Thursday 11/14/2024
Boarded the bus for a trip to the De Young museum at 9:15. 21 people on the trip. Not the usual luxury coach but a smaller one. There were two exhibits to see. One was a retrospective of the work of Tamara de Lempicka, the other the seven tapestries of the Battle of Pavia. Both were worth looking at. I spent a good amount of time peering at de Lempicka’s stuff. I had never heard of her before the announcement from the de Young a couple months ago, although she was a Big Deal in the art world from 1920 through the 1940s. She developed a style based out of Cubism, and specialized mostly in female portraits like this one.
Not only the striking compositions (she liked big diagonal lines that crowd the frame) but the amazing technique — look how she rendered the look of nylon stockings, which were a new thing at the time. There were lots of little sketches, too. I can’t imagine how you get this detailed shading just with a stick of charcoal.
The tapestries were harder to see (click the link for some pictures), but amazing for their size, seven tapestries each at least 10×15 feet, showing hundreds of soldiers fighting, with millions of tiny details of clothing and armor.
Back home just in time for a 3pm meeting of the Good Times committee, planning our next musical experience. The prior one was the folk festival featuring Joan Baez; what do we do for an encore? The schedule has it falling near Valentine’s day, so the plan is: love songs.
Codgerville 