Reviewed by Richard West

“Perils he sought not, but ne’er shrank to meet:

  The scene was savage, but the scene was new;

  This made the ceaseless toil of travel sweet.” (“Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Byron)

For 50 years Paul Theroux has been a traveling man, and as dean of American travel writing, chronicled his wanderings in fifteen best-selling books. Like Childe Harold, for Theroux it has not been a question of happiness but the happiness of the quest. Occasionally, as in “The Kingdom by the Sea,” he has come across as ornery as a bunkhouse cook, but, for me, that has been part of the great charm found in his writings. Lovely prose, displaying the curiosity of great explorers, opinions!, chronicling the Sisyphrustrations of hard daily travels absent in “tourism” have been the admirable hallmarks of his travel narratives.

Ten years ago in “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town” Theroux explored the right-hand-side of Africa. In his new “The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari” he resumes his trip in Cape Town and “after seeing how that city had changed in ten years, travel north in a new direction up the left-hand-side until I found the end of the line, either on the road or in my mind.” Both it turns out in this bitter-sweet wonderfully-crafted book that takes him from South Africa north through Namibia to the dreadful abyss of Angola. Energetic Paul Theroux has aged very well (he is 71), but much of the Africa he found in this new book is a violent trashcan of MRE’s (morally repugnant elites) or living-on-the-edge poor folk.

It starts well in Cape Town– improved townships, a booming economy, the enduring beauty of Table Mountain which holds more plant species than all of the British Isles—and lovely towns to the northwest like Citrusdal and Springbok. Namibian cities like Windhoek and Swakopmund are clean and orderly, reflecting their Germanic heritage. But look on their outskirts: hardscrabble gatherings  like Swakopmund’s Mondesa bleak township with its poverty, high HIV/AIDS infection rates, unemployment, and general neglect.

 And it gets worse the closer Theroux gets to Angola, the only African colony that began as a penal settlement. “Portugal’s Siberia” Theroux calls it, now obscenely rich ($40 billion annually) from off-shore oil and diamonds, yet remains a brutalized landscape with stumps of deforestation, burned-out tanks from a decades-long civil war, poisoned streams, no wild animals (all killed in the fighting or eaten by the hungry populace).  He gamely endures the squalor, an ATM fraud of $48,000, the rudeness and contempt of officials, the deaths of three friends (one beaten to death), inedible food, what sociologists call “challenging urban environments” and we call bad neighborhoods, as he sinks into a Lear-like lamentation at the ruination of his beloved Africa. By the end you picture our seasoned traveler with his head in his hands like Van Gogh’s portrait of Dr. Gachet.

“Zona Verde” is a euphemism for the bush, the non-urban outback Theroux loves the most. Yet this train-loving traveler refuses the trip: “Not this time. I had no desire to board the train. And, thinking it, I was joyous—a great relief to conclude that this was the end of my trip. No more…I felt beckoned home.” OWAWA, oh well, Africa wins again.

   Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters

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Reviewed by Richard West

Perhaps you’ve noticed the recent spate of travel articles on Colombia, hitherto a pariah country of ab ovo civil war and bad Karmageddon-esque drug creation, using, exporting, and killing. Most of us have avoided it or thought of Colombia as an imaginary land like Swift’s Lilliput. Now it seems the government has, perhaps temporarily, quelled the internal revolution and the drug violence has ebbed, though there seems to still be the occasional el paseo de los millonairios, the millionaires’ stroll when Senor Gorganfeller is driven across town with a pistol stuck in his ribs as his ATM accounts are emptied.  Given the new interest in the country, two travel narratives  appeared late last year in London, both purchasable via www.amazon.co.uk.

The best by far is Tom Feiling’s Short Walks From Bogota: Journeys in the New Colombia, whose first book, appropriately, was The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World.  Feiling’s Colombia remains a “sunny place for shady people” as General Sir George Erskine described Kenya in the 1920’s. Consider: it still leads the world in cocaine production, planted mines, most internal refugees (four million, one in ten), home of FARC, the world’s largest guerilla army, and has the world’s worst human rights’ record thanks to deaths and disappearances of Colombians by government-supported para-military forces—173,000 murders the past 25 years.   Oh yes, Colombian chefs have an aversion to using herbs and spices.

Anything positive besides the sun still moving 15 degrees an hour? Well, Columbia is the world’s most biodiverse nation, and it makes sensational juice-drinks, especially mango and passion fruit. No country has more species of birds or frogs. Its lakes and rivers contain more freshwater than those of the U.S. and Canada combined. Colombian women are legendarily beautiful, perennial winners of beauty contests. Feiling’s report also is a winner, a perfect blend of now, history, opinions, and research.

Not so perfect is Michael Jacobs’ The Robber of Memories: A River Journey Through Colombia. The waterway being the country’s main riverine highway, the Magdalena, a river Jacobs describes bittersweetly as “an open drain, albeit still a very enticing drain” thanks to years of sewage, waste, and as the last resting place for one-third of the civil war’s victims. His trip along the sluggish river, the color of cream-tea , is a bore with its unchanging jungly banks dotted with poor villages.

Once on land for the last half of the journey the book greatly improves.  With Dr. Francisco Lopera, one of the world’s Alzheimer’s experts, Jacobs visits the sad village of Angostura, home of the paisa mutation, a form of the terrible disease found in the central cordillera of the Andes. Later on his way by horseback to the river’s source, his party is stopped, questioned, and held for a time by an armed outback group of FARC . Luckily, no harm’s done but the interruption was very unpleasant.

Confession session: given all the other upper shelf places on earth and because the place still seems like a Frankenstymied golem, I’ll remain an informed Colombian armchair traveler thanks to these two books.

Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters.

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Kimono with Birds in Flight, Japan, Shōwa period (1926–89), 1942
Dye-and pigment-patterned plain-weave silk crepe (chirimen)
Overall: 76 7/8 x 49 3/8 in. (195.3 x 125.4 cm)
Gift of Harumi Takanashi and Akemi Ota, in memory of their mother, Yoshiko
Hiroumi Shima, 2007 (2007.44.1)

By Bobbie Leigh

Prepare to be dazzled. Birds in the Art of Japan, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will leave you spellbound. “Inspiration for the exhibition comes from traditional Japanese court poetry, haiku, and a Wallace Stevens  1923 poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” says John Carpenter,  Curator of Japanese Art  at the Met’s Department of Asian Art.  Intermingled among the scrolls, screens, ink paintings, and  bird books are contemporary  textiles, ceramics, lacquerware, and bamboo art.

KoheiNawa, Japanese, born 1975
PixCell-Deer#24
Japan, Heisei period (1989–present), 2011
Mixed media; taxidermied deerwith artificial crystal glass
H. 80 11/16 in. (205 cm); W. 59 1/16 in. (150 cm); D. 78 3/4 in. (200 cm)
Purchase, Acquisitions Fund and Peggy and Richard M. Danziger Gift, 2011

The mega-watt appeal of this new exhibition  begins with  Kohei Nawa’s glass PixCell-Deer, a contemporary sculpture  recently acquired by the Museum at  the entry point for the galleries.  Although a semi-permanent addition to the Arts of Japan galleries and not specifically related to avian themes,  it encapsulates all that follows—sublime sophistication  emotional and intellectual  complexities,  and  above all, a poetic sensibility.

The exhibition is organized roughly by  galleries devoted to specific types of birds, from pheasants to peacocks,   ravens to roosters,  mynahs to magpies —almost all types of birds  but only one with gossamer wings. Each gallery also features classic  poetic inscriptions that the  bird images might evoke. Intermingled among the scrolls, paintings, and watercolors  are contemporary  works that  match the  sensibilities of the medieval  ones.

Mochizuki Gyokkei ( Japanese, 1874–1939)
White Peafowl, Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912), 1908
Pair of six-panel folding screens; ink, color, gold, and gold-leaf dust on silk
Image: 59 1/4 x 141 in. (150.5 x 358.1 cm)
John C. Weber Collection

Cranes, waterbirds, birds of prey,  among others are depicted with meticulous realism  whether in flight,  in battle, soaring in the heavens,  enjoying domestic bliss,  or simply showing  off   their  spectacular plumage. The best example of this preening is a 1908  painting of a  rare white peafowl on a  gold  leaf and gold-dusted  silk screen.  Rather than feathers, its diaphanous,  delicate  grand tail  looks like extraordinary fluffy material.  Another striking feature of this over-the-top  image is that the bird’s eye looks straight at you.

Mori Sosen (Japanese, 1747–1821)
Silkies (Ukokkei)
Japan, Edo period (1615–1868), before 1808
Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk Image: 33 3/4 x 51 in. (85.7 x 129.5 cm)
Fishbein-Bender Collection

In the next case, is a rare  painting of Silkies by 18^th center painter Mori Sosen.According to Carpenter, when Marco Polo first saw this rare bird  on one of his 13^th century journeys, he is reported to have said that  this bird  was a  kind of fowl that had not feathers, but hair only like a cat’s fur.  As in so many of these paintings,  a lot is happening.

Mynah Birds (detail)
Japan, Momoyama (1573–1615)–Edo (1615–1868) period, early 17th century
Pair of six-panel folding screens; ink, color, and gold on paper
Image (each): 61 x 142 1/8 in. (155 x 361 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Foundation and Anonymous Gifts, 2013

Birds’ eyes also dominate in a pair of 17^th-century screens depicting a flock of more than 120 mynah birds (same as blackbirds)  in flight or  hopping along a shoreline. Their expressive eyes, no two are alike,  also suggest human interaction.  Mynah birds have a political significance in Japanese mythology: to defy corrupt political power.  The motive behind this composition may have been  a call to rebel, to remember the time when the ancient capital Kyoto where the emperor lived in his palace was under threat from the Tokugawa warlords.

Gorgeous textiles, both Buddhist and secular,  with elegant bird motifs  and a gallery devoted to ukiyo- prints  are highlights of the art forms used to keep the viewer  focused on the various ways,  classic and contemporary,  Japanese artists explored  and depicted bird motifs.  There are always surprises—tiny seeds woven into a wedding robe with embroidered birds or   amid a classic flock of cranes on a screen painting,  a  soaring  conceptual bamboo sculpture called  Flight by Honma Hideaki (b. 1959).

In the last gallery Fukase Masahisa’s 1978 photograph, The Solitude of Ravens, is a powerful work with nearly the same impact  as Edward Munch’s The Scream.   It depicts a black as night raven silhouetted  against a slightly less dark sky.  Unlike earlier images of crows in previous galleries,  here the raven is imbued with mystery, solitude, and a prevailing sadness.  It’s a bit of a downer to end this riveting show, but it does yet again give the viewer an unprecedented sense of birds in the arts of  Japan.

Birds in the Art of Japan  is on view through July 28;  www.metmuseum.org.  Another rare exhibition, “Audobon’s Aviary: The Complete Flock,”  will showcase Audubon’s  Watercolors in a three-part series at the New York Historical Society.  (Part I: March 8-May 19)

 Bobbie Leigh has written for many national publications including The Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, and Departures. Currently she is a New York correspondent for Art & Antiques

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Louvre-Lens

By Marc Kristal

The selection of December 4, 2012 for the inauguration of the new $150-million-Euro, 28,000-square-metre annex of the Louvre, set on a fifty-acre former mine yard in the city of Lens (in France’s northern Pas-de-Calais département), wasn’t accidental: it is the feast day of the Great Martyr Barbara, patron saint of miners – and, given the hopes that have been hung on the museum, designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese office SANAA (in association with the American firm Imrey Culbert), as a catalyst for the resurrection of post-industrial Lens, the saint’s intervention would be, as it were, a blessing. It’s perhaps useful as well that Barbara also watches over artillery gunners, military engineers, and other professions involving high explosives, as the revival of the region’s fortunes has long been a somewhat volatile challenge – in the words of the UK-born Diana Hounslow, director of Pas-de-Calais Tourisme, “the one hot potato everyone chucked to each other – we just didn’t know, within tourism, what to do with the old mining area.”

That the Louvre has been called upon to carry a lot of freight, in a variety of ways, is indisputable. The good news is that it seems poised to do so successfully – on its own, as a public institution and a work of architecture, and in the context of a larger vision.

Louvre-Lens, France

Lens’ situation is evident in what was, prior to the Louvre, the city’s principal tourist attraction: a pair of pyramid-shaped slag heaps, the largest in Europe (and a UNESCO World Heritage site). A major industrial city following the mid-nineteenth century, when coal was discovered, it’s said that Lens suffered both from having the mines within its midst and then – and perhaps worse – from not having them (not to mention the depredations of two world wars). Hounslow describes what was, prior to the last pit’s closure in 1987, a classic company town: by fiat of Houillères du Bassin Nord-Pas-de Calais, babies were automatically baptized at birth – “in case they died before leaving the hospital,” she explains – after which townspeople received free schooling, medical care, housing, and of course employment, until the mining company (unable to compete with more economical, open-pit mines) began gradually shutting down operations in the 1970s.

“Only a very small percentage’ of colliers found new employment,” Hounslow says, in part because of denial bred by decades of dependency. “A lot of people actually believed the mines would come back,” she recalls. “And so they sat and waited it out and got social security benefits.”

Compounding the problem was not only a lack of alternative employment but an absence of job training. “When the Channel tunnel was being dug, 80 percent of the jobs were promised to people from this region,”  Hounslow says. “But they just couldn’t find qualified workers.”

Nor was there much inclination to strike out for greener pastures. ‘

“In France, people are very family-minded, and stick to their original region,” she notes. “So they wouldn’t move, and it just became a stalemate, really – people receiving benefits generation after generation, out of work, and with nothing to offer them.”

Gallery in Louvre-Lens

As an antidote, both the Pas-de-Calais governing council and that of Nord, the neighboring département,  ”have been working since the seventies to encourage people into education, sport and culture,” Hounslow says – so when the prospect of a new Louvre was floated about six years ago, the chairman of the regional council sought out Henri Loyrette, the museum’s director, and proposed Lens as the location. Loyrette embraced the idea, and actively lobbied for Lens over other cities throughout France – seeing it, not only as a chance to help invigorate a struggling area, but for the museum, as Loyrette put it at a pre-opening press conference, “to rethink its mission;” to both extend the nation’s great wealth of art and culture beyond Paris, and experiment with new ways of presenting the Louvre’s incomparable collection.

To create what Louvre-Lens director Xavier Dectot calls “a museum with a human face” – one dedicated to making the public in general, and the people of Lens in particular, feel welcome and at home – the new institution would incorporate, in Dectot’s words, “new forms of mediation,” including multi- and new-media technologies, and also encourage a greater appreciation of the Louvre’s inner life with transparent, on-view storage rooms and restoration studios. As well, while the ‘mother ship’ in Paris displays its vast collection in discrete galleries organized by department, school and technique, the new venue presented an opportunity to bring typically separated artworks together in provocative, mutually amplifying presentations. (There was also, for the museum, a financial incentive: in exchange for creating a Guggenheim Bilbao-style tourist magnet, 80 percent of the project would be funded by local and regional authorities.) As Daniel Percheron, president of the Regional Nord-Pas-de-Calais Council, put it at the press conference, ‘The Louvre is a chance for Lens, and Lens is a chance for the Louvre.’

Gallery in Louvre-Lens

Lens made sense for another reason: Nord-Pas-de-Calais itself. The area, just south of Belgium and, on its west coast, within sight of the White Cliffs of Dover, has much to offer historically, culturally, and touristically. It is a tapestry of significant sites from the 20^th century’s great conflicts, among them the fascinating (and moving) Carrière Wellington, a network of tunnels from which 24,000 Tommies staged a surprise attack on the Kaiser’s army in 1917, and, at Étaples, the largest of British World War I cemeteries, the final resting place of 11,000 soldiers. The region boasts a surprising 48 national museums, the greatest concentration to be found anywhere in France outside Paris; and some exhibitions, such as an exceptional installation of 18^th- and 19^th-century carriages, sleighs and other royal vehicles drawn from the collection at Versailles, presently on view at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Arras, are well worth the brief train trip from the capital. Many of the towns and cities offer a variety of architectural attractions, some dating from the medieval period – the Flemish-influenced buildings in Arras, eclectic Grand-Place of Béthune, and fortifications of Boulogne-sur-Mer (where Victor Hugo discovered the real-life models for the protagonists of Les Miserables) are of particular interest; the abundance of soberly handsome belfries constructed over the centuries – 23 in total, many UNESCO-listed – are a hallmark of the region.

Nord-Pas-de-Calais remains physically beautiful as well, with an unspoiled nature preserve and 120 kilometres of sandy beach – the Côte d’Opale – above the piquant, once-very-English resort of Le Touquet, and the area beyond it, from the seaside village of Wimereux nearly to Calais, declared one of only ten Grand-Sites de France. Most surprisingly, the entire region is easily accessible: Calais is 55 minutes by train from the heart of London (and another 45 minutes or so to Lens), and only an hour and ten minutes of exceeding comfortable high-speed rail travel separate the Paris Louvre from its new satellite. Given what’s on offer, says Hounslow, ‘Nord-Pas-de-Calais is the ideal place to have a big project.’

Recognizing that all of the Louvre-Lens’ positives could be neutralized if its core audience – the community – didn’t accept it, the regional council and tourism office worked with museum officials to (as the L-L website puts it) “‘integrate the museum into the local fabric and encourage the inhabitants to make it their own.” “‘It was supposed to be a gift to the local people,” Hounslow explains. “But to begin with, all they could see was that Lens was going to be inadequate – “we don’t particularly want it or know what to do with it – what we need are jobs.”’ Rather than being perceived as a boon, says Hounslow, “the museum was like a big UFO landing in the middle of the city.”

A number of gambits were undertaken to prep the citizenry for the arrival of Starship Louvre-Lens. The museum organized a series of coffees to which people were invited to ask questions and air concerns; these, Hounslow believes, were only partly successful, as rather than bringing in those who live in the old mining houses around the site, “what they mainly got were the culture vultures from the area.”

Visitors at Louvre-Lens, France

The Lens team – led by the chairman of the Pas-de-Calais council, Dominique Dupilet, who created a dedicated ‘Mission Louvre-Lens’ office – took a different tack. First, they engaged the Aix-en-Provence-based consulting firm Nicaya to speak to a range of different constituencies and assess what Hounslow calls “the values of the region.” What Nicaya discovered was “a group of people who’ve been the underdogs, and are being offered a chance to get out of that, and it’s really hard for them,” Hounslow relates. Accordingly, the consultants encouraged the Louvre and Lens officials “‘not to criticize people for not being ready, to work with them to find solutions.” At the same time, the years of mining, with their attendant hardships, had given Lens a strong sense of fraternity, the ability to band together in challenging times. “We needed to create a series of events linked to the opening of the Louvre that would get people involved,” Hounslow recalls. “‘So we looked to the local associations, and what they wanted to do, and started supporting them and their projects.”

Once they’d wrapped their minds around the needs of the community, the council next focused on finding ways to make Lens attractive to outsiders. They engaged the Dutch-born, Paris-based trend forecaster Lidewij (Li) Edelkoort, whose previous clients included Coca-Cola, Gucci and Donna Karan, to identify aspects of Lens with global potential. The outcome startled and energized even the stodgiest of the city’s bureaucrats.

“She put together this cahier de tendence – it’s a style book – with the colors, textures and other things that came into her mind after she’d seen the Nicaya study, met a whole load of people, and had a look around,” Hounslow recalls. “And she said, ‘The family is highly important here – the message is, if you come to Lens, you’re going to be part of the family.’” She said, “’Whether you like it or not, your color here is black, the color of coal: coal has stained the buildings black, the slag-heap pyramids are the new Louvre pyramids – and they’re black.’” To local people, the rows of brick miners’ houses are an eyesore, a sign of poverty, but Li said, “Whatever you do, don’t lose that brick.”’ Edelkoort also observed the many vegetable gardens people kept and counseled a garden-to-table sensibility – “‘fresh vegetables in restaurants, straight from the garden, not fancy food.” And the trend-spotter recommended that Lens look to the Romantics for aesthetic inspiration. “It’s a period when people were saying, ‘oh, isn’t the past wonderful,’ but Li wanted us to look forward and bring that style into fashion and interior decoration,” Hounslow recalls. “She basically told us, ‘This could be the trendiest spot in the world in ten years.”’ Following Edelkoort’s lead, Hounslow and her associates put together their own style book, which they present to people working on hospitality projects as inspiration, and created financial incentives for entrepreneurs who work with stylists and interior designers from the region.

The mining days of Lens, France

As for the museum itself, the requirements of both the Louvre and Lens were, not surprisingly, complicated, and in 2005 the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, the project’s official overseer, announced an international competition, which generated in excess of 120 schemes. SANAA principals Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa were, in a sense, an obvious choice: their Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art (which opened in 2006), an entirely transparent structure of lapidary elegance, set in a public park, and incorporating a working glass-blowing studio and exhibition galleries that were visible from without and drew in visitors like a beacon, was in many ways a perfect trial run (and calling card) for what the Louvre and its host city had in mind. And the outcome, in Sejima and Nishizawa’s formulation, “fosters an open relationship between museum, nature, city, and landscape.”

The design, composed of four rectangular structures extending in two directions from a large square central entry hall – characterized by SANAA as collectively resembling a curving line of river craft that have gently drifted together – is a quietly stunning essay in transparency and reflectivity. “It’s an important principle for us to create spaces that are open to the society, the town, and the people,’” Nishizawa observed at the pre-opening press conference, and the 3800-square-metre entry hall – enclosed almost entirely by soaring glass walls and with its programmatic areas set within glass cylinders (a gambit borrowed from Toledo) – is a sublime expression of this objective: as Dectot described it, ‘an “open” museum in every sense of the term.’

Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Virgin and the Child with Saint Anne”

At the same time, said Sejima, “We felt that this was a region with a very special light, and an exceptionally beautiful natural landscape, and the challenge was to build something that brought together this light, that beauty, and the [surrounding brick] miners’ houses, which represented the history of the region.”

Accordingly, SANAA clad three of the four rectangular volumes (containing the two major exhibition halls and an auditorium) in a softly reflective aluminum that transforms Louvre-Lens’ exterior into a vast and Turner-esque, ceaselessly mutable mural.

If the building at once invites the community in and mirrors it, the architecture carries the notion of inclusiveness a step further in the Galerie du Temps – the Time Gallery – which displays a diverse selection of the Louvre’s holdings going back roughly to 3500 B.C. Here, too, the walls are aluminum-clad.

“We have the reflections of works of art and the people looking at them,” observes Nishizawa, “and hope that this will be a brand-new, innovative concept of public space.”

It’s an impressive shell, and its holdings are even more so. In addition to the Galerie du Temps, in which the paintings, sculpture and objects will be rotated with others from the Louvre’s holdings every three to five years (with some 20 percent changed annually on the magic date December 4 because, observes Dectot, “if what we’re offering isn’t rich enough, it will become a problem very quickly”), Louvre-Lens incorporates an 1800-square-metre temporary exhibitions gallery (which debuted with a prismatic overview of the Renaissance). Beyond this space, the auditorium will serve as a multipurpose theatre that can create connections between the performing arts and whatever is on view in the exhibition halls; and appended to the Galerie du Temps is a smaller glass pavilion that will feature special exhibitions, including collaborations with the network of museums spanning the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region.

The 19^th-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot observed that “theory is good, but it doesn’t prevent things from existing.”  While the idea that, by making architecture “transparent” and “reflective,” you will somehow foster an air of friendly inclusiveness is an appealing one, it is probably of limited use in the face of reality: If SANAA’s building is less (for lack of a better word) elitist than, for example, the Paris Louvre, it nonetheless remains a dramatic, even bravura presence, a hugely sophisticated work of world-class architecture, created by practitioners at the height of their powers; if you are inclined toward feelings of cultural inferiority, it will definitely give you pause. Equally, the Louvre-Lens idea of creating a  ”dialogue” across periods in the Galerie du Temps is something of a cliché; and the notion that reflective walls, which bring visitors and artworks together in the same visual plane, will serve as agents of egalitarianism seems like even more of a theoretical fancy.

Yet SANAA and the Louvre-Lens mandarins have unquestionably achieved a unity between theory and existence. The aluminum exterior and interior surfaces take ownership of their surroundings rather than reflect them; but they also demonstrate how architecture and art can transform your perceptions of yourself and the world, by encouraging a new ways of looking at things, whether quotidian or rarefied. And if exhibiting artworks with superficial gestural, graphic or thematic similarities together amounts to something less than a dialogue, it nonetheless reminds the beholder that certain subjects are timeless, and artists return to them again and again, reinterpreting them in response to talent, temperament, human events, the character of an age, and countless other influences, themselves timeless as well. By creating an exceptionally beautiful, welcoming and, indeed, ennobling environment in which to absorb the special pleasures the arts have to bestow, the museum – and all those who worked to bring it to Lens – have done the region, and everyone who comes to visit, a service.

Meanwhile, in the trenches of Lens, the work goes on. Catherine Mosbach’s ambitious vision for the in-progress park surrounding the museum seeks “to make a link between the town and local landscape and the museum and what’s inside it,” says the designer.

“The idea was to keep things very pure and open, to encourage people to come in,” explains Hounslow. “Initially the Louvre wanted the park to be closed in the evening. And the mayor said, ‘I can’t accept that, I need it completely open, so that people, even if they’re walking their dogs, can come and look in.”’

“It’s a subtle, and hopefully not too subtle, approach,” Hounslow suggests. So far, it would seem, so good: as of the new year, the museum had received in excess of 120,000 visitors.

“Lens was a black hole,” says Percheron. “But through the Louvre, we’ll see the soul of an entire region.”

Visit Louvre-Lens for more information and France Guide for information on travel to France.

 Marc Kristal is an architecture, design and travel writer. Kristal, a contributing editor of Dwell and a former editor ofAIA/J, and has written for The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, Wallpaper, Surface, and numerous other publications. In 2003, he curated the exhibition ‘Absence Into Presence: The Art, Architecture and Design of Remembrance’ at Parsons School of Design, and in 2009 he was part of the project team that created the award-winning Greenwich South planning study for the Alliance for Downtown New York. His books include Re:Crafted: Interpretations of Craft in Contemporary Architecture and Interiors (2010) and Immaterial World: Transparency in Architecture (2011), both from The Monacelli Press. Also a screenwriter, Kristal wrote the film Torn Apart.  He lives in New York.

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Richard West

Reviewed by Richard West

Employing retrospective clairvoyance, i.e. Monday-morning quarterbacking, we find that, with the exception of our number one walkaway hit,  this year’s nonfiction travel narratives have not been memorable like a great love affair but satisfactory like a good tailor. The A-list Americans—Paul Theroux, William Least Heat-Moon, Tony Horwitz—didn’t publish, thus, currently, two of our best are available only in Britain, most easily bought via www.amazon.co.uk.  Still, our five selected this year recognize and expand on Imam al-Shafi’s five advantages of travel:

“Arise and go a-roving if you’re in the mood

To earn the money, and the manners, to live well;

To feed your brain, to free your mind from cares that brood;

Not least to meet with other men whose mind excel.”

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, by Robert Macfarlane (Viking, $27.95). Far and away the best of the year is Macfarlane’s lyrically beautiful prose on the joys of putting one foot in front of the other, mostly in his native England, but also in the eastern Himalayas, the occupied Palestinian territories, and Spain’s Camino de Santiago. I can’t improve on a rapturous mention in a recent Sunday “New York Times Book Review”:  “He wears his polymath intelligence lightly as his mind roams across geology, archaeology, fauna, flora, architecture, art, literature…retrieving small surprises everywhere he walks.”

A Journey To Nowhere: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Courland, by Jean-Paul Kauffmann (MacLehose Press, London, L18.99). Courland? Nowhere indeed.  Well, a Latvian duchy in the 18th century, now most of that Baltic nation that trembles on the brink of the archaic like silent films the year sound appeared.  Arguably France’s finest travel writer, Kauffmann, at the wheel of a Skoda, motors through this Baltictude discovering the planet’s best rye bread, the world’s northern most vineyard near Sabile on the 57th parallel, and a former KGB prison where tourists can undergo for about eight Euros a night the “K.G.B. extreme experience.”

Looking For Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, by Noo Saro-Wiwa (Soft Skull Press, $15.95). My fervent thanks to Ms. Saro-Wiwa for writing this perfect armchair travel book. I’d rather eat worms than visit this dangerous, crumbling country run by corrupt nincompuppets, where 90% of its people survive on less than $2 daily,  that in a quarter of a century will have 300 million people in an area the size of Arizona and New Mexico. In the Muslim north, markets sell Saudi Arabian hand amputation machines. Transwonderland? Nigeria’s pitiful Disney World, a chair-o-plane, dragon rollercoaster, dodge-em cars, and Ferris wheel, all rusting in tall grass near Ibadan.

In Another World: Among Europe’s Dying Villages, by Tom Pow (Polygon Press, Edinburgh, L12). Who knew? In the next 30 years, Europe will lose almost a third of its population.  One hundred of Spain’s 5,000 villages face imminent extinction; since 2005, 11,000 Russian villages have disappeared; one-third of Italy’s farm land is fallow. Pow, a Scottish writer and poet, travels to Italy, Spain, France, Greece, and Russia discovering landscapes described in Gogol’s “Dead Souls” as “desolate and splendid.” The defining feature, as he writes, is absence which is not emptiness but loss.

Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, by Benjamin Taylor (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $27.95). No year’s best is complete without a book set in Italy and Taylor’s is fine indeed. The place has been chronicled since Aeneas’s  arrival, yet Taylor rediscovers with charm and scholarly learning the “visitable past” in Henry James’s phrase. And he’s kind enough to mention several cafes and restaurants no one would want to miss on the next visit: Naples’s La Locanda del Grifo, the Inn of the Griffin; Capri’s Le Grotelle; and, of course, Naples’s famous Caffé Gambrinus (est. 1860), “sacred ground like the Flore in Paris, the Central in Vienna, the Pedrocchi in Padua, the Quatre Gats in Barcelona.” Well said, sir.

Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters.

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“Hidden Gardens of Paris” by Susan Cahill

By Richard West

My 2012 Too-Hip-To-Grip Marketing Award goes to those amusing hommes and femmes at the Park Hyatt Paris-Vendome hotel. Here’s why. You’re not there very long, eyeing the glamorous heteroflexibles and other schmooseoisie who are eyeing each other or the eye-catching modern art (isn’t that a Roseline Granet?), when you notice a delightful , omnipresent scent. Not floral, musky, with a hint of sandalwood. Or civet.  “Is it the perfume from a dress/that makes me so digress?” asked T.S. Eliot in “Prufrock.” No, Tom, no dress, it’s an airborne mystery.

But after an absent-minded query to a staffer, a mystery that automagically appeared in my room in a spray bottle from Blaise Mautin Parfumeur (“Exclusively for Park Hyatt Paris-Vendome”), so now in my simple American cottage I can mist the kitchen, and, wa la!, I’m back in one of the great city’s nicest hotels, musing about another black current mojito while contemplating one of six Ed Paschke’s really unreal paintings in the dark bar.  Genius!

But my mission isn’t sniffing out hotels. After Hamlet-like agonizing, I’m here to explore three gardens selected from Susan Cahill’s helpful guide, “Hidden Gardens of Paris.”

Jardin de la Vallee Suisse, Paris.

The first is the hidden La Vallee Suisse at the corner of avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt and Cours la Reine.  First I advise a cocktail round the corner at the impossibly lovely outdoor Minipalais Café adjoined to the Grand Palais, then to the narrow stairs leading down to the Swiss Valley that “New York Times” writer Elaine Sciolino describes as a “tiny stage set.” A small waterfall, a weeping beech tree, lilacs and maples, a wooden footbridge—the perfect edenic , quiet spot to contemplate whether the poet Baudelaire really wore a green wig.  I find that musing often leads to hunger so perhaps to the nearby Grand Palais Restaurant at the American presidential corner of Franklin D. Roosevelt and avenue General Eisenhower.

Square Rene-Viviani

Next to the incomparable Shakespeare & Co. bookshop on rueBucherie facing Notre Dame across the Seine, then a squat-tez-vous stop next door at the Square Rene-Viviani (25, quai de Montebello). It’s one of the great vista-resting spots in the world, benches, deep shade, supposedly Paris’ oldest tree (acacia, 1601), roses, watercolor painters, and a tall fountain in the center that relates the story of the nearby Saint-Julien le Pauvre church on the park’s southwest corner, the city’s oldest (1170-1240). Then a relaxing glass of wine on the opposite side of Shakespeare & Co. at La Bucherie Café-Restaurant while pondering which quai Gerard de Narval walked his pet lobster on a leash.

Square Georges-Cain, Paris

Last stop, into the Marais to Square Georges-Cain (8, rue Payenne), also an archeological depository of stone fragments from older gardens, Ms. Cahill reports, scattered around a circular garden with a sculpture called Dawn. Why Georges Cain? He was the first curator of the Carnavalet museum bordering the square. In late spring you’re engulfed in blooming rose bushes. Very private and quiet and close to several Marais museums, the ideal place to wonder if Gustav Mahler’s bust in the Rodin Museum  really is labeled “Mozart.” Ah, but that’s for another trip.

“Hidden Gardens of Paris”, Susan Cahill, St. Martin’s Griffin press, $19.99.

  Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters.

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Cézanne’s “Apples, bottle and chairback”

By Bobbie Leigh

What makes a drawing a “master drawing?”  How do you define the nature of mastery?  One answer is to visit Mantegna to Matisse: Master Drawings from the Courtauld Gallery, a collection of 58 drawing from  The Courtauld Gallery,London.  Each one, whether a study for a painting, a quickly rendered sketch, or a  form of note-taking to record some great visual experience,  displays  mastery  of the subject  as well as a range of materials  –pencils, chalks,  pen-and-ink,  crayon,  and a rare watercolor such as  Paul Cezanne’s  Apples, Bottle and Chairback.

Mantegna’s study for “Christ at the Column”

No one answer will adequately explain what constitutes a master drawing, but as Vasari wrote  it is a “certain conception and judgment,” a visible expression of inner thoughts  translated  into something concrete with pen and chalk on paper. If you only see one  master  work in this show such as  Andrea Mantegna’s study for Christ at the Column, a  mid-1460s pen and brown ink  drawing,   a  visit  to the Frick  would  still be worthwhile.   Here we have a heroic, idealized  depiction of Christ, whose strong, muscular body contrasts with his downturned head and  facial agony.  Mantegna (1431-1506) was an ardent student of Greek and Roman sculpture and  departing from the usual  biblical  account,  he endows the  Savior   with a body worthy of a Greek God, while his head  is bent  and  his facial expression, tormented  and anguished.

Ingres’ “Study for La Grande Odalisque”

Among the many  standouts  among such great masters as  da Vinci, Durer, Michelangelo, Peter Paul Rubens,  Rembrandt, Watteau, van Gogh, Picasso and many others, , a  Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) study for his painting  La Grande Odalisque is especially riveting. Right out of the Thousand and One Nights,  this ethereal  nude  odalisque ( the Turkish word for a harem slave) is hardly classical. Instead,  her body   is lithe, elongated, and  barely there.  She has no physical reality, just an immense sensual presence.  Critics of the time attacked  her for having “neither bones, nor muscles, nor life.”  Yet there is more life in those  dancer’s legs and immensely  long arms than in more traditional  Romantic era French nudes.

Totally fresh, modern, and spontaneous, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s   (1864-1901) In Bed  depicts a woman, probably a prostitute, peering at the painter  with sleepy eyes. She  seems  reluctant to get out of bed.  Her feet are enormous with soles peering out from under the crumpled sheets. According to the catalog the “thrust of his lines, confident and quickly done, convey a sense of vigor and excitement”  in spite of the sleepy scene.   Toulouse- Lautrec used two different mediums—a soft black chalk and a harder pencil line which emphasizes the woman’s face and hair.   The hint that she has been exploited is simply not part of the drawing as in some of the artist’s other work.

Bruegel the Elder’s “Kermesse at Hoboken”

The techniques  on view here  vary from preliminary sketches to designs for finished art works, but what unites the various Italian, Dutch, Flemish, German, Spanish works is an  extraordinarily high level of draftsmanship.  Who can match  Pieter Bruegel the  Elder’s  (c 1525-1569) detailed drawings of peasant life.   On view at the Frick is Kermis  [church festival] at Hoboken, an exuberant drawing, a design for an engraving, showing revelers at a festival in the Flemish village of Hoboken.

Ruben’s (1577-1640)  drawing, Helena Fourment, his second wife, is said to be one of the greatest of the masterworks at The Courtauld. She is 16 and about to be wed to the 53-year-old artist. The artist used black, red, and white chalk (retouched with pen and brown ink in some details). She is about to  lift off  a veil that is suspended from her headdress  which looks like a bar bell to contemporary eyes.  She looks directly at the viewer with a startling mix of bravado and  vulnerability.

This is the first time this prized collection has been made available  on  loan. Many of the drawings are being shown for the first time in New York.  Don’t miss it. On view  through  January 23, 2012.  The Frick Collection, 1 East 70^th Street; 212-288-0700, www.frick.org.

  Bobbie Leigh has written for many national publications including The Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, and Departures. Currently she is a New York correspondent for Art & Antiques.

The post The Artful Traveler: The Frick’s Stunning Drawings from London’s Courtauld Gallery appeared first on Everett Potter's Travel Report.

Reviewed by Bobbie Leigh

Robert Hughes, the esteemed art critic and historian, who died two  months ago, claimed that Aboriginal art was “the last great art movement of the twentieth century.”  But where can you see it?   According to  Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,  you can walk in any direction among the Met’s galleries  and see works of art from almost any culture. But there is one glaring exception. Where is Aboriginal art from Australia, one of the most exhilarating, lively, and fascinating artmaking traditions?

Currently, you have to travel to  Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire, to see  a startling mix  of  contemporary Indigenous Australian art.  Go to see the leaf changing colors in  New England and plan a side trip to Dartmouth as the  exhibition, “Crossing Cultures: The Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art,” is a knockout.

The Will Owen and Harvey Wagner collection of paintings and photography at the Hood demonstrate that the  work  of Indigenous Australian artists  continues to play a significant role in today’s art world. Perhaps it is still  somewhat under the radar in this country, but certainly not in Australia where it is finally getting the recognition the artists deserve.

About 100 works representing  the last 50 years  of work by Aboriginal artists are in the exhibition at the Hood, ranging from  sculpture, photography and acrylic works  on canvas to earthen ochre paintings on bark.  Almost all are based or inspired by a one of the oldest cultures in the world:  Aboriginal people have lived for roughly 50,000  years on the continent now known as Australia.

Today both rural and urban-based artists are  unpacking their  ancient stories of the the Dreaming when their ancestors sang their world into existence.  The term encompasses the eternal nature of the Aboriginal belief system. Think of the Dreaming stories as  the Aboriginal equivalent of  Genesis. One major difference is that in the biblical story God created the world whereas in the Aboriginal Dreaming stories, the Ancestors created themselves. Some of the best insights in the Dreaming  can be found in Bruce Chatwin’s “Songlines,”  where he explains the importance of  singing in creating the world.

The acrylic paintings in this show can be traced  back to the early 1970s when an art teacher, Geoffrey Bardon,  gave some paints, brushes and other materials to a group of Aboriginal men living in a remote government settlement whose purpose ostensibly was assimilation.  Eventually, the  men formed an art cooperative,  now one of many hugely successful  enterprises. Today,  not just men but also Aboriginal  women are telling their own stories in acrylics on canvas.

According to an essay by  Francoise Dussart in the show’s catalog, the  lines, circles, and semicircles  in these works seem quite  abstract, but they have many layers of meanings.  By way of example, a circle might represent a waterhole, a campfire, a tree, or a ceremonial site.  Dots radiating from the circles could be a way to emphasize that all life is supported by water.   A series  of squiggly lines might relate to tracks  in the desert or a metaphysical landscape map.

The symbolism in these works is not easy to interpret. To the trained eye, they  represent the Dreaming when Ancestral Beings created life and sacred places. The  contemporary  works  in this  show  defy classification as tribal, ethnic or primitive art. Instead,  they are  exuberant, highly visual, and compelling examples of modern art.

Will Owen and Harvey Wagner, professors at the University of North Carolina,  first discovered  Aboriginal  Australian Art at New York’s Asia Society’s landmark 1988  “Dreamings” exhibition. They were captivated by the largely non-representational images and traveled periodically to Australia.  Their collection includes roughly 600 works  that are promised to the Hood  Museum. They have already gifted more than 500 works and incredibly there is more to come.

On view through March 10, 2013.   Hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu.

Other exhibitions: The Robert Kaplan and Margaret Levi Collection of Aboriginal Art is often on view and is promised to the Seattle Museum of Art. The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.  has sponsored exhibitions of Aboriginal Art. There is also a collection at the  Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Collection at the University of Virginia.

   Bobbie Leigh has written for many national publications including The Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, and Departures. Currently she is a New York correspondent for Art & Antiques.

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Winslow Homer’s Studio, Prouts Neck, Maine. Photo by Gayle Potter.

By Everett Potter

A couple of weeks ago, on a day when the sky over the Gulf of Maine was a cloudless, Bahamian blue, I literally walked into the seascape of a Winslow Homer painting. Never mind that Homer rarely painted these flawless weather conditions – storm-lashed rocks and turbulent seas were his signatures. But I was fortunate to be there on a bluebird day and to be getting a peek at the American painter’s studio. This solid 19th century wooden building, renovated for Homer by legendary Maine architect John Calvin Stevens, overlooks the sea in the wealthy hamlet of Prouts Neck, Maine. On September 25, it opens to the public for guided tours.

The Fog Warning, 1887. Winslow Homer. The Berger Collection.

Homer’s studio has been painstakingly and sensitively restored by Mills Whitaker Architects. If you go, you’ll not only see where the painter worked and lived but the seascape that inspired such works as The Lifeline and The Fog Warning. Both of these works can be seen at the Portland Museum of Art’s new exhibition to commemorate the opening of the studio, Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine.

The studio, a lyrical two story clapboard affair, has a prominent balcony, or piazza, as Homer called it in the parlance of the day. That gives it a nautical feel, and Homer’s brother Charles said that Homer nearly wore through the floorboards as he watched the Atlantic Ocean in its infinite moods.

It was Charles who built a nearby seaside home that he called The Ark, hoping to bring the entire Homer clan to Prout’s Neck. In 1883 Winslow Homer, by that time a successful 47 year old artist, decided to leave Manhattan and make Prouts Neck his home. His brother offered to build a studio for him, but the artist coveted The Ark’s carriage house. He also coveted his privacy, and had the building moved down the road, enlisting John Calvin Stevens, one of the prominent Shingle Style architects, to transform it.

Winslow Homer’s bath with a view. Photo by Gayle Potter.

Homer lived and painted here from 1883 until his death in 1910. In 2006, the Portland Museum of Art bought the house when Homer’s great-grand-nephew Charles Homer Willauer decided to sell it.

The renovation of the studio, which cost $2.8 million, required the removal of three bedrooms and a kitchen that had been added after Homer’s time, effectively bringing the studio back to about 1890. The structure was stabilized, and the original colors of dark green with red trim were redone.

Studio window. Photo by Gayle Potter.

The rooms have been left quite spare, with just a handful of artifacts that mark the artist’s presence. A window in the ground floor studio is like a camera lens, framing the view, and providing the same ratio as the painting Weatherbeaten.

From the piazza or the lawn, you’re looking south towards Stratton Island and Bluff Island. A distant lighthouse on Wood Island off Biddeford is visible. On the day we visited, the audio level of the Maine surf was subdued and hypnotic — now you hear it, now you don’t. It is the dramatic Maine coast of your dreams, and could easily move you to take up a brush, or at the very least raise your Smartphone and take a few photographs.

Winslow Homer with “The Gulf Stream” in his studio at Prout’s Neck, Maine, circa 1900. Unknown Artist. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, Gift of the Homer Family

“Homer liked to perpetuate the myth of the hermit artist,” explained Kristen Levesque, a museum spokesperson, “But in fact, he wore Brooks Brothers suits and had food shipped to him from Boston. He was actually more of a country gentleman. Every day, he would hoist a flag on the balcony and lunch would be delivered to him from the nearby Checkley Hotel.”

In the tradition of such 19th century gentlemen, Homer was also a hunter and fisherman, activities that appear in some of his best paintings. Maine was his home, but he traveled and painted in Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Adirondacks and Quebec, and on the studio walls are crudely mounted Atlantic salmon that he presumably caught, his fishing rod and net, and an eel spear. If you’re sharp eyed, you can find “Winslow” etched in tiny letters in the library alcove.

“Snakes Snakes Mice,” painted by Winslow Homer to scare off busybodies. Photo ©trentbellphotography

Still, he did not wish to be disturbed by rusticators, as vacationers to Maine were known a century ago. Over the fireplace in his studio is a crude sign he painted and left outside, a sign that announces “Snakes Snakes Mice” to frighten away anyone who thought to snoop.

Homer’s Maine coastline. Photo by Gayle Potter.

Leaving the studio, we took a walk along the cliff walk, where the same rocks that Homer painted over a century ago remain, including Cannon Rock, looking much as they did in his time. The surf crashed, cormorants dived for fish, and legions of butterflies worked the wildflowers that grew between the rocks. It felt like we were inhabiting a Homer painting.

Making our way back on a path through beach roses, my daughter cried out “Daddy, a snake!”

Sure enough, a little Garter snake was slithering into the hedge roots.

“Snakes Snakes Mice” indeed.

Homer hadn’t been bluffing. More than a century after his death, the life force of this extraordinary painter — not to mention his seascapes and snakes — still seems  very much alive.

IF YOU GO:

Winslow Homer Studio.  Because of the studio’s location, in a gated residential neighborhood, visitor numbers are quite restricted. The Portland Museum of Art has limited visitors to just 30 a day, six days a week. September 25 to December 2, 2012; April 2 to June 14, 2013; Tuesdays through Sundays. Tickets are $55, $30 for members. Reservations and information: (207) 775-6148.

Weatherbeaten, 1894. Winslow Homer. Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson.

To coincide with the reopening of the studio, the Portland Museum of Art has put together an exhibition called Weatherbeaten: “Winslow Homer and Maine. These paintings haven’t been seen together in Maine for generations.  September 22 to December 30, 2012. Museum admission is $12. Portland Museum of Art

STAY

Inn by the Sea, a few miles north on the coast in Cape Elizabeth, is offering a Seascapes package in conjunction with the opening of the Winslow Homer Studio. It includes

* Two nights in a single bedroom garden suite, spa suite, beach suite or traditional guest room accommodation
* Gourmet breakfast for two each morning
* 2 signature rum cocktails
* 2 tickets to “Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine” exhibit at the Portland Museum of art with exhibit catalogue

Doubles from $462.19 per night.

Tickets can be purchased from the Portland Museum of Art for a tour of the Winslow Homer Studio for an additional $55 per person (not included in package)

Visit Inn by the Sea for details.

  Everett Potter is Editor-in-Chief of Everett Potter’s Travel Report.

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A re-creation of the gardens of Giverny at “Monet’s Garden.”
Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen

By Bobbie Leigh

Claude Monet always said that if he had not been a painter, he would have been a botanist.  But it was only at the turn of the century  when he became  one of the wealthiest artists in France could he combine his love of painting with plants.  From the 1880s until his death  at 86 in 1926, Monet was as passionate about flowers as his art.  The two really merged in his  extensive series of paintings called “Nympheas” or “Water Lilies” where he transported  his perceptions, in spite of failing eye sight, onto canvas.

Monet’s garden in Giverny,  created in the Seine Valley  50 miles northwest of Paris, was his muse, his inspiration, and his source of worry—something every gardener will understand.  He was said to be so worried about soot  from passing trains nearby damaging his beloved lilies, that his gardener rowed out daily in a little boat every morning to clean them.  He even instructed one of his five  gardeners to dunk the lily pads daily so they would glisten in the sun.   The light, colors,  and images reflected in his lily pond were  an important  inspiration for his  later paintings.

The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx has created an approximation of Claude Monet’s Giverny garden including  the famous  lily pads… but here they are cleaned only once or twice a week. The “Monet’s  Garden” show is in three parts. The most exhilarating is the formal flower garden with rose-covered arches emerging from lush  flower beds lining both sides of a  path in the glass house  Victorian Conservatory.  It is what Monet called his Clos Normand  or Norman enclosure.  According to Elizabeth Murray, who documented the Giverny  garden for 25  years, Monet’s flower garden followed the same principles as his canvases. He arranged colors  of plants to create rich patterns, probably an inspiration for color field artists like  Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman who also were drawn to the expressive power of color in large fields.

Visitors on the Japanese footbridge at “Monet’s Garden.”
Photo by Talisman Brolin.

The path  in the  Conservatory  leads to  an indoor water garden with a recreation of  Monet’s iconic Japanese   bridge crossing a small pond. Dozens of water lilies including some varieties the artist depicted in his paintings float  beneath the bridge.  It is a replica of the Giverny arched bridge, a vibrant green, dubbed “Giverny green.”   In the special  Botanical Garden’s Shop in the Garden, you can buy some  Giverny  flowers as well as a replica of a bench in Monet’s garden.  It is a strikingly  handsome bench, made of plantation-grown teak with multiple layers of marine-grade paint in “Giverny green,”  for $3,500.

The   flower beds and the water garden with the  iconic green bridge are indoors  in  the Conservatory. The outdoor display of water lilies is in the Hardy Pool in the Conservatory Courtyard. Monet first became an ardent admirer of water lilies  when he saw them at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris.  In Giverny, he created a separate garden for his lilies which is more or less replicated in the Hardy Pool.

Monet in front of his paintings in his studios, 1920.
Musee Marmottan Monet/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
Gelatin silver print by Henri Manuel.

Water lilies are a challenge.   The Hardy Pool  water lilies required a loamy soil and were placed about a foot under water to ensure optimum growth. According to a Botanical  Garden  horticulturalist, they grow in full sun to bloom well and should be fertilized with a special aquatic fertilizer once a month during the growing period. In early spring when the Monet garden  show first opened,  the water lilies had not yet reached their peak. In the heat of summer,  visitors can expect brilliant colors and some giant Amazon water lilies with leaves up to five feet across.

Monet corresponded with eminent  horticulturists and bought seeds and plants from Japan as well as Europe.  “He filled his pond with rare aquatic plants that nearly covered the entire surface with carefully sited water lilies of every color,” according  to Elizabeth Murray’s essay in the show’s catalog.  The best way to approach this dazzling display of  a  lily paradise is to head first for the Botanical Garden’s Ross Gallery to admire Murray’s photographs.  Murray — painter, writer, photographer — is featured in a  YouTube clip  of  a photography  lecture shown at Eastman House on Monet’s Garden “Monet’s Passion.”

The show opened with spring flowers—clematis, morning glories poppies, and peonies. In summer, you will see  what Todd Forrest,VP  for Horticulture and Living Collections, calls the “hot hues” of summer flowers— yellow and  orange nasturtiums, zinnias,  hollyhocks, while  the roses on the arches should still be in bloom.   By fall, expect yellow, oranges reds and purples  along with  towering sunflowers.

Most surprising about this brilliant burst of color  in the gardens  is that almost all the flowers were grown in the Botanical Garden’s Nolen Greenhouses.  Even more astounding is that they will be adjusted for the seasons  so like  the Giverny original, the gardens will be filled with colorful  blooms until Monet’s Garden closes  October 21, 2012.

Two paintings by Claude Monet are on view in the Rodina Gallery in  the Botanical  Garden’s Library, a short walk from the entrance. Yale University’s  The Artist’s Garden in Giverny,   painted around 1900,  shows a large sweep of deep purple and violet irises while Irises, painted around 1915 and never shown in this country until now,  portrays a close up of the spring flower.  Monet was so precise about when his irises would bloom, he once told a friend to “come Tuesday…the Irises will be perfect.”   Monet’s paint encrusted wooden palette and some historical photographs showing the artist creating and enjoying his garden are also on view.

Water lilies on display at “Monet’s Garden.”
Photo by Mark Pfeffer

If you have never had a chance to visit Giverny, Monet’s Garden offers an  opportunity to  deepen your understanding of the passions of this complex artist. “I want the unobtainable,” he wrote. “ Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that’s the end. They are finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible.”  

NYBG in Bloom  is a free iPhone app  available from iTunes for those who would like  more information about Monet and his garden. A special feature of this app is that you can view Monet paintings currently at the Met via a link to the Met’s  web site.

Visit “Monet’s Garden.”

The New York Botanical Garden is  at  the Bronx River Parkway  (Exit 7W) and Fordham Road. Parking is available. You can also take the subway  or Metro-North Railroad.   For tickets and more information, call 718-817-8600 or nybg.org.

You can read Everett Potter’s tale of visiting the real Giverny here.

Bobbie Leigh has written for many national publications including The Wall Street Journal, Travel & Leisure, and Departures. Currently she is a New York correspondent for Art & Antiques.

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