Friday, 24 May 2024 Potsdam: Food and art

Written 10 August 2024

An easy day in Potsdam, starting, of course, with leisurely enjoyment of the hotel's breakfast, intermediate between that of a small hotel like La Casa dei Colori and the big international chains, where the breakfast can span acres.

At the left, an assortment of yogurts, muesli, bowls of kiwi and apple chunks, and slices of several cheeses garnished with fruit.

At the right, butter, margarine, cold cuts, excellent liverwurst, and sliced vegetables.

At the left here, smoked salmon, a wide array of pickles, garnishes, and condiments (fresh horseradish, olives, pickled beets, etc.), oil and balsamic vinegar, and jars of wet flavored salt, like strawberry, garlic, and I couple more I can't read the labels of.

At the right, large divided chafing dishes offering bacon, sausages, scrambled eggs, pancakes, grilled vegetables, and potatoes. Mustard, ketchup, green onions, and other condiments alongside.

Then a wide array of jams and honeys (with ice-cream-cone portion cups), cut melons, and whole fruit.

Finally, the bread assortment, including viennoiseries and, in the right middle drawer, heart-shaped seed breads.

Our plan for the morning was to visit the Barberini Museum, so here we are back in the Old Market Square, in the reconstructed heart of the city, which we passed through earlier with Viking. At the left here is St. Nicholas Church, with the square's central obelisk in front.

At the right is one long side of the City Palace, whose Fortunaportal (just out of sight to the right of the photo) faces on the square, and yes, there are Leon and David forging ahead as usual.

The end of the museum is visible at the left side of the photo. Its entrance faces the long pink facade of the palace.

The museum houses the Hasso Plattner collection, which is actually two collections in one. About half of the space is devoted to Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), an Italian painter and sculptor working mainly in France, who has a very distinctive style that, frankly, I can take or leave. That's a photo of him at the left, and I was surprised to see such a robust individual, given the allmost etiolated look of his protraits.

I looked at the exhibition, and I learned a good deal about the artist and the evolution of his style, but I find that I didn't even bother to get a good shot of one of his characteristic works. The one shown here at the right is very early and highly uncharacteristic (no almond eyes, no vertical elongation), but I liked it best of the lot. It's a portrait of the artist's friend, sculptor Maurice Drouard.

The rest of the collection, though, was terrific! It was solidly impressionist, and included myriad works by familar artists (e.g., Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Morisot, Pissarro, Signac) that we hadn't seen before.

Before I talk about them, though, I want to sing the praises of a fabulous feature of German museums. I was first introduced to these little folding stools in Weimar, but I didn't think to get a photo. I think it was in the Schiller house where a young docent spotted me slogging up that last flight of stairs to the top floor and offered me one from a supply she kept up there. I had seen racks of them in other musea but hadn't twigged to what they were. Once I paid attention, I found that in every museum, right next to the cloak room, a rolling rack of them was standing by, and you could just grab one and take it with you.

As you can see at the left, they fold absolutely flat. On the racks, they hang on a rod by their handles. You just slide one off the end of the rod as needed. They're incredibly light to carry, and when you come to someplace you'd like to stop, you just flip it open and have a seat. Can't wait until these show up in Paris and the US!

I didn't think much of the impressionists when I was introduced to them back in Art 100—optics were pretty advanced their time; why didn't they just get glasses?! But fond as I remain of the hyperrealistic style of the Dutch old masters, over the years the impressionists have definitely grown on me, and I think Monet has emerged as my favorite.

At the left here is Monet's "Argenteuil, Late Afternoon." At the right, his "The Ball-shaped Tree, Argenteuil." Lovely.

The museum turned out to hold a treasure-trove of the works of Gustave Caillebotte. Caillebotte was good friends with Renoir and the others, and definitely part of their artistic group, but he was independently wealthy, so he didn't particularly care whether he sold his work. He subsidized his friends by buying and collecting their works (later leaving them to the French nation), but his own works mostly stayed in his family for decades. Somehow this collection had acquired quite a number of them, including the two shown here ("Couple on a Walk" and "Avenue of the Villa des Fleurs in Trouville"). It left me with a whole new appreciation of him. Before, I had seen a couple of his works but I knew him mostly as the guy in a straw hat and white t-shirt sitting backwards on a chair in the lower right foreground of Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party."

Here are a couple more Monets. At the left, "Bordighera, Italien" (painted on a trip to Italy) and at the right "Floes at Bennecourt."

For good meteorological reasons I won't address here, France got way more snow than usual in the last half of the 19th century, and the museum posted a whole information panel about the impressionists' fascination with the effects of light and reflection on snow and ice. I'd seen some snow scenes by Monet, but this was a new one on me.

Here, at the left, is one more Monet—a beautiful apple tree in bloom.

Then the collection started drifting off into pointilism. I liked the painting, at the right, of the Rio San Trovaso in Venice by Henri-Edmond Cross better than many, maybe just because he uses bolder colors; I often find pointilism pastel to the point of looking overexposed.

Finally, I really liked these two panels that illustrated how the "biography" of a painting can be read from the markings on the back of it.

They were accompanied by explanatory panels explaining the agreements that have begun to be formed and signed by various countries to locate and return art works stolen during WWII.

Many of the markings on the backs of these two paintings (both present here in the collection) are unexplained—number written on the edges of the frame that meant something to the writer but whose significance has been lost. Markings from the art-supply dealer who supplied the frame or the canvas, customs stamps applied when the work was shipped, seals with dates and locations applied by auction houses who sold the work at some point, bar codes applied by modern museums and collections. Really interesting.

The museum backs onto the Havel River just where it is split by Friendship Island into the Alte Fahrt and the Neue Fahrt, which I take to mean the old and new channels. Its caféwhere we had lunch, overlooks the Alte Fahrt (left). The great grey heron that hung around in the reeds on the far bank was not disturbed when this rowboat passed by.

We all chose quiche—salmon for me; the other choices were Lorraine, spinach, and asparagus.

The desserts were spectacularly photogenic. It was early in the day, so I chanced a café Liegeoise.

I don't know what this magnificent torte was called, but it looked scrumptious.

I think David's was raspberry.

On the way out, I stopped to get a shot of this fellow, truckin' across the courtyard. He's called "Century Step" by Wolfgang Mattheuer. Then we just headed back to the hotel to rest up for dinner.

Our dinner reservation was at Zum Fliegenden Holländer (At the Flying Dutchman), just a few blocks away in (of course) the Dutch quarter.

I started with Beelitz (remember Beelitz?) asparagus soup with wild garlic croutons. Tasty.

I'm afraid I can't match this plate in front of Leon with anything on the menu I photographed. Perhaps it's chicken topped with cheese and bacon?

I think this heap of salad conceals Gritta's "gnocchi with burratina." As far as I can tell, burratina is just a smaller size of burrata.

Giving David's veal a run for its money in photogenicity was the dessert Gritta and I shared—vanilla ice cream with strawberries, whipped cream, and egg liqueur. Definitely yummy.