Skip to main content

MY ESCAPE FROM “THERE IS NO ESCAPE” – PART FOUR

At the end of my second visit to the Hockney exhibition a few weeks ago, I decided to have another walk through the Gemäldegalerie.  I’ve seen the permanent collection several times before, often in combination with a special exhibition, but I thought, “Why not?  You can never see too much good art.”  I don’t think I made it around more than 2/3 of the galleries, but what I saw was a Greatest Hits of European painting from the 13th to the 18th century.   

Here, in no particular order, is what I was able to capture.  If you are in Berlin, I recommend seeing the works in person.  My photos don't do them justice.

Jan Van Eyck  (ca. 12" tall!)

Rogier van der Weyden

Rembrandt (self-portrait, top)



 Vermeer


Georges de La Tour

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Raphael

Dürer

Lucas Cranach the Elder

Hans Holbein

Botticelli

Fra Filippo Lippi

Masaccio (front)

Masaccio (retro)

Ghirlandaio

Bellini

Caravaggio

Frans Hals

Watteau

Sir Joshua Reynolds

Reubens

Van Dyck

What with a pandemic, record heat waves, a war of attrition, and a general sense of something between malaise and foreboding, it feels so good to get back into a museum to see how others saw their world, coped with their trials and tribulations, and left us some things of beauty and permanence. 

Keep it real!

Marilyn

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS

A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini, Antonio Gramsci, Italian philosopher and politician,  was imprisoned for his political views in 1926; he remained in prison until shortly before his death in 1937.   From his cell, he wrote the  Prison Letters in which he famously said, “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."   In this time of upheaval, when the post-World War II world order is dying, a new world order is being born, and monsters roam the earth, it is from Gramsci's dual perspective that I write this post.    I will be brief. Th e window to oppose America’ s headlong rush into authoritarianism at home and neo-imperialism abroad by congressional or judicial means has closed.   Law firms, universities, businesses, the press, media, foundations, and individuals alike who have been deemed "insufficiently aligned" with the Administration's agenda, have been intimidated into submission by frivolous lawsuits, expe...

DISPUTING KEATS

The great English poet John Keats wrote in his magnificent 1819 poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn , “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all Ye know on earth, and all Ye need to know.”  Were that it were so!   But poetry cannot hide the fact that the truth is sometimes ugly.  Consider two current cases. First, the war in Gaza and the destruction and famine it has wrought.   Policy makers, scholars, and pundits can argue whether what is happening in Gaza (and to some extent, in the West Bank) is genocide, whether the leveling of Gaza and the systematic killing of its people is equivalent to the Holocaust, or whether Palestinians have the right to free themselves by any means necessary from an open-air prison.   They can debate whether Israel has become an apartheid, undemocratic state, or whether the only way to achieve security in Israel is to ring-fence or destroy Hamas. And they can construct theories about who has the “right” to live in historic Palestine, e...

THE IRON TRIANGLE

Corruption.   It’s like an operating system running in the background on the Computer of Life that inflects and infects everything we do and what is done to us.   Corruption is epidemic, endemic, and systemic. Universal, it is everywhere and all at once.   When he was the director of the FBI, Robert E. Mueller III gave an address to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York and opened a new window on the operating system of corruption:   transnational organized crime.   He called this new operating system an “iron triangle.” Its three sides:  organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders.    In her June 17, 2025, Substack , Heather Cox Richardson recalled Mueller’s address in an account of foreign investment in President Trump’s businesses.   She wrote: Eliot Brown of the Wall Street Journal reported that Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, is now one of the many wealthy foreign real estate develope...