I spent most of the day yesterday in Copenhagen with my friend Camilla. We met up at 9 am at the train station in Malmö and took the train over and then walked 2 blocks to the Glyptoteket. I have been there before, but it was ages ago, and all I remembered was admiring Rodin’s The Thinker and after realizing that a great deal of the museum is devoted to permanent galleries of Egyptian and Middle East, and Greek and Roman artifacts, lost interest. Not really my thing when it comes to museums. But Camilla was excited about 2 visiting exhibitions about Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas, and asked if I wanted to go. I’m always up for an exhibition and an expedition, so I readily agreed.
The lion sculptures at the front of the Glyptoteket were the kinds of things I love so I took a lot of photos of them. 😀
To be honest, the French Impressionists and Post-Impresssionists aren’t my thing either. I’m much more engaged by the masters of the Renaissance, especially the Italians. It’s not that I don’t appreciate Impressionism, because I do (theoretically), but Degas’ ballerinas and most landscapes don’t really do anything for me. Which is weird, in the case of landscapes, at least, because I love trees and paintings of them especially if you throw in a cow or horse or chicken, or two. I prefer Degas’ women at their toilette and his sketches and drawings. I do like a lot of Van Gogh (though not all, and who doesn’t?), and I like Pissarro, but apart from single works here and there, I can give the rest a miss. Gauguin intrigues me more because of his bolder use of color (though he slides into Symbolism, past Post-Impressionism).
Anyway, it was supposed to rain on and off all day, so it was nice to be in a big, beautiful museum looking at beautiful things. We spent an hour and a half walking through the Degas exhibition (Degas’ Obsession), a great deal of which turned out to focus on ONE painting, Dancers Practising in the Foyer, and the research that has recently led to a proposed revised dating of the work. There was a lot of very detailed and specific information about the scientific methods recently used to examine, X-ray, and rethink the painting. Degas apparently started it FIRST of all his ballerina paintings and worked on it over and over, revising and revisiting it for over 30 years. Crazy. Of all the paintings and sculptures (some reproductions) of his that were on display, it was actually the painting that I liked the most. I quite liked his sculpture The Tub as well.
After Degas, we went down to the huge open green courtyard in the center of the museum and had lunch in the café. I had a very good, rather unusually fancy steak tartare, and we both had these fabulous lemon and poppyseed tarts.
After lunch and some quality sit-and-chat time, we headed back upstairs for the Gauguin exhibition, which was actually titled Gauguin & Kihara – First Impressions. The first room showed a video of a panel of Samoan artists gathered by Yuki Kihara, talking about several of his paintings and their place in the Tahitian culture both then and now. Past that was a large room filled with his paintings and sculptures, as well as lots of info about his life. This painting, Landscape from Brittany with Breton Women, was the only one I really liked (note: cow), though I was taken by some of the wood sculptures that I hadn’t previously seen or read about.
We visiting the permanent exhibition of French Art as well (mostly meh, apart from Berthe Morisot), and finished up by wandering through the French and Danish Sculpture hall. I took LOTS of photos there, as some of the sculptures and their details were amazing. BOOBS AHEAD!
A lot of photo spam in this post! We sat downstairs for about an hour and worked on my medical complaint document that Camilla and her friend Anita are helping me with, doing quite a lot of major editing and revising to get it into shape for submitting soon. It also gave us a chance to rest a bit after all the walking and standing, especially for Camilla who had been having issues with racing pulse and heart fibrillations all day (she also suffers from heart failure, which is awful and scary).
Around 4, we headed back to the train station, stopping for a bit at the pretty garden behind the Glyptoteket (dahlias! snapdragons!), and while on the train decided to head to Malmö Saluhall for dinner, which was a PERFECT idea! We got there just after 5 and despite there being so many choices of restaurants, went straight to Söderholmens Fisk. I had a salmon platter with both cold- and warm-smoked salmon, potatoes, creamy herb sauce and a perfect romaine and radish salad. It was DELICIOUS. I could have licked the plate clean. And they had the most delicious sourdough bread and butter. Afterwards, even though we were both stuffed, we stopped and got gelato. And then we stopped at the fruit stand outside and I picked up a bag of cherries and some raspberries to have with breakfast the rest of this week.
All in all, it was a perfect way to spend one of my remaining vacation (sick leave) days. Of course, we DID get rained on as soon as we were back in Sweden, but only a bit as we only had to walk from the train station out to the parking garage.
Today, I am finishing the last dusting that I didn’t do last weekend: my two shadowboxes full of tiny things (as well as the framed photos under them which I only swiped at before). When Flyinge Plantshop opens I’m running up to get a couple of hostess/birthday gifts, and tonight we are going to our friends’ Barbara and Paul for dinner. Anders is finishing the installation of our new alarm system, including new smoke alarms and keyless entry. It was raining this morning but it’s clearing up now. I can see blue sky and the clouds are parting. It’s supposed to be sunny and warm this afternoon so hopefully will finally get a little sun time on the deck for awhile. And maybe take a nap, since I was up this morning at 5:30 am.
Mood: relaxed
Music: Grace Pool—Still the Spirit