Le Grand Pressigny, a Castle-Museum in the Loire

PRE-HISTORY IN THE SOUTH LOIRE REGION

This is a wonderful place for ancient history buffs.

The plain around Descartes in South Touraine is famous for exceptional quality flint. Tools carved from this found their way all over Europe during the Neolithic and Paleolithic eras.

Many of these tools can be seen in the Musee Departemental de Prehistoire (Touraine’s Museum of Prehistory) in the 12^th-16^th-century Chateau Du Grand-Pressigny.

When you enter the village of Le Grand-Pressigny, follow the signs to the Chateau, up winding narrow roads behind the castle.  Park just outside, and walk across the drawbridge over the empty moat. The entrance fee of €4.50/adult is well worth it. What’s left of the castle is interesting anyway, but really fascinating are the prehistoric collections. To the right of the entrance gate is a wonderful collection of, mostly, fossilized shells, but also bones, teeth, and wood. In the old Great Hall in the main building of the castle is the Museum. It’s superbly done with dioramas, and paintings of life as imagined at that time, with items in large cases telling the story of man in this area from very long ago, to the Bronze Age. Some truly wonderful arrowheads of polished jasper merit a visit for themselves!

Climb the watchtower, the Tour Vironne, for a great view of the total layout of the castle, and across town to the valley’s fields. It’s a fascinating place, and although not rated as one of the “biggies” it should be. It’s one of the biggest and best such collections we’ve ever seen.

From the N10, south of Ste-Maure de Touraine, cut across east to Descartes and then on D750 to Abilly and 5km further, Le Grand Pressigny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paris: Musee National de Ceramique

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MUSĒE NATIONAL DE CĒRAMIQUE

At the gates of Paris along the River Seine, the National Ceramic Museum adjoins the national factory that produces Sevres porcelain, and the expansive Parc de St Cloud.

The museum was created in the first years of the 19^th century by Alexandre Brongniart, who became director of the porcelain factory in 1800. He wanted to display all the categories of ceramics (pottery, faience, stoneware, porcelain, but also enamels, stained glass windows and glass) from all countries and all time periods.

Previously the porcelain factory was in Vincennes on the far east side of Paris, but it was moved to Sevres on the south west side in 1756, apparently at the request of Madame de Pompadour, and from 1760 was state controlled.

In 1876 the porcelain factory and the museum of ceramics moved from their building in the heart of Sevres, to the current building between the pont de Sevres (Sevres bridge) and the parc de St Cloud (St Cloud park). In 1934 the administration of the factory and the museum were separated, although tours of the workshops behind the museum can still be arranged.

Today, due to a dynamic acquisition program, and through donations, the museum has almost 50,000 pieces, from antiquity to present day, from the Italian renaissance to Japan, from Moorish Spain to 18^th century Europe.

For those interested in ceramics, this museum is a real find, as about 5,000 works of art are displayed, from all eras. Each piece is labeled and you could spend hours looking and learning. Even if you don’t have in-depth knowledge of ceramics this is a great museum, as there are so many beautiful pieces. In the various rooms on the two floors are groupings of pieces from certain time periods or certain places—ancient America, Islamic, Chinese, Japanese, many from Italy (Florence, Sienna, Venice), Germany (such as Meissen from Saxe), and other areas of France (Vincennes, Saint-Cloud, Chantilly, Mennecy).

At the entrance we are welcomed by 2 huge blue and white urns, about 12 feet tall, a suitable introduction to the wealth inside. We wandered around for a couple of hours, amazed at what can be made from ceramics, and at how beautifully finished the objects are—fine details, gorgeous colors, exquisite paintings. There are more enormous urns, vases, plates, tureens, watering cans, teacups and saucers, busts of famous people, decorative pots in fanciful shapes (such as animals). We notice lots of gold color; many pieces decorated with paintings of scenes from a city or with the face of an important person; many have animals (notably snakes, but we also saw rabbits, lizards and even a squirrel). There are also modern pieces, such as a large brightly-painted ceramic family, a huge red apple, and an elongated brown figure that’s very evocative of African art.

Over the years the names of many famous people have been linked to the factory-museum. Supposedly in 1776 Thomas Bentley, Josiah Wedgewood’s partner, was very impressed by what he saw in the factory (and perhaps learned a few tips). The composer, Lully, lived in a nearby pavilion, named after him. Some of the designers of Sevres porcelain were E.M. Falconet (1716-91) and J.B. Pigalle (1714-85). (I’d often wondered where the name of the well-known Pigalle area of the city came from).

Well worth the trip out of the city center.

PRACTICALITIES:

Place de la Manufacture, Sèvres

Tel: 01 41 14 04 20

Open every day except Tuesday and some holidays

Entrance fee: €4.50, €3 for 18-25 years, under 18 free. Free to all the first Sunday of the month.

Metro: Pont de Sevres (cross the river, and the museum is on your right)

Tramway: T2

Bus: 169, 171, 179

www.musee-ceramique-sevres.fr

WC in the basement. A small gift- and bookshop on the entrance level. Many special programs and events offered through the year; check website.

Spurlock Museum of Cultural Heritage

 SPURLOCK MUSEUM of Cultural Heritage

At the University of Illinois, UIUC, a division of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

What a thrill for a museum lover! The Beauty of places very close to my Backyard too.

By world standards this museum is fairly small, but the exhibits are of world-class standards—educational, very well set-out and marked. Another benefit of living in a university town.

Their motto is “Explore the World”. Well, here you certainly can, as you get a good taste of what’s out there in our big wide world. Whet your appetite, or (like me) consolidate some of what you’ve seen and learned before about world cultures and cultural history.

The entrance lobby has an information desk on the right and behind it a Learning Center, and a special exhibit hall (which has shown, for example, “Why Knot”, about the diverse uses of fibers over the ages; and “Ancient Egypt: The Origins”).

Enter the actual museum to the left. First into the circular atrium, called the Central Core Gallery, with its three pillars: Body (shelter, food, clothing), Mind (ethics), and Soul (art, religion), representing the challenges all humans face, and some of the varied solutions.  The museum galleries radiate out and around this central space.

On the ground floor are the Gallery of American Indian Cultures (both North and South America), and the Gallery of Ancient Mediterranean Cultures (focusing on Greece and Rome).

Upstairs are three galleries. First, the Gallery of Asian Cultures, which focuses on Indonesia, Oceania, and East Asia. In the center is the Gallery of European Cultures. Finally, on the right is the Gallery of African and Middle Eastern Cultures.

You could spend many hours here, but today I chose to highlight the European Gallery. It spotlights a number of different cultural areas, loosely linked by the theme of European Odyssey. First are 4 houses, from different eras and different geographical areas in Europe. Then there is Warfare (from Medieval times to WW2), Religion (Islam, Judaism, Christianity—with some gorgeous stained-glass panels), the Elites, Communication, and Entertainment.

Every semester, the museum also offers a number of special events, such as Manda Drumming, Polish Music and Dancing, Chinese Silk-and-Bamboo Ensemble. They are always really interesting and we come away feeling we’ve learned a whole lot of new stuff. See my earlier entry on the Mayan Weavings in “Wonderful Weavings” April 2008.

Pick up one of the Gallery Explorations worksheets or an Exhibit Bingo sheet for the kids.

INFORMATION:

Address: 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana(just off Lincoln, on the corner of Gregory and Oregon).

Hours:

Tuesday 12-5                                                          

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 9-5

Saturday 10-4

Sunday 12-4

Free general admission

Parking available on the street, and in the unmetered parking lot over weekends.

Tel: +1 217-333-2360

www.spurlock.uiuc.edu

Another Centennial: Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago (1909)

 

Another Centennial: Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago (1909)

Helping to Make Chicago What it is Today

One hundred years later, what would Burnham think?

The miles of lakefront development on Lake Michigan are a hugely attractive feature of the Windy City. People can walk or run for miles; there are beaches for swimming and places for picnics; we can watch the boats, or go on a cruise and look at the skyline and the parks from a different vantage point. In so many ways, the city nowadays celebrates the waterfront.

Grant Park, a large 320 acres, has Buckingham Fountain, many gorgeous spring, and summer, gardens, the Museum Campus, and is also the venue for some of the biggest summer events, for example, the Chicago Blues Festival and Taste of Chicago.

Millennium Park, finished in 2004 (started 1997), smaller at 24.5 acres, is filled with stunning public art, such as the now-iconic sculpture “Cloud Gate” by Anish Kapoor, known affectionately as “The Bean”.

But, Burnham’s plan was about much more than just the waterfront. He had big ideas for the city and its development.

Some background: Various men of vision made Chicago what it is today. One was Montgomery Ward, wealthy from a catalogue business, who launched a 13-year court battle to save Grant Park from public buildings and campaigned to beautify the area. City Hall, the local press, and the business community opposed him, calling him an obstructionist. But, in the end Ward won and established the concept that the whole of Chicago’s lakefront should be preserved, open and free.

Then came the architect Daniel Burnham. He laid out the principle of a pristine lakefront in his famous city plan of 1909. Burnham was a man of big ideas and the energy to see them through. “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood”, he famously declared and he put that ambition to work as director of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He and his partner Charles Atwood designed the Beaux Arts structures of the Exposition. To the millions of visitors to the fair, Burnham’s White City, as it was known, was the epitome of classical splendor and it later served as a model for the City Beautiful movement that wanted to change the squalor of congested, coal-blackened cities with sensible planning and Beaux Arts architecture. In 1905 he was commissioned to create plans for San Francisco and Manila. Working with his assistant Edward Bennett, he applied what he’d learned to his 1909 Plan of Chicago —a kind of magna carta of urban planning, with sweeping proposals for transportation, recreation, and culture.

No other plan has influenced Chicago’s growth as much. The plan resulted in a string of lakefront parks and beaches, including Jackson Park and Washington Park; the acquisition of a greenbelt of forest preserves on the city’s periphery; the construction of Chicago’s main post office; and the site of the Eisenhower Expressway.

But, Burnham’s influential Plan of Chicago didn’t always materialize as he intended. As he recommended, the city’s lakefront has been almost entirely reserved for public parks. But, in 1965 when the city got round to building a new civic center it wasn’t a Beaux Arts palace. Instead the city built the Richard J. Daley Center, a skyscraper faced in warm brown steel, its plaza dominated by a sculpture by Picasso that is sometimes likened to the head of an Afghan hound—not a heroic classical figure. However, other parts of his plan were implemented, such as double-decker Wacker Drive, designed to route truck traffic around the business district, so the lakefront was more attractive; the ornate Union Station, planned to secure Chicago’s place as the Midwest hub of transportation and shipping; and the large expanse of parkland that separates the skyscrapers from the lakefront, leaving the lakefront “Forever open, free, and clear.”

Burnham devised his famous Plan of Chicago in the 17-storey Santa Fe Building on south Michigan Avenue (opposite the Art Institute). It’s now home, appropriately it seems, to the Chicago Architecture Foundation, which has galleries on the architectural history of the city and which offers free walking tours of the city’s architectural highlights, plus a boat tour.

For the Centennial, many events are planned throughout the year, with the centerpiece being two temporary pavilions in Millennium Park. Many educational programs will reflect back on the legacy of the 1909 Plan, and also look forward to bold new plans. A documentary called “Make No Little Plans—Daniel Burnham and the American City” is due to premier in summer 2009. One special event by and for school children will take place when 152 kids come together to make a living map.

See here for more on special projects:

http://burnhamplan100.uchicago.edu/events

The Art Institute is hosting an exhibit on Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago, which runs through December 2009 in Gallery 24.  It presents 32 prized illustrations selected from the Department of Architecture and Design’s collection in five separate rotations.

I don’t work for the Chicago CVB (or any other CVB), but still I say, Come and enjoy this great city, come and experience all this wonderful lakefront parkland.

 

“Masterpiece of the Month”

Take a look at the Masterpiece of the Month for March, April, and May (click on the link in the box on the right of the page).

Enjoy.

Inspiration for Artists

In Chicago, President Barak Obama and his family are understandably immensely popular, as this is their home turf. Wandering around the city last week, I happened on this temporary exhibition. It’s a lot of fun, and showed (again) just how many people Obama inspired in various ways.

“Inspired Art for Obama” is an exhibition of prints, posters, photographs and videos that emerged in 2008 as icons of the art movement in support of Barak Obama for president.

It features more than 100 works from independent artists and designers and the Obama ’08 campaign. I found it amazing to see what Obama inspired people to do and, judging from the crowds visiting the gallery, people are still inspired and interested.

He must be one of the most art-depicted presidential candidates of all times!

Inspired Art for Obama. Officially Unofficial. The Chicago Exhibition runs from April 1-May 31, 2009.

Free entrance.

Monday-Saturday 10am-6pm, Sunday 10am-5pm

72 E. Randolph Street (opposite the Culture Center, just off Michigan Ave).

Not sure where it’s going next—perhaps Kansas , as the Kansas City Art Institute is one of the sponsors.

One Success for Earth Day

Yesterday, April 22, was Earth Day, and in some places the concept has been expanded to Earth Week, as more and more people become aware of how important this earth of ours is and how endangered it is.

Earth Day all year would be a good idea, but let’s celebrate any success, however small, in saving some part of all the earth has to offer.

Here, a Galapagos Giant Tortoise ’strolls’ freely on a rural road on the island of Santa Cruz in the Galapagos. Some tortoise species have been brought back from the brink of extinction, thanks to devoted conservation efforts, and it’s very exciting to see a huge creature like this free, out in the wild (well…not in captivity anyway).

Portrait of a Daffodil

“Daffodils” (1804)

By William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

“I WANDER’D lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,      

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” (Continued below)

 

I was a school student in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which was a British colony at the time. Our education was therefore very British-centric, and in English classes I remember learning the poem “Daffodils”. This lyrical poem appealed to me, for its rhythmic language and the images it evoked, and they were just images in my mind’s eye. Because, Rhodesia is in a sub-tropical zone and I never saw daffodils actually growing.

Rather, we had flame lilies (gloriosa superba), frangipani trees with their gorgeous fragrant blossoms, bright bougainvilleas growing profusely up other trees or sides of houses, hibiscus flowers as big as my dad’s hand, and poinsettia trees. We might, perhaps, find the delicate spring daffodils in a special flower shop, enormously expensive and therefore never something we had any personal contact with. They were something pretty that we could find in a book, but the riotous blooms in our own backyard were far more accessible and attractive.

But, then I moved to the USA and in our state we have four definite seasons. The first spring, after a hard winter with lots of snow and ice, I discovered the real draw of these spring flowers. How, after cold, bare, grey times, these amazing plants begin to shoot, how the green fronds and the bright yellow trumpets signal a renewal, are a symbol of rebirth. Each spring, we go looking for the first daffodils, and each year we are amazed all over again at how varied they can be, some small, some huge, many with multiple petals, and in a staggering variety of color combinations. With cameras we try to capture the beauty, the essence, what these flowers stand for, but can never really do them justice. As I watch daffodils waving in the breeze, I can now identify with the words of Wordsworth’s poem.

…“Continuous as the stars that shine      

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch’d in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,                            

In such a jocund company:

I gazed — and gazed — but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.”

This is my attempt at a Portrait of A Daffodil.

 

 

 

You know it’s summer season approaching when…

When you hit Road Works on the highways.

In the USA, you know summer season is fast approaching when the road works begin. Road conditions take a heavy pounding from high traffic volume and winter weather conditions. So, come the warmer weather, we begin to see orange and white signs, flashing lights and restricted lanes, as the road crews try to patch up. It seems to be a rather temporary fix, as the whole cycle repeats again the next year.

Pretty irritating, but necessary. Also pretty dangerous for the workers, as heavy traffic whizzes by. A good thing I noticed this year is that many places are trying to get people to pay attention to the safety of road workers. As at the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St Louis, where they colored the entrance fountain bright orange. A nice touch, and visitors did stop, notice and comment. As I am here!

Invitation to the Spa

A different sort of post for me, but fun nevertheless!

My first spa experience and it was fun. Part of a Christmas gift from Joanna. A new experience like this could be a bit intimidating at first, but it wasn’t, not with Joanna to explaining the procedure. Plus the young Thai guy who attended to me had a gentle way and a charming smile.

He pampered my hands and feet with a special wash, soak, creaming massage, buffing, then nail polish (which I don’t usually wear). It did feel good, I must say, and the process must be good for hands and feet, so perhaps I need to try again periodically.

Some people do this regularly, as evidenced by all the articles and ads in various magazines and travel sites, but for me it still felt a bit decadent!

Paradise Spa, 1016 Lockwood Blvd, Ste 130, Oviedo, FL 32765, Web: www.pabespa.com