chalk from a cliff in England all neatly suspended in a grid-like fashion from the ceiling like a magical snap shot of rocks in free fall frozen in time; and two simple but endlessly fascinating pieces by the artist Larry Bell that feature constructions made out of vacuum coated glass that bend and distort light to create mesmerizing shadows and distorted reflections of the world around them.
My favorite piece for sheer wildness was an untitled piece by Robert Gober which looks like a totally unassuming old suit case just lying around until you get up close and see that the bottom of the suit case is a cast iron grate looking down into a shockingly deep shaft that seems to be filled with some mysterious golden substance (which i think is actually painted human hair yuck). It was so unexpected and seemingly physically impossible, that it really blew me away. I always like any piece that can activate that sense of childlike wonder at “How did they do that?!”
Exiting the main contemporary galleries, I was greeted by the majestically lumpy cubist sculpture Standing Figure (Roman Figure II) by Thomas Houseago. The sculpture is made of plaster cast around and iron and wood skelton and it does a funny job being at once very reminiscent of ancient sculptures while also being decidedly modern in its unusual shapes and textures.
From there, I moved into the galleries of 20th and 21st century Design. These featured pieces designed to be household objects but with contemporary boundary pushing approaches to form and function. I used to not really get the point of design galleries because I used to be in the camp of thinking of “how can a piece of furniture be on the same level as a great painting” but now I’ve grown to appreciate creativity and originality in whatever forms it may take, and in some ways it takes more imagination to do something new with something as familiar as a household object.
The galleries started with a collection of some of the funkiest chairs you’ve ever seen, which were all very visually stunning even if they maybe didn’t look all that comfortable to actually sit in.
After the chairs, there were some displays of contemporary jewelry which were an incredible mix of delicate craftsmanship and naturally gorgeous materials. It’s always crazy to think that precious metals and gemstones are just naturally occurring materials out in the world.
Some of the items in the design wing were more on the artsy side of art and design showcasing the versatility of once function-based mediums such as glass and ceramics. Highlights here included: an abstract crown of colorful blown glass by Harvey K. Littleton; sleek jazz age Deco dinner-ware; a set of blown glass vessels by Josiah McElheny arranged in a mirrored display so as to make it seem like they go on to infinity; some gorgeously hand painted ceramics with abstract and landscape scenes; a really pretty and creatively designed ceramic teapot by Margarete Heymann-Lobenstein-Marks; a very whimsical painted wood cabinet with legs by Wendell Castle fittingly called a Walking Cabinet which pleasantly reminded of the chaotic Luggage from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Novels; some very elegant earthenware vases by Roseline Delisle; a faux historic ceramic bust by Robert Arneson cheekily named Desolatus.
The design galleries also had some fun non-traditional pieces related to leisure which I got a real kick out of. These included: a wild 1960s board game called My Family which featured little cardboard standees of charmingly specific 60s people; a cool space-age looking jukebox; a sleek art deco model car with a luxury trailer hilariously called the Zephyr Land Yacht; and some colorful vintage Kodak cameras with really fun and stylish geometric patterns.
The next room I entered was just dedicated to two massive works of minimalism (a fun oxymoron). These were Martin Puryear’s Maroon, a large amorphous but pleasant form made of tar hardened over wire mesh with a smooth wooden cap giving the piece a sense of functionality despite being totally abstract, and Eva Hesse’s Right After, an ethereal, haunting sculpture that looks like a web of string but is actually all fiberglass that was dipped in liquid latex and left to dry so that the weight of the latex would cause the fiberglass to droop and harden into the piece’s unusual shape. It’s a fun mess of contradictions, solid but fragile, chaotic but intricate, and it was really sort of mesmerizing to look at the shadows the sculpture cast on the floor and wall. The fact that Hesse made the piece after having one of the three surgical operations she would have on the brain tumor that ultimately killed her adds an element of melancholy that weirdly does come out in the piece and I’m sure there was no doubt a very meditative and therapeutic effect in the physicality of dipping all that glass and watching the piece take shape as it dried.
The next few galleries were dedicated to the museum’s expansive collection of folk art and works by self taught artists from around the world, which is one of the largest such collections in the country. I loved seeing these pieces because they had the unpredictability of pure creativity without any of that pesky training getting in the way, and you felt like there were no barriers between the artists’ emotions and their canvas of choice.
The first galleries were all dedicated to the museum’s stellar collection of works by self-taught Haitian artists. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen another museum spotlight Haitian art to the same extent before, and it was very exciting to me to see so much art rooted in cultural, historic, and stylistic traditions that I’d never seen really represented to this degree. The pieces had really vibrant colors, and a cool sense of magical realism where history, folklore, religious characters, and modernity could all coexist depending on the scene. My favorites included: a powerful rendering by Castera Bazile of the historic moment when a Vodun priestess sacrificed a black pig as part of a Petwo ceremony that would help kick start the Haitian revolution; a fun painting of Ezili, a Vodou God of love and femininity with her decidedly feminine earthly court by Hector Hyppolite; a really tender painting of Saint Francis holding the Baby Jesus also by Hector Hyppolite; a dynamic metal sculpture of the serpent god Danbala by Georges Liautuad; a wonderfully otherworldly painting of a flower festival by Rigaud Benoit; another painting by Rigaud Benoit of a fantastical scene of a family communing with the dead; a painting of the suave and sophisticated spirit of the dead Baron La Croix by Andre Pierre; a dramatic painting of a trumpeting Siren also by Andre Pierre; a very sweet painting by Antoine Obin of himself as a young boy being held by his Grandmother; a layered and whimsical circular metal carving by Sérésier Louisjuste; an interior scene with of a Masonic Blue Lodge with wild perspective by Gerard Valcin; and a great expressive composition of a community working in the fields also by Gerard Valcin.
My favorite piece from the Haitian collection though was this huge metal sculpture by Serge Jolimeau because the way he is able to cram in characters both realistic and fantastical all into the same composition is really incredible and plays with your sense of perspective in a fun way.
Next up were the collections of folk art from the US and Europe. These were somewhat more stylistically familiar to me than the Haitian art, but a real treat nonetheless. Highlights here included: a vaguely haunting portrait of a young girl and her cat by Drossos P. Skyllas; a painting of a young girl with a creepy little doll by Gabriele Munter; a strangely floral painting of mushroom cloud by Eugene von Bruenchenhein; some colorfully trippy dreamscapes also by Eugene von Bruenchenhein; a surreal symmetrical composition of natural and religious imagery by Minnie Evans; an impressionistic reclining nude by Sylvia Levine; a wild piece by Michael Lenk called The Fifth Day of Creation which implies some wonderfully baffling choices on the part of the creator; a big abstract elephant by William L. Hawkins; a very cubist still life by Ruth Grotenrath; a very expressionist painting hilariously just called A Person by Arnold Schmidt; a shockingly intricate piece depicting God Creating the Heavens done entirely in ballpoint pen by Consuelo Amézcua; and another stunningly detailed pen and ink drawing of an unnamed woman by Madge Gill.
Possibly my favorite part of the Folk Art galleries though were the crazy wood carvings and sculptures people had made that really take whittling up a notch. There’s an extra layer of physicality to these pieces that really makes the artist’s effort jump out at you a bit more. Some highlights included: the delightfully named demon Boogerman sculpted by Earnest Patton; a mildly horrific wooden scene with apocalyptic musings on the afterlife called Hospital in Hell by Ronald Cooper; a carved scene by Josephus Farmer (what a name) depicting the emancipation of the slaves and scenes from Lincoln’s life without necessarily the clearest narrative structure; an urgent and panting carved Newsboy which originally hung over the Pawtucket Record in Rhode Island which must have surely been slightly alarming for customers in spite of the genuinely impressive craftsmanship (that face); an adorable little metal weightlifter that was originally on display somewhere called Bell’s Bar; a positively insane cane depicting a naked woman being eaten from the top down by a jaguar and from the bottom up by a snake handmade by Denzil Goodpaster; a wooden man in a suit that was made by an unknown artist and which the museum believes was either placed in front of a fraternal order or a mortuary (same difference, I guess); a deeply goofy wooden sculpture of a pregnant woman by Bessie Harvey; a charming wooden porcupine Felipe B. Archuleta; a wooden wind up toy depicting The World of Work by an unknown artist; a funny little dog carved out of a rock and fittingly named Rock Dog by Edgar Tolson; and a genuinely beautiful wooden box made through the distinctive triangular carving pattern known as tramp art.
For pure intricacy, the number of moving parts in this giant wind up toy featuring multiple see saws and windmills, called The Sport World, really took the cake for me.
While in the folk art galleries, I discovered a new favorite genre which is bizarre blends of history and religious imagery here exemplified by Anna Celletti’s strange imagining of Stalin as the Black Angel of Death, and Josephus Farmer’s really impressive but much less accurate depiction of The Seven Thousand Years of Human History (he’s only about a million years off but he does cover a lot of ground which is more than commendable).
After the folk-art and self taught artists, I made my way to see the Marcia and Granvil Specks Collection, which at over 450 pieces, is one of the largest collections of German Expressionist prints in the nation, which included a lot of of woodcuts. I’m a huge fan of the stark lines and textures of woodcut prints, and I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve seen of German Expressionism so I was excited for this marriage of the two. What was on display was understandably much smaller than the whole collection, but it was all pretty amazing. My favorites included: an etching by Lyonel Feininger of a more straightforward city scene than his more trademark cubist works; a dark and moody woodcut of a military train station by Fritz Schaefler; a really sweet drypoint etching of a mother and child strolling by a canal by Erich Heckle; a humorously exaggerated city scene called Window Shopping by Emil Betzler; a fantastically angular drypoint etching of a wooden bridge by the great Max Beckmann; a dynamic woodcut of a bridge over a moving train by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner; and a surreally bawdy woodcut of a red-light district by Franz M. Jansen cheekily called the Metropolitan Paradise.
The next room I went into had two giant paintings by the contemporary artist Alex Katz, who has a very distinctive style that exists somewhere between Pop Art and classical landscape and portrait painting. I’m not sure if there was any special reason these paintings were separate from everything else or if it was just because they were quite large, but they really were excellent. I think the picture of white lilies is particularly beautiful, but the way he captures the personality in his painting of a scruffy little sheepdog named Sunny is also pretty wonderful.
Next up was a perfect example of curation with the placement of Barbara Hepworth’s minimalist stone sculpture, entitled very reasonably Two Piece Marble, in front of a giant window looking out over Lake Michigan. The sculpture itself is simple but elegant and quietly impressive in how natural the cuts seem and how well balanced the two pieces are, but something about being able to see the endless water through the piece really added a whole new level of natural grandeur. It was both breathtaking and oddly soothing to just stand there and stare at the gently rippling waters though the small sturdy marble.
The next wing of the museum (did I mention this place is massive) featured the astonishing Mrs. Harry L. Bradley collection of late 19th century and 20th century works by European and American masters. The collection is easily worth several million dollars so it’s insane that it was all donated by one person, but the Bradleys estate, built through the founding of industrial manufacturing powerhouse Allen-Bradley, is currently in the billions so I guess the money wasn’t exactly an issue. It’s an unreal collection, so I’m glad they donated it to the museum to share with the public, but the Bradley Foundation does also donate millions to promoting conservative government so I just have to put that out of my mind while I’m marveling at the art.
The wing spanned several galleries, countries, and decades, so I’ve tried to group things in categories that make sense to me while sharing my favorites. First up we hav, have early 20th Century European art, featuring relatively straightforward landscapes and portraits but with more impressionistic lines and color schemes. My favorites here included: Raoul Dufy’s gauzy colorful painting of an orchestra; an fantastically personality-rich portrait of a gardener by Alexei Jawlensky; a flowy painting of female laborers battling the wind by Marianne Werefkin; an angular portrait called Dodo with a Feather Hat by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner; a hazy dusk lit village church by Gabriele Münter; a vibrant early morning scene by Max Pechstein; a serene view of geraniums, plumes of smoke, and blue mountains by August Macke; a bustling city street scene also by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner; and a pretty portrait called Lady in Red by Oscar Kokoschka.
Next up was more modernist 20th-century European works that start to get more surrealist and abstract which was very much my jam. Highlights for me included: a playful scene of dancing nudes on the beach by Otto Muller; a humorously abstract painting called the King’s Jester by one of my personal favorites, Joan Miro; a very lumpy anxious young man painted by Ludwig Meidner; a cute cubist sculpture of a mother and child by Jacques Lipchitz; a colorful and surprisingly non-Cubist painting by George Braque; an almost normal-seeming still life by Joan Miro before he developed his signature surreal style; a mind-bending cubist portrait by Fernand Leger; a dynamically abstracted seascape by Czech artist František Kupka; a subtly impressionistic painting of the Place Vendome in Paris by Kees van Dongen (fun name); another painting more surreal scene by Kees van Dongen of the Quai in Venice; a minimalist-cubist painting by Paul Klee humorously named Hot Blooded Woman; and a charming impressionist river scene by Raoul Dufy.
Some of my favorites from this period were these two wonderfully bizarre animal paintings, a cubist rooster by Pablo Picasso and some dramatic war horses by Marino Marnini.
Next up were early 20th-century modernist American paintings which were some of my favorites in the museum. Highlights for me were: a truly gorgeous painting called Yvonne in a Pink Dress by Guy Pène du Bois; a jazzy painting of a Southwestern Landscape using a repeated motif of the Letter V by Raymond Jonson; an eerie apocalyptic scene by John Wilde (who I never knew about before entering the Midwest, but who quickly became one of my new favorites for just how weird his paintings get); a beautiful allegorical painting by Aaron Douglas called the Song of the Tower celebrating Black freedom and talent; a hauntingly lovely Andrew Wyeth painting called Afternoon; an abstracted landscape painting by Manierre Dawson called Prognostic; a weirdly shifty scene of a comically Italian family entering a church for a Christening by Osvaldo Louis Guglielmi; a classically pretty landscape painting by John Steuart Curry; an impressionistic outdoor scene by an artist whose name I couldn’t find; a dramatic seascape by the great Marsden Hartley; a watercolor-esque oil landscape painting by John Marin; a fun geometric abstraction of a still-life by Stuart Davis; an art-deco inspired Harlem Renaissance painting called the Acscent of Ethiopia by Lois Mailou Jones; and three pleasantly minimalist portraits of different women by Milton Avery, who manages to convey an impressive amount of personality without ever drawing a face.
Amidst all these paintings there were some very sleek, tubular sculptures by cubist artists Raymond Duchamp-Villon (left) and William Hunt Diedrich (right) which I thought really added some character to the rooms.
Among the more modernist works were some more classically Americana Western pieces, which I’ve grown quite fond of during my travels. My favorites here were: a lovely twilit scene of a solitary buffalo on the prairie by Richard Lorenz; an incredibly detailed bronze sculpture of a bucking bronco by the amazing Frederic Remington; and a dramatic scene of a horseback gunfight by an artist whose name I couldn’t find.
The ultimate piece of Americana art though was this sweetly hilarious Norman Rockwell painting of a grumpy old store clerk modeling a flowery hat for a young customer. Norman Rockwell’s an interesting case where he’s so famous, you almost forget just how great he is until you see one in person.
Up next was a large collection of works by Wisconsin’s own Georgia O’Keeffe. I always associate her with the Southwest, because that’s where she spent so much of her adult life, so it was funny to learn that she was a local. I always love seeing her paintings because they so brilliantly blend the naturalistic and the abstract in really powerful ways. It’s interesting that she herself didn’t see anything particularly feminine in her own artwork. For some of the paintings, I think that’s more than fair, but in other ones it’s hard to see anything else. It’s exciting that even after seeing a whole museum dedicated to her in Santa Fe, I still get to be surprised by new works of hers in most museums I visit, thought this collection was particularly great:
Next up, I moved into works of more pure abstraction from the early days of the abstract expressionist movement’s rise to prominence. My favorites here included: a colorful early piece by Helen Frankenthaler before she had fully developed her more signature “soak-stain” technique; a geometric piece by Fernand Leger called The Wounded II; a bubbly color field called Diamond Red by Ernst Wilhelm Nay (lots of artsy Ernsts in this museum); a black and white perspective study by Victor Vasarely called Sir-Ris; a dramatic splatter of black paint called Two Figures with Stripe by Robert Motherwell; a fascinatingly textured color abstraction by Paul Jenkins called Phenomena Blue Held Over that looked like it was unfurling before your eyes; a strangely captivating blend of striped and solid blobs of color called Court Les Rues by Jean Dubuffet; a small enigmatic construction called T54/19 by Hans Hartung; an optical illusion of blending colored stripes by Yaacov Agam; an interestingly off-center color abstraction called Zeta by Morris Louis; a perspective-bending abstraction by Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy that was a cool superimposing of a 3-d sphere on a 2-d plane; and an eclectic abstract composition by one of the godfathers of abstract expressionism, Wassily Kandinsky.
The abstract paintings were also accompanied by some funky abstract sculptures. My favorites were two pieces by Harry Bertoia, one that reminded me of Cousin Itt from the Addams Family and one that was a pretty awesome rendering of a dandelion puff waiting to be blown into the wind.
Next up was a series of prints by European masters like Pablo Picasso, Edouard Manet, and Francisco de Goya. The Goya etchings in particular really blew me aways, and it’s hard to believe he was alive in the 1700s because all of his works are so cool and modern seeming and you can feel the reach of his influence into today. Across all the pieces, the amount of detail in such tiny prints was really astounding.
Making my way out of the Bradley wing I walked by an incredible piece called Rainbow Bridge by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, featuring a rainbow of mirrored glass spheres which look totally black if you look at them from one angle but then are vividly colored from other angles so as you walk around the piece you get a dazzling effect of the colors shifting before your eyes. I didn’t know the artist at the time I saw this piece, but since being off the road I got really into the show Abstract: The Art of Design on Netflix and there’s a whole episode about Olafur Eliasson that I highly recommend because you get to see some of his larger scale installations that also play with light, color, and architecture in astonishing ways.
Walking past the cafe area, I was excited to see a typically crazy blown glass installation by the one and only Dale Chihuly, that one eyed madman.
At this point, I’d been in the museum for a couple of full hours (which might be how long it’s taken to read all this, hope it’s at least somewhat interesting since I know it’s a lot!) and my car was already done being serviced, so I got a Lyft back to the dealership, and then promptly drove my new and improved car back to the museum because there were still whole wings I hadn’t seen yet!
Back in the museum, I started by making my way through the European Art Wing. I began with early European art, which I must admit isn’t exactly my favorite part of any museum though I know others will disagree. While it all sort of blends together for me, there were still plenty of pieces that objectively quite lovely.
My favorites naturally skew on the stranger side and they included: this hilarious portrait of Mars the God of War by Gerrit van Honthurst where the look on his face makes me laugh every time I see it; a painting by Francesco Botticini that I think is supposed to show the Baby Christ reaching for his mother but was unintentionally painted in such a way that it looks like she just dropped him; and a wild Triple Profile Portrait attributed to Lucas de Heere which honestly weirdly like it could be a good modern album art for a female fronted punk band.
Among these paintings, there were also some interesting three-dimensional pieces including: an odd wooden sculpture that seems to depict a young man with no back stepping on a dog; a beautiful religious scene carved into a bronze relief; and a scene of the Madonna and Christ child carved into polychromed and gilded stucco by the workshop of Antonio Rossellino.
Next up was a room of early decorative art, which featured various home goods with the most elaborate and intricate etchings carved onto every surface and all the finest natural materials including precious metals, ivory, seashells, and beautiful woods that have impressively retained their color all these years. I can’t imagine having any of these things just casually in my house, but they were stunning to see.
Going back even further in history, the collection of antiquities included a beautifully hand painted mummy and fantastically well preserved Grecian urn.
There was also a full suit of armor from Medieval England, which was as impressively made as it was probably horribly uncomfortable to wear.
The next room of paintings were slightly later European works featuring more colorful and fantastical scenes which I was more partial to personally.
My favorites here included: a ridiculous mythological scene of a Satyr party painted by Amédée van Loo featuring wine drinking babies; an incredibly flowery self-portrait by Andien de Clermont; and two of the dandiest young tennis players ever painted by Georg Anton Abraham Urlaub.
Next up came more decorative arts, this time featuring exquisite pieces of ceramic and glass dishware that were really something to behold. These included some fabulous examples of Wedgwood china which is one of the foremost British pottery companies (top row).
Some highlights included: a wood-carved cabinet with religious figurines; a highly decorative tea set with different painted scenes on every piece; a vintage rifle gun with intricate carved ivory adornments; and a carved stained walnut panel depicting an action-packed scened ominously called the Massacre of the Innocent.
Some of my favorite pieces that I’d never seen anything quite like before were these giant copper plates with different scenes from the life of Moses painted on them in enamel. The combination of the glimmering copper and cream-colored paint was just stunning.
The strangest piece in my opinion, because I can’t really imagine why anyone would want this in their despite the excellent craftsmanship, was this majestically portly ceramic sculpture of Augustus III, the King of Poland, from the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory in Dresden.
In a neat bit of curation, the European decorative art was accompanied by two pieces by contemporary artist Beth Lipman called Laid Tabled (left) and Secretary with Chipmunk (right) which featured antique furniture decorated with Lipman’s own insanely ornate blown glass compositions. They were just jaw-droppingly impressive.
Next up I came to a gallery of works by Impressionist painters which were featured gorgeously rich colors and delicate, precise brushstrokes. My favorites were: a sun-dappled scene of Waterloo Bridge by Claude Monet; a Pointillist harbor scene by Camille Pissarro; a dappled peaceful boating painting by Gustave Caillebotte; a wild portrait of Salome holding the head of John the Baptist by Wilhelm Trubner; a painting of a woman about to have a meal of oyster by Lovis Corinth; and a lush scene of two lovers by the water by Renoir.
Amid the paintings, there was a giant bust of Honore de Balzac by the great Auguste Rodin, that was impressive but far from flattering. Hilariously the French organization that commissioned the sculpture originally refused to accept it, because they thought Rodin was making fun of the famous novelist.
Next up, there were some works where European painters tackled imagined renderings of lands they’d never visited in Asia and Africa which are very pretty though undoubtedly far from accurate. My favorites of these were: a Scene from Gizah (their spelling) by Charles Théodore Frère; a pleasantly relaxed royal scene set in Tangiers by Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant; and stunning imaginary landscape featuring a lion surveying his kingdom by Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Taking a step back in time from the Impressionists, there were some more realist paintings from 19th Century Europe which features some of the most spectacular landscapes.
My favorite though was this hilarious scene of two dumpy friars who have just spilled all their wine cheekily named The Catastrophe by Eduard von Grützner. The looks of embarrassment and disappointment on the two fellas’ faces are all too human and there’s a real sweetness under the humor that made this piece a stand out for me.
Some less silly highlights included: an exceptionally well detailed painting by Michael Carl Gregorovius of the architecture in Gdansk, which was sadly mostly destroyed in the World Wars so paintings like this are extra special; and a sad but impressively well characterized scene of people standing outside a bank in Vienna waiting to hear news about a devastating market crash painted by Christian Ludwig Bokelmann.
Next up, there were some more great examples of insanely detailed decorative arts. My favorites included: a wooden box with an impressive marble sculpture on top; a display case filled with batshit insane steins made to look like different animals and characters (don’t worry it’s all ceramic though the skull is alarmingly convincing); an incredibly intricate circular desk that is a marvel of woodwork; and a pretty stone relief depicting the first meeting of Adam and Eve.
Last but not least, I went to a special exhibit on David Drake also known as Dave the Potter or simply just Dave, since he was born into Slavery in 1801 in South Carolina and Drake wasn’t his real last name. Despite the limitations imposed on Dave by a racist society, he managed to become a prolific and celebrated potter, becoming the most skilled craftsmen in any factory he was able to find employment in. His works have endured not only because of their beauty and skillful construction but also because of Dave’s whimsical streak of etching short lines of poetry into his works. Visually it’s effective even now, but it’s especially impressive given that it was illegal at that time for slaves to learn how to read and write, so Dave not only he taught himself on the sly, which is impressive enough, but he even mastered writing in verse and keeping a sense of humor in a world that was hostile to his very existence which is pretty nuts. And seemingly despite his couplets technically being illegal acts, the pots were just so good that most people weren’t going to say anything so he proudly and defiantly continued to make his mark, leaving objects that are both great works of art and powerful first-hand historical documents of life during slavery for the generations to follow. It’s an incredible story, but sadly my phone crapped out after several hours of photo-taking so I had to find pictures of his work online, where I also stumbled across this great article about Dave’s life by Chandra Noyes so if you’re interested in any further reading click here.
After all that museum-ing about, I was in desperate need of a coffee so I made my way to Collectivo Coffee, a local chain that has been awarded the best coffee in Milwaukee several times. Their coffee was good and strong, and they had lots of different creative specialty drinks (and more importantly milkshakes) which I would have had a lot of fun testing out if I was spending more time in the city.
After re-fueling, I drove down to the Burnham Block on Milwaukee’s South Side which has the distinction of containing the largest cluster of Frank Lloyd Wright homes of anywhere in the world which is pretty neat for an inconspicuous little suburban street. The Burnham houses, of which there are six, were Wright’s attempt at solving the problem of affordable housing in America with a design he called American System-Built Homes which featured a cost-effective strategy of cutting all the materials in a factory to be essentially good to go and then assembling them onsite, thus reducing labor costs and waste cleanup. His goal was to take his signature Prairie style aesthetic and to create houses that were practical, space, efficient, and affordable on the average working-class budget without sacrificing any beauty. It was a noble endeavor, but the onset of WWI made it a huge financial misfire as most factories and potential home buyers were taken away by the war effort, so the American System-Built style became another casualty. Because they were considered a failure at the time, when the homes were eventually bought Wright was much more hands-off than he would famously be about his grander homes, and the homeowners had an unusual degree of freedom with making alterations to the home, most notably one which added siding that he would have hated for taking away from the naturalist aesthetic he was going for. While some of the houses are still privately owned, others have been bought by a local historic preservation organization that intends to restore them and turn them into a museum. I didn’t have time to take a tour or see inside any of the houses myself, but for being more mass-produced than his usual works they still had real visual flair and a calming presence to them that makes it hard not to think of the weird alternate history version of the world where this took off and became what most suburbs looked like.
After admiring the local architecture, I made my way to the very hip Lakefront Brewery for dinner and drinks. I knew I was going to like the place right off the bat because they had these bonkers Three Stooges Sculptures made out of decommissioned brewing vats by local artist Paul Bobrowitz.
The animal prints on the bodies are a particularly strange touch which naturally I loved
Lakefront had a super convivial atmosphere, and it was bustling with happy patrons making the most of a pleasant summer evening. As a brewpub, they also really delivered on both the food and drink fronts. For food, I got a tasty burrito bowl which was probably the least red meat and bread I’d eaten since entering Milwaukee so my arteries were definitely grateful for the slight change of pace. To drink, I went with Eastside Dark Lager, a Bavarian-style beer with the rich maltiness of a darker beer but the lightness and easy drinking feel of a lager which made it a perfect refresher after a busy day.
After dinner, I made my way to the night’s Open Mic where I was meeting one of my mom’s best friends, Jeannie, and her sons, Paul and Jeff. The mic was at a cool small artsy theater called the Miramar Theater. I had hoped a theater mic would feel more like a real show since I would have audience members, but I didn’t do the best of research and it wasn’t a pure comedy Open Mic but an anything-goes kind of open mic with a mix of music, poetry, and comedy. These can be a bit more unpredictable naturally, but we all got lucky that all the different performers regardless of their art of choice were actually really solid and there was a small but supportive crowd so it actually ended up being a very fun night.
All the performers were really sweet and supportive in addition to being talented so I’m just going to give them all a little shout out rather than pick favorites (unfortunately I didn’t get everyone’s last names, but I also think not everyone gave theirs):
Sandy - She played music and read a really sweet Anti-Trump poem that her friend wrote
Brandy- She did a sort of blend of storytelling and standup, and I got a kick out of the line “it's not premarital sex if you never get married”
MC Tone- The only other pure comedian, who had a lot of energy but he also brought his own microphone and wasn’t always easy to understand. From what I heard I really liked the line “A qhite guy introduced me as McTone. McTone sounds like a sandwich”
Dano- A very moving poet
Pete Freeman- He was really good bluegrass singer-songwriter, and he said something nice about everyone who came before him which I thought was incredibly classy
Carl- Played sort of free-associative blues that was pretty enthralling.
Chris Isaac- He was also the host, and he had a really powerful voice and stage presence. There was something very electric about his performance and you couldn’t take your eyes off the stage while he was up there.
My own set was actually pretty well received, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt that I had some friendly faces in the crowd. I think it’s funny (and probably a good sign) that whenever I do material about my parents I usually get a decent reaction, but when people who know them are in the crowd I always get a really positive reaction so it must mean I’m on to something.
After the show, I hung out for a little bit just chatting with the other performers, Jeannie, and her sons, and it was just a really positive atmosphere and you could tell it had been a fun night all around. I did get a particular kick out of an older man in the audience walking up to me and saying “You know I thought you looked quite boyish on stage but now that I’m up close to you, I can see the pain in your eyes”. I really don’t know what he was going for, but in his defense after spending over 9 months on the road and sleeping quite little I’m sure I did have some pretty sizable bags under my eyes at that point.
After the show, Jeannie was nice enough to put up this weary traveler for a night, and we had a really nice night just chatting and busting out old photo albums. Jeannie and my mom go way back to the early 80s when they were both teaching American elementary school kids on a military base in Stuttgart, Germany. It’s really heartwarming to see how well they and their other teacher friends have kept the friendships they made over there going to this day even after they were all back state-side and starting families in different parts of the country. I particularly got a kick out of these photos from a vacation all the families took together in Cape May, NJ over 20 years ago now (yikes!). I’m far and away the youngest of all the kids, being a late-game surprise for my parents, so I don’t remember much from the trip itself other than it being a lot of fun and that I made a point of demonstrating my signature wrestling moves for everyone, including the Diaper Drop (where I sat on my brother) and the Lollipop Lick (where I licked my brother) which certainly implies that I’ve been an oddball and a ham since the very beginning. It was really funny to see just how young everyone looked, since for most of my life I’ve thought of my mom’s friends’ kids as grown-ups, and the photo on the right of my dad brandishing a crab claw while wearing a Keith Herring t-shirt was particularly surprising. It was a great end to the night, and it meant a lot getting to be among such a nice family again.
Favorite Random Sightings from the Day: a real store called Art Smart’s Dart Mart and Juggling Emporium; a Thai restaurant called Thai-namite; a sub-shop hilariously called Suburpia; and maybe the craziest bumper sticker I’ve seen in the entire country:
Regional Observations: This whole week I was really impressed by the architecture in Milwaukee. You never hear people talk about it like it’s a really pretty city, but I for what it’s worth I thought it looked great
Albums Listened To Today: I mostly worked on getting to the end of my audio book, but I did listen the song Shake It Off from Taylor Swift’s 1989 came on my iPod and I let it play because however you feel about Taylor, the song is a bop.
Joke of the Day:
The salesman at the furniture store told a customer, “This sofa will seat 5 people without any problems.”
The customer said, “Where the hell am I going to find 5 people without any problems?”
Songsof the Day:
one of my all time favorite covers, for just how much the group totally makes it their own