NERO'S TERM

Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus
(37-68 A.D.)

Nero's Term
A poem by Constantine Cavafy

Nero was not worried when he heard

the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle.
"Let him fear the seventy three years."
He still had ample time to enjoy himself.
He is thirty.
More than sufficient is the term the god allots him
to prepare for future perils.

Now he will return to Rome slightly tired,
but delightfully tired from this journey,
full of days of enjoyment
--at the theaters, the gardens, the gymnasia...
evenings at cities of Achaia...
Ah, the delight of nude bodies, above all...

Thus fared Nero.
And in Spain, Galba,
secretly assembles and drills his army,
the old man of seventy three.

Galba (3BCE-69 A.D.)

El plazo de Nerón

No se inquietó Nerón cuando escuchó
del délfico adivino aquel oráculo.
«Los setenta y tres años témelos».
Quedaba tiempo aún para gozar.
Pues tiene treinta años, y es bien largo
el plazo que le ha concedido el dios
para ocuparse ya en futuros cuidos.

Ahora a Roma volverá un tanto fatigado,
pero tan felizmente fatigado de este viaje,
que ha sido todo días de placer
por teatros, por jardines, por gimnasios...
las noches de las ciudades de Acaya...
Ay, de cuerpos desnudos el placer, ay, sobre todo...

Así Nerón. Y ya en Hispania, Galba
reúne y ejercita sus tropas a escondidas,
el viejo de setenta y tres años.

Η Διορία του Nέρωνος Αναγνωρισμένα

Δεν ανησύχησεν ο Νέρων όταν άκουσε του Δελφικού Μαντείου τον χρησμό. «Τα εβδομήντα τρία χρόνια να φοβάται.» Είχε καιρόν ακόμη να χαρεί. Τριάντα χρονώ είναι. Πολύ αρκετή είν’ η διορία που ο θεός τον δίδει για να φροντίσει για τους μέλλοντας κινδύνους. Τώρα στην Pώμη θα επιστρέψει κουρασμένος λίγο, αλλά εξαίσια κουρασμένος από το ταξείδι αυτό, που ήταν όλο μέρες απολαύσεως — στα θέατρα, στους κήπους, στα γυμνάσια ... Των πόλεων της Aχαΐας εσπέρες ... A των γυμνών σωμάτων η ηδονή προ πάντων ... Aυτά ο Νέρων. Και στην Ισπανία ο Γάλβας κρυφά το στράτευμά του συναθροίζει και το ασκεί, ο γέροντας ο εβδομήντα τριώ χρονώ.

(Από τα Ποιήματα 1897-1933, Ίκαρος 1984) Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933)

On the possibility of culture after Auschwitz

A prisoner at Auschwitz:
Krystyna Trzesniewska, born on February 2, 1929, registered as a prisoner at Auschwitz on December 13, 1942, executed on May 18, 1943.

Berlin Zeughaus Museum.




A very famous quote from Theodor Adorno, totally taken out of context: “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch.” (To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric). It has been interpreted as an injunction against writing poetry, or as the proclamation of a taboo on cultural expression. It is not. Not only does the lack of context result in hiding the reasons why the statement was originally advanced, but it further disguises the fact that Adorno meant it as an aporetic statement: No poetry can any longer be written, but it must be written. This latter point is clearly made in an excellent article by Elaine Martin, Re-reading Adorno: The ‘after-Auschwitz’ Aporia, FORUM: Fear and Terror, National University of Ireland, Maynooth).

My particular interest in the issue is based on the reasons which underlie Adorno’s initial statement, the answers to the question which naturally arises therefrom: why is it barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz? Here, two issues are necessarily highlighted: the failure of a culture that is complicit in a monstrous crime, and the impossibility of using that culture’s language or discourse after it has been used for the perpetration of such monstrous crime. To the aesthetic dilemma is added a moral quandary, and both extend beyond the German context. The issue of form, the poisoning of the language and the taint on the culture, is the aesthetic quandary. The question of whether there is a danger of romanticizing the crime sets up its ethical dimension.

From the Belvedere Palace in Weimar, the palace of the Dukes of Sachse-Weimar, where Goethe was often a guest and where he served as Privy Counselor (Geheimrat) to Duke Karl August, the monument to the victims at Buchenwald is clearly visible.



[be sure and click on the photo for enhanced viewing]


















Buchenwald Concentration Camp Monument, visible from the
grounds of the Belvedere Palace in Weimar.



German Culture and Buchenwald, and Auschwitz? German Culture and the Shoah? How was this debasement possible? That is not so much the interesting question any longer, one that can only lead to trite answers and tired liberal-humanistic shibboleths. The important fact is that it happened, because it shows that even the greatest and richest cultures can fail. When a culture commits mass murder and genocide, it has failed. After Auschwitz, Adorno argues, to write poetry in the German language is to attempt to create beauty in a medium that has been tainted and corrupted.

It is tainted and corrupted unto silence and paralysis. In what manner has this occurred? As Elaine Martin points out in her article, for Adorno, the language became a tool of instrumental reason the function of which was to make a ‘thing’ out of a human being, one that served, in other words, to reify humanity. This language, this discourse, can thereafter no longer be used to express “the knowledge of its own impossibility.” The destruction of the traditional notion of the individual’s autonomy, which is by far the least of what occurred at Auschwitz or Buchenwald, the fact that the one who utters the language is no longer a human being but a 'thing,' makes it impossible for the language to record how such an expression is itself no longer possible. Auschwitz destroyed the very possibility of the poet.

"The impossibility of portraying Fascism stems from the fact that in it subjective freedom no longer exists. Absolute lack of freedom cannot be represented." (Adorno, Minima Moralia, 148. Elaine Martin trans.)

The extinction of the very possibility of poetic discourse, arguably the consequence of reification, is both cause and consequence of the extinction of the culture that sustained it. Insofar as language makes us, - determines the structure and context of our cultural upbringing-, a tainted language gives birth to a tainted culture. A language in bondage, itself the offspring of a failed culture, can only engender a new culture which is also in bondage. How can any cultural or artistic discourse have any credibility after it commits a monstrous crime? What else can that culture say? How can it create beauty? How can it even entertain? In this regard, there is a revealing anecdote, I believe it’s from Bruno Bettleheim, about his walking with another prisoner at Buchenwald and politely greeting a camp officer as the latter walked by. “Now I finally understand Hegel’s dictum, that 'the real is rational and the rational is real,'” one of the prisoners says to the other. “When the prisoner doffs his hat at the executioner, then the real has become rational.” A culture so debased, where criminal behavior becomes the accepted norm, can no longer produce Beauty.

How then is it possible to ‘get back to normal?’ How is it possible to start writing poetry again?

















Theodor W. Adorno
(1903-1969)




Theodor Adorno’s “post-Auschwitz” aporia consists in the fact that the culture cannot acknowledge the crime it has committed because it cannot express itself autonomously any longer in its own language, and yet poetry must be written in order to articulate the crime, and thus acknowledge and stand witness to it. In short, poetry cannot be written, but it must be written, so that it bears witness to what has been done. From this there is no exit.


















Botero, Abu Ghraib, 2005








 




























In his paintings of 2005, (above) Botero has beautified the crime of Abu Ghraib, by aestheticizing the actual event and its horror, a crime which is not yet atoned for. The beautification of that which is criminal is a forgiveness, though the artist no doubt was making in this instance a clearly critical statement. It shifts the viewer's value-making system from the ethical realm to the aesthetic. The painting is judged aesthetically; the crime is out of consciousness, if even for a second. Botero's work here illustrates Adorno's understanding of the 'aporia.' The poem cannot be written, but it must be written.

The "post-Auschwitz" aporia transcends the peculiarly horrifying context of its own historical origin. Poetry must bear witness, but the corruption of its language by the enormity of the underlying crime, and the mere possibility that it may romanticize or beautify its subject matter, brings about a dumbfounded silence. Today, we stare into a similar void. The noise of the culture industry will only continue to obfuscate a silence which is in fact, by and large, a total void of culture.

INVALUABLE DOCUMENT: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer

I shall bear Witness unto the last: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer (1933-1945)
Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebücher 1933-1945 von Victor Klemperer


















Victor Klemperer (1881-1960)





The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, painfully and painstakingly written during the Nazi period and throughout every dark month of the Second World War by a Jewish outcast in Dresden, must be regarded as one of the most important documents of the twentieth century. Klemperer had been professor of Romance languages and literature at the Technische Universität in Dresden since 1920, having distinguished himself as a teacher and as a scholar, with several publications to his name. He was an expert on French Literature, and particularly on Voltaire, but had written extensively on Montesquieu and Corneille. In 1933, he lost his academic status and position at the University, as well as half his pension, and thenceforth began his desperate struggle for dignity and survival amid the horror of Nazi rule, which is all faithfully and extensively memorialized in the Diaries. He survived ultimately because he was married to an Aryan woman, Eva Schlemmer, a Protestant from Königsberg, and because his final deportation date, along with that of the few remaining Jews in the city, coincided with the destruction of Dresden, on the 13th and 14th of February, 1945.

The significance of these diaries lies in the revelation of two principal developments, one of a sociological, the other of a cultural nature, both pointing to forces and outcomes that affected all of European civilization and its society, well beyond the limits of the city of Dresden, and well after 1945.

1. The reduction of Professor Klemperer

Well before Klemperer was forced to wear the yellow star publicly on his jacket, from September 19, 1941 until the day of the bombing of Dresden, he had been totally degraded and savagely reduced. Over the course of the five pre-war years, he had been forced to abandon his home, give up driving his car, cease walking through certain parts of the city, forgo his activities as a public intellectual and scholar, as well as interaction with colleagues and acquaintances who were Aryan, and move into a crowded building with people with whom he had nothing in common other than an ancestral Jewish ethnicity. As the years passed, Klemperer lost his library, as well as any possible privilege to use any other library. His scholarly work was interrupted, and his work on the clandestine Diaries became the only intellectual task he undertook, almost daily, in peril of his life.

The progression of the Diaries records a relentless descent and reduction for Victor and Eva Klemperer into a nightmare of horror, poverty and despair that was undreamed of when the initial consequences of the Nazi takeover of power first made themselves felt in their lives. After the beginning of the war, in September 1939, their very survival was constantly in play. The smallest infraction of the growing number of rules designed to make the life of the Jews miserable and fearful could result in deportation and certain death. The Klemperers suffered hunger and debasement. In utter despair and hopelessness, Klemperer was driven to steal food from his neighbors, was forced to work in factories on assembly lines, despite agonizing pain and exhaustion, was accosted by individuals, including children, on the streets and insulted, slapped and spat on during arbitrary house searches where his belongings and food were confiscated, thrown into jail and kept in fearful solitary confinement, - for the minor offense of neglecting to black out a window in the house -, despised, shouted at, cursed, and throughout terrified by the fear of imminent deportation and death.

In his post-war Diaries [The Lesser Evil: Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1945-1959: So sitze ich denn zwischen allen Stühlen. Tagebucher 1945-1959], Klemperer describes the day, July 4, 1945, when he recovered some of the possessions which had been hidden in the home of a friend, together with the war diaries and other manuscripts. “How very rich we were!” was Klemperer's astonished reaction when he saw the silver plate, the clothing and furnishings that had survived. Indeed, what the Diaries record is a long process of reduction and degradation, of the narrowing of life, space and opportunity, a Beschränkung (narrowing) of life, from the high comfort and status of a bourgeois professor to arbitrary confinement and the prospect of a death which for Klemperer was symbolized by the small cylindrical containers in which the ashes of his Jewish acquaintances were buried, in small holes at the Jewish cemetery, after their murder in the Dresden prisons. The total extinction of a rich life, which was, in effect, the life of the old German Bildungsbürgertum, the educated and richly cultivated German bourgeoisie.

This life would never return. Not only had the economic preconditions for that life disappeared for ever, but the culture that sustained it vanished as well.

2. The poisoning of the old culture

The second development recorded in the Diaries that I wish to call attention to, is the gradual poisoning of the language, and the attendant debasement of the culture, which accompanied the horrors of the Nazi period in Germany. Even before the war began, Klemperer noted in his Diaries the changing uses of words and expressions in the media and public discourse, the appearance of superlatives, the emergence of a racist vocabulary, the transformation of the cognitive content of words into new emotional or assertive significations designed for the purposes of propaganda and misinformation. The notes and observations thus recorded became the basis of his subsequent book, Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen (1947) [The Language of the Third Reich: Notes of a Philologist].

Much has been written on Klemperer’s ground-breaking philological observations, but the emphasis should shift from mere words to the context of the entire culture which the distortion of words serves to debase. For it is not just a matter of words. The entire meaning of the culture becomes tainted when the form in which it is expressed is poisoned, because the poisoning of the words answers to a dynamic of cultural repression and distortion that cannot but affect the content of the overall cultural discourse. In a diary entry for March 19, 1944 (Sunday morning half past nine), Klemperer makes a most revealing observation. He is sitting in a room by himself, separated from the Aryan workers in a factory where he is doing forced labor at an assembly line, and he can listen to a radio in the background, “. . . catching a couple of radio tunes, among them still the same cabaret schmaltz by the same castrato voice that I heard . . . last summer. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands have fallen, and that man is still singing: “A little girl has stolen my heart . . . .”

Hundreds of thousands have fallen, monstrous crimes have been committed, yet the content of the entertainment, the entertainment itself, remains unchanged from what it was in peace time. As Theodor Adorno has pointed out, when collective crime is committed, the culture that is responsible for it has failed, and is complicit in the crime. How can a criminal culture entertain? Its attempt at normalcy, at representing a life that is going on “as usual,” is horrifying in its deceptiveness. Whether a culture can recover from such a catastrophe is still an open question, and it is a question that the Diaries of Victor Klemperer pose in a remarkably compelling fashion to us today.














Dresden in ruins, 1945

In Memoriam: Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648 – 1695)


Salud, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, y a tu memoria, porque entendiste que para leer libremente, para pensar, para dejarse llevar por el Conocimiento, era necesario someterse al confin de una celda, Salud!

Hail, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and your memory, because you understood that in order to read freely, to think, to allow yourself to be carried away by Knowledge, it was necessary to be confined in a cell, Hail to you!



DIME VENCEDOR RAPAZ

Dime vencedor Rapaz,
vencido de mi constancia,
¿Qué ha sacado tu arrogancia
de alterar mi firme paz?
Que aunque de vencer capaz
es la punta de tu arpón,
¿qué importa el tiro violento,
si a pesar del vencimiento
queda viva la razón?

Tienes grande señorío;
pero tu jurisdicción
domina la inclinación,
mas no pasa el albedrío.
Y así librarme confío
de tu loco atrevimiento,
pues aunque rendida siento
y presa la libertad,
se rinde la voluntad
pero no el consentimiento.

En dos partes dividida
tengo el alma en confusión:
una, esclava a la pasión,
y otra, a la razón medida.
Guerra civil, encendida,
aflige el pecho importuna:
quiere vencer cada una,
y entre fortunas tan varias,
morirán ambas contrarias
pero vencerá ninguna.

Cuando fuera, Amor, te vía,
no merecí de ti palma;
y hoy, que estás dentro del alma,
es resistir valentía.
Córrase, pues, tu porfía,
de los triunfos que te gano:
pues cuando ocupas, tirano,
el alma, sin resistillo,
tienes vencido el Castillo
e invencible el Castellano.

Invicta razón alienta
armas contra tu vil saña,
y el pecho es corta campaña
a batalla tan sangrienta.
Y así, Amor, en vano intenta
tu esfuerzo loco ofenderme:
pues podré decir, al verme
expirar sin entregarme,
que conseguiste matarme
mas no pudiste vencerme.


The following is an English translation of the above poem by Beulah Limosneros, obtained from the web.


Ascendent Raptor speak...

Ascendent Raptor - speak,
victor yet vanquished by my constancy,
what has your arrogance won
from its siege against my steadfast peace?
For though your lance's barb
be sharp to pierce
the hardest heart,
what point has the most violent cast - if,
finding its mark,
sweet reason clings yet to the target?

You hold great sway, Lord,
but though your dominion
obtains against our inclination
it masters not our liberty.
And thus to this I trust as my ransom
from the madness of your audacity:
for while my freedom
is held captive, under siege,
my discretion might be yielded,
but never my consentment.

My soul is cleft
confusedly in twain.
Half - a thrall to passion,
the other - reason's slave.
Civil war, inflamed, importunate
afflicts this breast:
each strives to overwhelm his counterpart;
but amidst such mutinous counterstorms,
both helmsmen must perish,
neither, return to port.

From the field, Love,
never once did I win the palm of your favour,
but now, with you lodged within,
denying you the trophy of my soul
calls for all my valour.
But then let that very resistance
drive out Love's heartless garrison!
- for when you, Tyrant,
invade the soul, without constraint,
you take as spoil the castle,
yet lose your hold over its chatelaine.

Invincible reason has now wrought
rebel arms to oppose your vicious rages;
even as the breast cedes scant terrain
for so bloody a battle.
And so, Love, you launch in vain
your insane onslaught:
since it will be said - to see me fall
yet not surrender -
that you managed to kill
but failed to conquer.

Translated by Beulah Limosneros

TRAVEL DIARIES: Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie

GERMAN ROMANTIC PAINTING IN THE ALTE NATIONALGALERIE IN BERLIN.

Gottlieb Schick (1776-1812) "Head of a youth."
Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie
http://www.smb.museum/smb/sammlungen/details.php?objectId=17

July 11, 2010







Plato has famously suggested in his Symposium, that Eros is the young boy that seduces you into the contemplation of the Ideas. According to Diotima, the midwife from Mantinea who speaks last before the arrival of Alcibiades in Plato's dialogue, the love for a woman is the particular form of love required for the purpose of procreation, but the love for a boy, on the other hand, has no biological outcome, and becomes therefore a sort of womb of knowledge and wisdom, presumably because such a love is based on admiration. Such is the notion of Plato, as presented in both his Symposium and in the Phaedrus, that the love that arises from pederasty, which is according to him a love of knowledge, is an alternative to the animal love of man and woman, and that the love of boys leads to philosophy, and is, in fact, philosophy, for which pederasty is the maieutic.

The portrayal of Eros in ancient Greek, and in modern Western Art, is informed by this text, and ultimately calls for a consideration of the method of idealization, as Plato intended. The process by which knowledge and wisdom arise in the love of a boy, in the overall schema of the Symposium, is a synecdoche of idealization. For Plato, to know is to idealize.

I do not see in Gottlieb Schick's portrait of the head of his unknown youth the pure mechanism of Eros that Plato wrote about. I do not find here the maieusis that Diotima described as the locus of the birth of knowledge and wisdom, when she spoke at the party in Agathon's house. There is something pornographic about this image, particularly as the boy, with an expression of innocent wonder and anticipation, appears to be turning around, still giving us his back. There is a sensuality here that prevents a recognition of Plato's Eros at work, as a conduit to the higher realm of Ideas. However, the more I am withdrawn from this image, from the moment of its initial perception, the colder it becomes in my imagination, the more it leads me to think about it, in particular, and about the things that it beckons and betokens. And hence this boy becomes Eros. Plato seems to me to be correct in thinking that beauty leads us to the search for contemplation of a higher idea, which in this case may very well be the dynamic, both psychic and cultural, both phylo and onto-genetical, of idealization. Why do we idealize in Art? And what do we idealize? And why? These are the questions that this anonymous portrait raises.

It is not sufficiently satisfying here to quote Marx, or Feuerbach before him, to the effect that we idealize what we want to become. The old Greeks carved out of hard stone the image of what they were, not what they hoped to be. Modern European idealization of the Romantic type is born out of a lack, a need for beauty that was absent from its own historical time and circumstance. The ugliness of a growing and grasping bourgeoisie, and of the world it was creating, sought after beauty, and hence idealized it. It was an idealization born of a lack, not out of a plentiful feeling of adoration for the human form, as in the case of the old Greeks.

Can knowledge, as Plato argued, therefore be born from a contemplation of the beautiful portrait of Gottlieb Schick's anonymous boy? Can knowledge be an outcome here, as opposed to a mere satisfaction of the senses? Yes. I think that is what I seem to have concluded.

TRAVEL DIARIES: Nietzsche's Birthplace

Röcken, Sachsen-Anhalt, July 3, 2010

















Lutheran parish church in Röcken: Altar










Röcken is the birthplace and burial ground of Nietzsche: The photograph above is of the altar of the Lutheran Church in Röcken.

The photograph shows the altar of the small parish church in Röcken, where Nietzsche's father was minister of the Lutheran Church until his death in 1849. Note that above the table of the altar there is the preacher's pulpit, and nothing else. The Word has replaced all the Icons.


At the root of Nietzsche's perspectivism lies the genealogical evolution and the historical malleability of the Word. Nietzsche grew up under the influence of the Word, as preached from this pulpit by his father, at the small Lutheran parish church of Röcken. His philosophy is a perpetual re-evaluation of the Word he heard before this altar.








"I am the Alpha and the Omega. The First and the Last." Book of Revelations, 22.13" (Wood panel in the Parish Church of Röcken)





The psychoanalyst and historian Erik H. Erickson wrote the following, in his book Young Man Luther, (Norton, 1962 pb ed., p. 107):



"After 1505 Luther had made no bones about the pernicious influence which “rancid Aristotelianism” had had on theology. Scholasticism had made him lose faith, he said; through St. Paul he had recovered it. He put the problem in terms of organ modes, by describing scholastic disputations as dentes and linguae: the teeth are hard and sinister, and form words in anger and fury; the tongue is soft and suavely persuasive. Using these modes, the devil can evoke purely intellectual mirages (mira potest suggere in intellectu). But the organ through which the word enters to replensish the heart is the ear (natura enim verbi est audiri), for it is in the nature of the word that it should be heard. On the other hand, faith comes from listening, not from looking (quia est auditu fides, non ex visu). Therefore, the greatest thing one can say about Christ, and about all Christians, is that they have aures perfectas et perfossas: good and open ears. But only what is perceived at the same time as a matter affectionalis [of affection] and moralis [of morality] as well as intellectual can be a matter sacred and divine: one must, therefore, hear before one sees, believe before one understands, be captivated before one captures. Fides est “locus” animae: faith is the seat, the organ of the soul."

Portrait of Martin Luther, painted by the Protestant painter Lucas Cranach, and now at the Schlossmuseum in Weimar.





Nietzsche, as a little boy, listened to the Word from the pulpit at Röcken. His intellectual path thereafter, a long departure from Martin Luther's teachings, was a journey from believing to understanding, from the ear to the eye, from listening to looking, from Luther and Paul to the ancient Greeks in the Lyrical Age of Tragedy, discovered as a student of Prussian 'Bildung' and in his boarding-school at Schulpforta, where he first saw all the color of Hellenism while distinguishing himself as a Classics scholar.  And along that path he lost the Faith of his father.





















Röcken, in Sachsen-Anhalt. The church tower is visible in the center-left of the photograph.





Below: Approach to Röcken. The church tower is visible above the trees in the center-right of the photograph.


[right-click on images and open link in new window to enhance the size of the picture]












The Parish Church in Röcken:



















The tower


























Nietzsche's gravesite next to the church, and next to that of his father.













Interior of the Church in Röcken:















Gravestones of local worthies, no doubt awesome to the little boy.
























Wood panels and organ at the rear of the parish church of Röcken. Nietzsche's first exposure to music.





















Tomb of Nietzsche next to the Röcken Parish Church










Nietzsche's birthplace


Nietzsche's birthplace: Pfarrerhaus


























"My father born in 1813, died in 1849. Previous to taking over the pastorship of the parish of Röcken not far from Lützen he lived for some years at the Castle of Altenburg where he had charge of the education of the four princesses. His pupils are the Queen of Hanover, the Grand Duchess Constantine, the Grand Duchess of Oldenburg and the Princess Theresa of Saxe-Altenburg. He was full of loyal respect for the Prussian King Frederick William the Fourth from whom he obtained his living at Röcken; the events of 1848 saddened him immensely. As I was born on the 15th of October, the birthday of the king above mentioned, I naturally received the Hohenzollern names of Friedrich Wilhelm. There was in any case one advantage in the choice of this day: my birthday throughout the whole of my childhood was a day of public rejoicing." (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo).

TRAVEL DIARIES: Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen

Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam
http://www.boijmans.nl/nl/

The Muse stares at me from around the corner of the Museum's wall. She asks, are you seduced?

July 22, 2010


















Jan van der Ploeg, Wall Painting No. 155 (2006)













Williem Claesz. Heda, Still life with Oysters, a Rummer, a Lemon, and a Silver Bowl (1634)

Paul Delvaux, La Ville Rouge, (1944)

















Jan van Goyen, Sailing boats on a lake (1639)

Paolo Veronese, Portrait of a Boy, 1588