Memories of 1956

To say that Hungarians are masters of memory is perhaps to risk cliché. But I couldn't help being moved at their genius for preservation. 

Here is the extraordinary statue of Imre Nagy, the leader of the breakaway Hungarian government, executed by the Russians two years later:

He gazes at the Parliament Building.

Here is a flag that commemorates the one from which the rebels ripped the Soviet emblem:

It flies next to a symbolic grave of people killed there.

Finally, here's a more humorous one, of Istvan Szechenyi, who endowed the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and built the iconic Chain bridge in the centre of Budapest:

Two Classical Bridges

I came across two bridges with significance derived from ancient Greece. The first is the Eisener Steg in Frankfurt, an old iron footbridge that crosses the Main river in central Frankfurt.

 

The inscription is from Homer's Odyssey: "to many foreigners on a wine-dark sea". No clear explanation of what that quotation is supposed to mean on this bridge.

And then there is this:

 

"This river I step in is not the river I stand in", an allusion to Heraclitus on a bridge that crosses the Don Valley on Queen Street East in Toronto. No more comprehensible -- and why the allusion, rather than the exact quote? -- but equally charming.

Dutch Vandalism in Toronto?

The other day, on my morning walk to the office, I spied this clumsy piece of signage on top of what I knew to be an elegant building:


The Ontario Power Generation building is not perhaps a landmark piece of architecture, but it is simple and impressive, and its front echoes the curve of Queen's Park crescent a little further north. Across College Street, Norman Foster pays it a compliment by continuing its lines in the University of Toronto's new Pharmacy building, which doubles OPG's colonnade with a reflection of its own.


What then did it do to deserve this?


It looks like amateur fixup by a DYI householder. I feel hurt that a Dutch bank would do this to Toronto. Aren't we supposed to be friends? Didn't Canada help liberate Holland after the war? Didn't hundreds of Dutch men and women come over here with their Canadian spouses? And then they do this?

Some of my friends remark that the ING signage is merely an expression of the Toronto craze to brand buildings. That is part of it, no doubt. But there isn't anything seriously bad about the S on top of this building, is there? (Aside from the logo itself, of course.)


The rule in Toronto is that the eye is not allowed to fall unpunished upon a pleasant thing. The Dutch, whose cities are gorgeous even though built by bankers and shippers, should have done better.

Here, by the way, is ING's world headquarters near Schiphol in the Netherlands:



Now, that's a building and a half. Note the signage.

The New MoMA

The renovations at MoMA are fabulous. Maybe a little too much so in places. All that money and technology seems to have magnified and hyper-realized the austere modernist aesthetic of the original building. Its giganticism reminds one in a slightly creepy way of Mussolini or that other guy – little people amongst huge furniture dwarfed by rooms of galactic proportions. The second floor atrium is magnificent, but intimidating. Here is a view of the ceiling:


The sunlit patterns are gorgeous, but they don’t warm.

The galleries and the restaurant are much better. The restaurant's human-scale preserves the New York post-war aesthetic – comfortable industrial-style furniture with chrome legs, beautifully sculptural flower arrangements, long bar with impressive bottles.



The food is simple, but elegantly prepared to the point where the simplicity of the dish is something of a riff. I had liverwurst (tangy and sophisticated) with pickled vegetables (out of this world -- or perhaps one should say "Only in Japan are there pickles like this):


And then, a poached egg cooked in its own Mason jar with lobster meat and corn. I didn't think the corn worked -- the egg and lobster were already sweet, and the corn added a vegetal sweetness that didn't quite match:

Definitely an A-.

A Day at MoMA, New York

There is a line-up to get in – only about ten minutes, but there’s no blockbuster show that draws these folks in, just the star-power of this great museum. Once inside, even the children have a lot of fun. People try to find the coins and nails in Jackson Pollock’s “Full Fathom Five”:


Or get their photos taken in front of his paintings

Even in front of Barnett Newman’s vacuous Vir Heroicus Sublimis. (Newman spent much of his life celebrating Jamaican beer.)

Abstract expressionism is a lot of fun and very instructive, but I was unprepared for the joyous inclusion of these art-works in the touristic experiences of these throngs. (Lots of Europeans, by the way. Which makes sense: a French family visiting New York would prefer Rothko to Renoir over at the Metropolitan.) Picasso is a celebrity – as recently as in my father’s generation, all but the pseuds found him baffling and inaccessible. At MoMA, however, hundreds ogle the difficult cubism of Woman with a Guitar and the monumental geometry of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and their curiosity spills over to Gris and Braque.

Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe is to MoMA what the Mona Lisa is to the Louvre. The most glamorous woman of the 20th century memorialized by the most famous artist -- never mind that this picture was, along with that of an electric chair, part of a series that commemorates famous and untimely deaths. An endless stream of people is photographed in front of it – with families, it’s always the father, it seems.


But there are also young women, hoping that some of that stardust will fall on to a picture that includes them.


There’s nothing like this at the almost equally crowded Metropolitan Museum, where children whine while their parents snatch a few harried moments in front of Manet or Cezanne and solemn teenagers tour with grandparents, diarizing in notebooks about the Old Masters. The Cezannes there are hardly noticed; here, they are gobbled up with all the other goodies.

National War Memorial, Ottawa

The National War Memorial in Ottawa, across Wellington Street from the Chateau Laurier, is a remarkable piece of public sculpture, with something over twenty full size figures marching as if through mud. The figures, who represent many different services, look grim rather than heroic, and reflect the privations of war in the trenches.


They include two women, including this charmingly snub-nosed nurse (?), the strap of her handbag falling over the back of her hand as she tramps uphill.


There is, no doubt, more than a little sentimentality in this immensely ambitious work -- I cannot think of anything else in bronze that is half as complex -- which was unveiled only a few months before the Second War. What would you expect? -- It was planned by an Englishman from Farnborough, and executed by his family after he died. A touch of village mawkishness, I guess. But with statuary, my view is put it up first, and think about it later. There is far too little in Canada -- except on this site.

Two Equestrian Statues

This is a statue of King Edward VII: an egregiously stupid and gluttonous man with a flexible sense of private morality. Son of Victoria, he became heir to the throne because his brother, who was severely retarded, died before their mother did.


This fine statue once stood in Delhi, as this plaque below it recounts:


Now it stands in Queen's Park in Toronto, a sadly shabby space in the centre of this appearance-oblivious city. Paul Fonseca remarks in the Globe and Mail about the "rundown fountain surrounded by unplanted gardens," "the dilapidated benches" and "the neglected monument to a dead monarch." As for the last: how did it get there?

Delhi had many such statues, some of which had their ornamental qualities. The one shown below was at one end of Rajpat, or Kingsway, which has the fabulous Rashtrapati Bhawan, or President's Residence, at its other end.


This one has now been removed, and the pedestal stands empty. It is of George V, a somewhat thinner, but equally uncultured son of the man on a horse. The statue of Edward VII was also removed. These and many other statues were stored in kind of graveyard for imperial relics, on the grounds of the old Coronation Durbar, in Civil Lines near Delhi University.

Sometime in the sixties, Henry Jackman had the good idea that Toronto was in need of an equestrian statue. It had many good statues in front of the legislature building in Queen's Park, but all the men so honoured stood on their feet. Jackman contacted his friend, Roland Michener, then Canada's High Commissioner to India, to see if the Government of India would give Toronto its exiled Edward VII-on-horseback. GOI was only too willing to oblige.

The statue was cut into three pieces, shipped to Toronto, rewelded here, and erected in 1969. It looks good where it stands (though grass, as you can see, is a struggle in Toronto).


Canada and Toronto were unappreciative recipients. In her memoir of her father's time in India, Michener's daughter complains about how long it took to process the papers needed to export the statue. Nowhere in this memoir is there a word of gratitude for the gift. Nor is Toronto properly appreciative for who gave it its equestrian statue. Look closely at the plaque above: you'll see it says that the gift was "made possible" by the Government of India, along with "the former High Commissioner to India, His Excellency Roland Michener C.C, C.D., Governor General of Canada." Michener did indeed make the gift possible, and Jackman paid to transport and install it, but surely the Government or the people of India should be acknowledged as the donors (rather than as facilitators).

Jackman was right about equestrian statues: no city is complete without one. Soon others began to hear the call. A couple of blocks away, in St. Michael's College, there now stands this charming example of the genre:


Not quite as imposing as Edward Emperor of India perhaps, but at least this one doesn't look like the type who cadges money and mistresses from his friends.

Young Turk Feminists

This is the office of a women's student association at a Place of Higher Learning somewhere in southern Canada.

Given the high assumed level of literacy in such a Place, may one assume that everything, including the "Come Inside", is intended?

Moon, Eclipsed, on a Rope

My Panasonic Lumix has a nifty digital image stabilizer, which makes it easy to take pictures with a shaky hand. But it got confused when I tried to take pictures of the total eclipse of the Moon on February 20th. I didn't have a tripod, unfortunately, and the image inevitably smudged. The problem was that the image stabilizer sharpened the smudge.



Oh well: you can see a bit of the copper colour of the eclipsed Moon in this one: