Today was our museum day! We went to the Kunsthalle, Hamburg’s art museum, right after it opened at 10 am, mostly to see two special exhibits (we’ve seen the permanent collection many times). One was a William Blake exhibit, with some gorgeous colorized prints of some of his most impressive word-image combinations–including the incredibly famous Europe: A Prophecy and America: A Prophecy. I have seen digital reproductions, but never any original prints with the hallmark water-color colorization. I liked the exhibit, but I thought that the connection with German Romantic painters like Caspar David Friedrich and Phillip Otto Runge (which the exhibit made clear Blake did not know about) was a bit forced. Peter was convinced they emphasized it because they had the art on hand. We were also a bit disappointed that there was no discussion of Blake’s etching technique–Andrea and I ended up looking it up online while sitting in the museum.
The second exhibit that we were very curious about was by an American artist named Kathleen Ryan, who had a range of different items but who made a name for herself with representations of rotting, mouldy fruit with beautiful beads, gemstones, and agates. I had seen photos of these before, but they gave me the wrong impression–I thought they were fruit-size and made with tiny beads. But they are quite big and just fantastic–a mix of the beauty and elegance of the material they are made with and the grossness of the decay that is being shown.
Before we left, we had (overpriced) sandwiches at the museum cafeteria and took a quick peek at the main entrance for a couple more of Kathleen Ryan’s pieces and the handful of Victorian British painters that are represented in the main hall.
Then Andrea and Peter went off on their own and Mark and I walked from the Kunsthalle to the other side of the Alster lake and the Dammtor train station to the Hamburg University campus, where I was a student in the 1980s. We went to the “Philosopher’s Tower,” freshly renovated to look just like it did in the 1980s–a 13-story piece of brutalist architecture from the early 1960s that always struck me as hostile and cold, in spite of some beautiful wooden ceilings and lecture halls that did let the light in. We came there to meet my main mentor in Hamburg, Peter Hühn (professor emeritus), and have coffee with him. We went to a nearby coffeehouse and talked for a couple of hours–about the lectures he is still giving and the hikes he is still going on in his 80s! We took a picture at the nearby Grindelhochhäuser, the first apartment complexes built in Germany after the Second World War, starting in 1946, as a modern “Wohnmaschine” complete with stores and restaurants and a gas station.
I remember attending my Middle English lecture with Prof. Hühn here.
Then we walked to the nearest subway station and made our way home. After dinner with Andrea and Peter, we took a short walk around the neighborhood park and then watched TV for a bit with them–a Netflix show called Valhalla (I was not impressed).