Post by Grubb.
But that didn’t stop me from suggesting we check out the Gothenburg Fine Arts Museum. The first exhibit on the second floor should have been a warning.
As we made all the hallway connections there were enough old masters cropping up to make me pause and be wowed.
But the majority of the exhibition space was devoted to the Swedish Colorist movement. These painters, a lot of whom hung out in Gothenburg in the early twentieth century, some of whom studied with Matisse, well, there was nothing that made me stop my forward motion.
And then there was the last exhibit of a contemporary artist, South Korean Lee Bul. A lot of mirrors, some broken, some inflatable, but from my standpoint, nothing that beats what I’d find in the fun house of a traveling circus.
The sun is out and people are wearing shorts, but I’m not afraid to dodge the lovely spring weather and make for the Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft. Somewhere we had read that there was an exhibit about the future of fashion. We were wrong. Instead we got to feast our eyes on a vintage Vespa (1948), rooms devoted to the Asian and Japanese influence on Swedish design, and a hodgepodge of early modernist furniture. Not one New Age Barbarella reentry ball gown, or bulletproof footy pajamas.
Salome with the head of John the Baptist. Obviously something every good Jewish boy would know.
I’ve always been fascinated by Cranach’s paintings of a slender, slightly elongated Venus posing with Cupid, so this painting of his surprised me. I love how the color of neck gore matches her outfit and that it’s an opportunity for Salome to show off her necklace!
Okay, and now for a little eroticism go listen to “The Dance of the Seven Veils” from Richard Strauss’ opera Salome.
Or the truly decadent version of Wilde’s play in Ken Russell’s “Salome’s Last Dance.”